Decades Ago, Students Attacked the ‘Iron Horse.’ Now It Rides Again.

The most famous beastly sculpture in the college town of Athens, Ga., is — improbably — not a bulldog. It is an 11-foot-tall welded steel horse, an abstract labyrinth of undulations and crescents, created at the University of Georgia by a visiting Chicago sculptor, Abbott Pattison, in 1954.

When a crane first heaved Pattison’s mammoth steed from the basement of the university’s Fine Arts Building that spring, it was unlike anything the campus had seen before, with a cage-like midsection of pointed ribs, flat, Cubist planes, and a wavy, squared-off mane and tail. It was recognizably a horse, but it was no classical equestrian sculpture. And the artwork had many on campus seething.

Last spring, when the sculpture — briefly titled “Steel Horse” and then “Pegasus” by the artist, but popularly known as Iron Horse — was extricated from a concrete pad in a cornfield outside Athens for conservation, it was missing 32 pieces and bore decades-deep scars of etching and graffiti, and a bullet wound in its neck. Its hooves had rusted the color of Georgia clay.

Statues on college campuses have long been lightning rods for the issues and debates coursing through society. But exactly why the Iron Horse was attacked by students may always be a mystery.

“There’s all this mystery and misinformation around it,” said Donald Cope, a designer and metal fabricator who spent six months restoring the sculpture to its original condition with a conservator, Amy Jones Abbe, both based in Athens. “It has this lore, it has an aura.”

Cope painstakingly repaired corrosion and reproduced missing parts (all but one, for which he could not find photographic support), mimicking the artist’s rugged welds. Before then, the Iron Horse had not been seen in its complete form since the day it was unveiled 70 years ago.

Scholars today are hard-pressed to distinguish a significant large-scale, modern steel public sculpture in the South that predates it.

“If I were teaching at the University of Georgia and I was wanting to split my classes into modern and traditional art, I could use this piece as the perfect pivot point,” said David Raskin, a professor of contemporary art history at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where Pattison taught in the 1940s and ’50s.

For a brief few hours after it was first installed at the University of Georgia campus, the sculpture stood unbruised on a lawn between men’s dormitories. But curious crowds began to gather, and by nightfall hundreds of students had descended on the horse, marking it with graffiti (“What the hell is this thing?”), shoveling manure under its tail, and, among other indignities, tying two balloons between its hind legs. Old tires were set ablaze beneath it and the fire department was called to subdue the flames, and the mob.

“Essentially, I see a reaction to modernism, which was an issue they didn’t understand, which a lot of Americans didn’t understand,” said William U. Eiland, who was the director of the Georgia Museum of Art from 1992 to 2023 and pushed for the sculpture’s conservation for years. “They were reacting to change.”

It was a “heady time” on campus, added Eiland, who wrote a biography of Lamar Dodd, the influential head of the art department during that period. It was the era of McCarthyism and the Red Scare, the Brown v. Board of Education decision that would desegregate schools, and campus dress codes and curfews for women. Did the Iron Horse represent something disruptive or unknown? Did its Cubist lines somewhat resemble the horse in Picasso’s famed protest piece, “Guernica,” as some have suggested?

Maybe. But several of those involved in the incident said later in a University of Georgia alumni newsletter that they were motivated more by a tiff between Pattison and the university community, reflected in the campus newspaper, The Red & Black.

Prank or Grudge?

Pattison came to the university as an artist in residence in 1953 on a grant from the General Education Board, which was devoted to the cause of improving education throughout the United States and supported by John D. Rockefeller Sr. The artist, who died in 1999, saw wide success with more than two dozen works on public display in the Chicago area and pieces in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

He was initially well-received in Athens, with a newspaper reporting that an exhibition of his work at the new academic Georgia Museum of Art was extended due to popularity. Students observed him on the campus lawn hand-chiseling his first commission — an abstract rendition of a mother and child from an 8-foot-tall block of Georgia marble, which was installed next to the Fine Arts Building that fall. But a student journalist, Bill Shipp, writing in the Red & Black, called the four-sided totem of polished curves and rough planes “ridiculously complex.” A cartoon of the sculpture ran alongside his story, with the caption, “It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No, it’s….”

Then one night, after Pattison returned for the spring semester in 1954, the modern marble was met with a can of green paint.

