It took nearly a week to hoist Billy Yank from the east bank of the Great Miami River to the dome on top of the Soldiers, Sailors, and Pioneers Monument, and there was so much excitement some people thought the city was on fire.
The statue, officially titled “Victory: Jewel of the Soul,” was the magnum opus of Rudolph Thiem, a German immigrant who became Hamilton’s most noted artist and designer of his day and ever since.
According to the family genealogy on file at the Butler County Historical Society, Thiem was born in Berlin on October 22, 1857, although he would tell Hamilton biographers and carved on his own tombstone that he was born in 1859. His mother Pauline nee Moritz, died from the complications of childbirth when he was but four years old.
He early showed an aptitude for art and “his art studies began in Berlin under the best German sculptors,” his daughter Mabel would report to Hamilton Historian Stella Weiler Taylor in 1937. “He worked on many fine pieces in and around Berlin, one of the most famous being a statue of the King of Saxony. Often when he was engrossed in this work the Saxon king and his staff would draw up and watch him.”
He was 23 years old when he came to the United States. He told the biographer for the Centennial History of Hamilton that he “decided to seek and new field for his talents,” but family lore has it that he left Berlin to get away from his father when his father’s fourth marriage was to a woman younger than Rudolph himself.
He landed in New Orleans and went into business with a fellow Berliner, Peter Reiss, an older man who had been in America for a long time and had fought for the Union in the Civil War. They ran a foundry to make decorative household items, funeral monuments and garden statues. One major project included a near-life-size statue of Robert E. Lee, even though Reiss had fought against Lee’s army.
Business was difficult, so when Thiem met Lazard Kahn, a fellow German immigrant (from Alsace) who was visiting his wife’s family in New Orleans, he accepted a one-year contract to come north and work as a designer and model maker in a stove factory owned by Kahn and his brother Felix.
In April, 1886, Rudolph Thiem arrived in Hamilton and became a leader in the German immigrant community as a member of St. John’s German Evangelical Church. Having established his creativity and competence in his work with the Kahn brothers, after three years he set up shop on his own. He married a Hamilton girl and they started a family, eventually a son and two daughters.
“Mr. Thiem met with great success from the start and soon established a large and lucrative business in his line,” according the the Centennial History. His shop was on A Street directly across the river from the site that would be home to his masterpiece.
Mabel wrote, “His artist hands carved for him a successful business and his kindly, unassuming, lovable disposition won for him the high esteem of all who knew him.”
So when the committee–which included former Ohio Governor James E. Campbell–met to review the bids for a statue for the top of the Soldiers, Sailors, and Pioneers Monument, they unanimously picked Thiem’s proposal over the competing artists from Cincinnati, Indianapolis, and Boston. The Boston entrant was Theo Alice Ruggles Kitson, the first female member of the American Sculpture Society, who in 1888 was the youngest woman and the first American woman to win honorable mention at the Salon des Artistes Francais in Paris. She was one of the most prominent designers of war monuments in America with over 73 works for the Vicksburg National Military Park alone.
Thiem’s bid was to create a fourteen-foot statue of bronze fir $3,500. KitSon’s entry was for an eight-foot statue at the same price.
“Mr. Thiem has quite a reputation in plaster, wood, and metal models and there is no doubt that he will be successful in giving the committee a statue that will be perfect in every detail,” the Sun predicted. “Hamilton will again show the country that we are able to undertake anything in our shops and factories.”
The contract was awarded on November 6, 1903, and Thiem set to work on it immediately in his A Street studio.
“His shop was the center of interest particularly for the boys, who would gather in large interested groups to watch the massive figure take definite form,” Mabel recalled. “The boys were not disorderly, but a bit distracting to the sculptor and father was forced to ask them to stay away until the soldier was completed, promising them the privilege of a close-up view then.
“Another interesting detail is the manner in which the face was modeled. High up on the scaffold my father held a mirror so placed that he could observe his own mouth and facial expression when the lips were open to voice joy. Thus the face was modeled and I do believe he captured something of his own likeness in the Soldier’s face.
When it was finished, “Victory: Jewel of the Soul” was 16 feet high including the pedestal and hat held over its head, was eight feet around the waist, and had nine-inch fingers and twenty-six inch feet. The bronze cast weighed 3,500 pounds.
Early in the morning on Thanksgiving Day, 1904, two years to the date of the laying of the cornerstone of the monument, the tedious process of pulling the statue up the side of the Monument began by means of a hand-cranked windlass.
“A crowd of several hundred people stood about the monument during the afternoon and watched the work,” the Sun reported. “No services of any kind marked the raising of the statue except the tribute of the silent crowd which gazed upon it while in mid-air.
“The men worked until about five o’clock in the evening and only had the statue about two thirds of the way up. It was placed on a cornice and will remain there until a larger derrick is placed in position to take the statue to its proper place. This may take some days.”
Finally, on December 1, “Amid the clanging of fire bells the statue of a soldier was placed on the Soldiers, Sailors and Pioneers Monument… The ringing of the fire bells caused much excitement. Many people thought the town was afire… During the placing of the statue William Elzer fired three shots from a cannon belonging to the Uneeda Outing Club. Besides this and the ringing of the fire bells there were no other ceremonies.”
The next 20 years brought Thiem both great commercial success and personal sorrow.
The raging waters of the 1913 flood destroyed his studio and most of A Street, sweeping away casts, models, templates, works-in-progress, and all of his woodcarving tools. He continued to receive prominent commissions both public and private while he mourned the early death of his wife and other members of his circle.
Indeed, he was on his way home from the funeral of Lazard Kahn i in March 1928, when he suffered a heart attack from which he would not fully recover. He died October 1 of that year, leaving behind his three children and their growing families, and a statue that has become an enduring symbol for the city of Hamilton, the most prominent statue in a City of Sculpture.