Russell A. Alger Memorial Fountain

01 / The story of this place

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Russell A. Alger served as governor of Michigan, then as U.S. Secretary of War under President William McKinley, and later as a U.S. senator, and Detroit remembered him after his death with a public fountain. Unveiled in Grand Circus Park in 1921, the memorial pairs an allegorical bronze figure representing the state of Michigan with a formal basin, the work of sculptor Daniel Chester French and architect Henry Bacon, the same pair who had finished the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. just a year earlier. Grand Circus Park itself, laid out as one of Detroit's great semicircular public spaces along Woodward Avenue, has anchored the theater district for well over a century. The fountain has weathered more than a hundred Michigan winters and several rounds of park renovation, and it still stands as one of the more elegant pieces of civic sculpture in downtown Detroit.

1. Honors Russell A. Alger, Michigan governor and U.S. Secretary of War
2. Unveiled in Grand Circus Park in 1921
3. Sculpted by Daniel Chester French, who also made the Lincoln Memorial statue
4. Designed with architect Henry Bacon, the Lincoln Memorial's architect
5. Still standing in downtown Detroit's theater district