Lewis & Clark Memorial Sculpture dedication set

A special dedication ceremony will take place at 10 a.m. on Wednesday, Nov. 16, in Cairo. Members of the University and Cairo communities will dedicate the Lewis & Clark at the Confluence Memorial Sculpture, located at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers in Fort Defiance Park.

Evertt Beidler, a graduate student in the School of Art and Design, designed and fabricated the sculpture.

The sculpture was one of the outgrowths of a research project that explored a five-day period in November 1803 when Meriwether Lewis and William Clark and their "Voyage of Discovery" contingent stopped at the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers before heading upstream for the first time. David Koch, associate dean (emeritus), Morris Library-Special Collection Research Center, and Robert Swenson, architect and associate professor in the School of Architecture, secured a Library of Congress grant for the project.

In addition to the sculpture, the project resulted in the creation of two Lewis and Clark exhibits, one at the Cairo Custom House museum and the other in Cairo’s Public (Safford Memorial) Library.

The Nov. 16 ceremony is open to the public. A reception will follow at the Custom House, and there will be refreshments.