Brewer man was one of nation’s top sculptors

Carl E. Tefft, “the well-known Brewer boy,” was staying at his childhood home for part of the winter of 1905. While at the big brick house at 235 Center St., he had been working on a clay model for a memorial of Gen. Henry Knox, the Bangor Daily News announced on Feb. 10.

At age 30, Carl, or Charles as he was actually named by his parents, was rapidly becoming a famous sculptor. A striking publicity shot that accompanied the newspaper story showed the profile of a nattily dressed young man with a receding hairline and a pointed beard, arms crossed, eyes gazing dreamily off into the distance. It’s signed, “Sincerely yours, Carl E. Tefft.”

The feature might have been assigned or written by Carl’s brother Nathan, who was telegraph editor at the newspaper.

The Knox memorial was going to be the kind of larger-than-life portrayal that was Charlie Tefft’s specialty, showing the Revolutionary War hero sitting astride an imposing horse, atop a large, ornately decorated base. The only trouble was Congress had yet to decide whether to place the memorial in Knox County or Augusta, or whether to appropriate the $50,000 it would cost. It also hadn’t picked Tefft as the sculptor.

“Mr. Tefft is nothing if not loyal to his own State and when the time comes for a serious consideration of a Knox memorial, he hopes to have an opportunity to submit his designs,” the paper said.

The opportunity never came. It would not be the last time that Tefft would be disappointed in a bid to immortalize one of his boyhood heroes from Maine. Indeed, he seemed to be a man caught in a riptide that was constantly pulling him between the Pine Tree State and the wider world. In the end, Maine won.

Today he is known primarily for a handful of monuments that grace various spots in the Queen City. The best known is the Luther H. Peirce Memorial, also called “The Last Drive,” the dramatic rendering of three burly river drivers, which stands in the small park next to the Bangor Public Library. They remind us living in eastern Maine of our rough-and-ready heritage like nothing else.

The fact that Tefft once performed creditably on the national stage has been largely forgotten. “Indeed, history and the notoriously fickle art world have not been particularly kind to the memory of the native son of Brewer, Maine, who was one of the foremost American sculptors during the first three decades of the twentieth century,” concluded historian William David Barry.

Tefft was a prodigy. While still in high school, he took over the family parlor, turning it into a studio complete with a half-ton of Brewer brickyard clay and a barrel of plaster of Paris.

“It was a matter of ‘possession is nine points,’ and that settled it, with the result that for three years my mother was without a parlor,” Nathan wrote years later.

Brewer native and family friend Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain sat in that parlor while Tefft shaped a bust of him that is now in the Brewer Public Library. Hannibal Hamlin, Thomas Brackett Reed and other famous men reportedly posed there as well.

One of the many odd jobs Chamberlain had after the Civil War was the presidency of the Institute of Artists and Artisans in New York City. The old general obtained a scholarship there for the talented boy after high school graduation.

Soon after his arrival in New York, his work earned honors from the American Art League, and he gained important connections through Daniel Chester French and Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the two most influential sculptors of the day.

Before 1905, his work had appeared at three expositions – what came to be called world’s fairs – in Buffalo, Charleston and St. Louis. At the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, he was one of six American sculptors chosen to execute the permanent work. His portrayal of Renaissance Art still appears today at the entrance to the St. Louis Museum of Art.

While working in St. Louis, he beat out 33 other sculptors to execute a heroic equestrian group statue in front of the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx. Other major works followed: a battle monument at Fort Lee, N.J., overlooking the Hudson River; a peace monument in Belleville, N.J.; a memorial to William H. Maxwell, the first superintendent of New York City’s public schools, in the American Museum of Natural History and others.

By the time his Fort Lee design was accepted in 1907, he had completed 18 sculptures, according to The New York Times. Still called Carl in the papers, he was a rapidly ascending star.

He maintained studios in New York City and taught at the New York Evening School of Industrial Art, which he helped found. He was appointed director of sculpture in 1925 at the Sesqui-Centennial International Exposition in Philadelphia. By that date, The New York Times was calling him Charles.

Of course, there were disappointments, besides the unrealized Knox memorial. He was chosen for a prestigious scholarship to study in Rome, but the money never materialized. Perhaps that’s when he began calling himself Carl, in the hopes it would give the impression he had a European background, helping his career.

In the years ahead, his plans to create monuments of U.S. Rep. Thomas Bracket Reed and Gen. Oliver Otis Howard, both Maine icons, were rejected. In the competition to build the Lincoln Memorial, he was passed over for his friend Daniel French.

Gradually, Tefft spent more time in Maine, opening a studio in Willimantic in the 1920s. The art world was changing. The neo-Renaissance style in which he worked was losing fashion. He was returning to his roots.

This was the period of the great Bangor works: “The Last Drive”; Vice President Hannibal Hamlin on the Kenduskeag Mall; “Winged Victory” in Norumbega Parkway and others. A smaller version of the Hamlin statue was placed in the Hall of Statuary at the U.S. Capitol.

No matter how far Tefft might have tried to go from his native state – whether to New York City or Rome – he was always drawn back to the Bangor-Brewer waterfront where he had seen the gaunt river drivers. Yet, ironically, today there is no monument to the maker of monuments, or even a major library repository of his papers, models and other artifacts of his career. It’s difficult even to find a thorough list of his works.

Once eyed as a possible museum back in the 1960s, the stately house where Tefft grew up and did his earliest work is occupied by a VFW post today. His studio in Willimantic burned after his death. Apparently many of his papers and models were destroyed as well.

But Tefft said he cared little for fame. A reporter once visited him at his studio at Willimantic. When the subject of being famous came up, the man who had been declared one of the leading sculptors in the nation by the Boston Sunday Herald a few years before responded, “Fame is nothing. … It is ever so much more fun to work in a garden and watch the prodigious growth of beans, taking time to study life as expressed everywhere in nature.”

Earle G. Shettleworth Jr. and Richard R. Shaw supplied sources for this column. Wayne E. Reilly can be reached at

wreilly@bangordailynews.net.