In 1964, Marshall Fredericks’ Fountain of Eternal Life in Cleveland Was Dedicated

In the days leading up to Memorial Day 1964, a project 19 years in the making was getting its finishing touches.

World War II had ended in Europe but was still raging in the South Pacific when the Cleveland Press first floated the idea of a memorial fountain on the Mall in May 1945. The memorial would be sculpted by Marshall Fredericks, a Rock Island, Illinois, native who grew up in Cleveland and attended the Cleveland School of Art. The announcement was made that fall, shortly after Fredericks had returned home from his own service in the Pacific as a lieutenant colonel in the 20th Bomber Group.

Fredericks was noted at that point for the Barbour Memorial Fountain at Belle Isle Park in Detroit, and would later sculpt the Spirit of Detroit at its City-County Building, as well as a statue for the 1964 World’s Fair in Queens.

But another war intervened — in Korea — and it wasn’t until 1955 that ground was formally broken for the project, which was further delayed as plans were considered, then rejected, for a Hilton hotel on the Mall. And Fredericks was painstaking in his production of four 20,000-pound granite sculptures in the pool and a 10½-foot-diameter sphere topped with a 35-foot-tall bronze statue, lifted into place by crane.

Finally, the memorial was dedicated before a crowd of more than 2,000 people on Memorial Day, May 30, 1964. Fredericks hesitated to call it his greatest work but said it was his most challenging and complex project.

“Nothing I have ever done has interested me more,” he said shortly before its official dedication. “Nothing has had so much depth or has been so monumental.”  

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