Nor do they notice their fearsome resemblance to the huge sculptural sentries that rise beside the river in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies.
The standard story spun about the Post Office eagles focuses on their sculptor, Italian immigrant Amos Mazzolini.
But last week, Scott Sanders told a group gathered at the National Bronze Sculpture Symposium that the story of Mazzolini and the Antioch Art Foundry (and thus, the story of the eagles) “begins really as most of these stories do … in the expansive mind of Arthur Morgan.”
President of the college from 1920-1936, when Morgan established the art foundry in 1926, he was doing more than trying to earn profits for the college and provide practical work study to help students pay tuition.
“That was certainly part of it,” said Sanders, Antioch’s college archivist.
But the man would leave to run the Tennessee Valley Authority also was “pursuing his philosophy of making a model community with a diverse local economy,” Sanders said.
Years later, Yellow Springs Instrument Co. and Vernay Laboratories would do more of what Morgan had in mind when they spun off from the college.
Those businesses are “probably the best examples of the college giving over space for entrepreneurs to do research and develop products,” Sanders said. “In each case, (the college) had a much more formal share of the company and might even have even had part ownership of patents.”
But in the 1920s just as Antioch Shoes, whose “revolutionary new therapeutic footwear” got a toehold in Portsmouth, the Antioch Art Foundry and Antioch Bookplate “effectively just moved off campus,” said Sanders.
Although Sanders said he suspects Morgan was more interested in the industrial aspects of casting, it was through the arts that the foundry got its foot in the door in 1926.
The first Italian artist Morgan recruited for the art department, known by his last name, Palsati, proved a too vigilant protector and practitioner of the ancient “lost wax” method of bronze sculpture.
Recruited in 1925, his failure to share the ancient secrets of the method and his insistence that students serve a seven-year apprenticeship were ill fitted to Morgan’s plans.
So in 1927, Sanders said, the president brought Mazzolini as an instructor in art and a technical assistant assigned to watch Palisati “like a hawk” and learn the ancient techniques.
Described by Sanders as “a good natured but seriously intelligent man,” Mazzolini had taken the measure of the process in six months. And when his master departed, he “generously shared the secrets of lost wax casting” with his employer and Antioch students.
With student assistance on both the technical and artistic sides, Mazzolini managed to build up a business for the art foundry, both by casting sculptures of his own making and doing the casting work for other artists.
“Amos wasn’t just a master of bronze casting, he was a master sculptor,” Sanders said.
An example he cited for Mazzolini’s sculptural credentials were the post office eagles.
“Ohio sandstone is probably not the best medium” for stone sculpture, Sanders said. But Mazzolini nonetheless used the stone to make the eagles, the transportation scene over the post office’s main doors and the decorative columns on the building.
The foundry also cast metal grille work for the building.
Likewise, horses and Great Danes were cast for Kentuckians who raced both. The foundry also cast a dough-boy for the Ohio Statehouse, a sculpture of Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forest for the state of Tennessee and a Stephen Foster statue still on display Cincinnati.
A bust of Franklin Delano Roosevelt poured there still looks out over the Grand Coulee Dam.
Although Sanders ably described the lost wax process to the symposium-goers, he was at a loss to explain the lost profits problem that plagued the foundry.
Even seemingly lucrative contracts for the Roosevelt Memorial Wing of the American Natural History Museum and the National Archives lost money, the later running “several thousand dollars over the contract price,” Sanders said.
“It was not a profitable venture,” and required “a considerable subsidy from the college,” Sanders said.
With the Great Depression bearing down, “the solution was really a separation” between the Art Foundry and the college, he said.
Fortunately for the foundry, a physics major from North Dakota and his eventual mathematics major wife were associated with the venture by then.
The scientific and technical expertise Morris Bean and Xarifa Sallume Bean brought to bear turned “was really the contribution that Antioch made to casting,” Sanders said.
With him as director of the operation and her working on research and technical improvements, the Beans attracted a $500 grant from Goodyear Tire & Rubber, which was experimenting with aluminum castings.
This move from the fine arts into the industrial arts eventually led to the founding of Morris Bean & Co. about 1936, Sanders said.
The industry’s subsequent long term role providing jobs for Yellow Springs better fit Morgan’s model community.
But on the way helping to incubating and hatch the foundry that still operates on the edge of Yellow Springs, the “expansive mind of Arthur Morgan” also incubated and hatched the pair of eagles permanently on guard at the Springfield Post Office.
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