Boston Public Library
Boston MA
2012

https://www.wbur.org/news/2016/09/02/bpl-lions-history

https://www.bpl.org/bpl-history/

The lions were commissioned by veterans of the 20th Massachusetts and the 2nd Massachusetts regiments.

Greg meets me as the summer afternoon light bathes the creamy marble that surrounds the staircase, and out of which the lions are sculpted.

"The lions are an icon for the library," Greg tells me. "I mean, there's many major people here, but they sort of stand out as an icon for the institution."

The lions lie regally as patrons and tourists pass between them, their massive paws curling across the edge of the bases, filled with the names of the battles fought by the 2nd and the 20th Massachusetts: Ball's Bluff, Antietam, Gettysburg.

The library's expert on the lions is Meg Weeks, the library's exhibitions and outreach associate.

"Charles Follen McKim created the staircase we see around us," Weeks says. "He was so meticulous in his selection of color and tone when selecting the yellow Siena marble for the staircase, he quarried what they estimated to be 10 times the amount of stone needed to build the staircase because he was so particular about the tones, and wanted to have the opportunity to select just the right amount of veining, just the right amount of color, and it's remarkable because these lions were left unpolished."

In 1891, the sculptor, Louis Saint-Gaudens, delivered the lions unpolished. Library architect McKim thought they should be polished.

"And yet, when the members of the 2nd and 20th Massachusetts volunteer infantries came in and saw these, they were delighted," Weeks says. "They thought they were just ... ideal in the sense that they were unpolished and they caught the light and the contours of the sculpture in a very particular way that they might not otherwise if their tone was brought down to that of the yellow Siena marble."

In the end, the veterans proved to have better taste than the architect.

The lions, it turns out, are part of a collection of monuments to that time. David Lambert, the chief genealogist of the New England Historic Genealogical Society, says most of the other monuments are just more humble.

"Not every regiment has a beautiful statue at the Boston Public Library that you can see in the grand staircase there in the old building," Lambert says, "but if you go through a cemetery and you see these little white marble markers, those are instituted for Civil War veterans, and each one of them is slowly fading away. Sometimes the inscriptions are just barely there, but each one of them has a story."

And so the lions you pass on your way to do research at the library are really just two of the most majestic symbols of a much broader effort Massachusetts made two centuries ago to tell the stories of the young men who fought in America's bloodiest war.