Pattison penned a letter to the editor, stating: “The green paint on my marble sculpture doesn’t hurt me as much as it does the University upon which is cast the shadow of the presence of spite, ignorance, and intolerance.”

Two months later, the Iron Horse landed on the lawn.

But for Don McMillian, who was a veterinary student at the university at the time, and procured the manure in his Studebaker Commander convertible, it was just an end-of-the-year prank.

“It wasn’t a big, deep, dark problem with the art or anything like that,” said McMillian, now 91 and a retired veterinarian living in Jonesboro, Ga. “It was just a bunch of crazy boys having fun.” (This was, he noted, the era of the panty raid craze on campuses across the country.)

Pattison himself was offended. “I was rather shocked, to say the least, to see the painting on it, and to see the manure and the litter all around the place, and things hanging off of it,” the artist said in a 1981 documentary by William VanDerKloot about the sculpture that aired on PBS. “It was a rather devastating experience to me.”

The morning after the attack, university officials carted the sculpture out of sight, hiding it behind an off-campus barn where it languished for five years until a horticulture professor, L.C. Curtis, got permission to take it to his farm in Greene County, 20 miles south of Athens. He positioned it right alongside Georgia State Route 15 for passing motorists to see.

And there the Iron Horse has sat for decades, where it has morphed from a pariah into a kind of icon, a destination for selfies, a landmark for visiting football fans, a symbol for the community — featured on town murals, in brochures, on student bucket lists. McMillian, the veterinarian, visited a few years ago for the first time since 1954 to have his picture taken, he said.

For years, the university and the Curtis family disputed the fate of the Iron Horse and where it belonged. But for now its future seems set in the cornfield.

The Curtis farm was sold to the university in 2013 and renamed the Iron Horse Plant Sciences Farm, but the family maintained ownership of the sculpture and the 400 square feet surrounding it. Last January, the family gifted the sculpture to the university, on the condition that it be restored by the school and returned to the farm, said Alice Hugel, granddaughter of L.C. Curtis, who died in 1980. Her mother, Patty Curtis, was newly married to L.C. Curtis’s son, Jack, when the family acquired the sculpture.

The university would not disclose the amount of the restoration, except to say in a statement that private funds were allocated. Eric Atkinson, the school’s dean of students, said, “This restoration is an important step in ensuring the Iron Horse remains a part of the U.G.A. experience.”

In late November, the Iron Horse was set back out to pasture in the cornfield, now in a shiny new coat of black paint, sitting atop a Georgia granite plinth.

But many believe it should be returned to the main campus, where the artist intended and where it might be better protected. One advocate has been the artist’s son, Harry Pattison, a working artist living in Bellingham, Wash., who was 2 years old when his father completed the Iron Horse. He said he had several conversations with his father about the fate of the sculpture before his death.

“Abbott wanted it back where it originally belonged,” Pattison said. “He thought, someday the university will want it back.”

Out in the field, over decades, the sculpture was subjected to the elements — and campus high jinks. It was spray-painted at least twice by opposing football fans (and spray-painted back to black by a secret Greek society, the Order of the Greek Horsemen, that considers the horse its symbol). Underwear has been fashioned into a hat stretched over its forelock. Climbing atop the horse became the custom, which over time caused welds to give. Carved initials once speckled its hide.

“It’s sort of the price of celebrity for the horse,” said Alice Hugel, who, with her mother, argued that it should remain at the farm, where it would continue to be accessible.

Raskin, the art history professor, noted, “There is something really wonderful that this horse on campus, even if it was controversial, somehow managed to at least focus people’s attention on modern art — or on art at all.”

Now, its conservators Cope and Abbe hope the sculpture can enter a third phase of life where it is admired as a museum-worthy work rather than something like a roadside attraction.

“I just hope going forward people have a different kind of appreciation for it, even if it came from a place of affection,” said Abbe, who previously worked as a conservator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

On a recent windy afternoon, the Iron Horse stood peacefully on its hilltop, seemingly untouched since its re-installation nearly two months ago.

Olen Anderson, a senior at the university and a member of the Order of Greek Horsemen, said the organization and its alumni supported the restoration and had offered to donate funds for the work if needed. “We feel very sentimental toward it,” he said. Still, part of the group’s ritual each year is climbing atop the horse for the cover of The Fraternity Way magazine. What about the conservators’ wish that it be admired from the ground instead? “I think we’d honor that. Because above all, we want it to last.”