Jere Baxter sculpture by Belle Kinney, Nashville, Tennessee, 1978
Tony Gonzalez has an excellent story about how Metro owns art it can't afford to maintain and how they’re looking into how to fix that.
One of the pieces in desperate need of maintenance is the statue of Jere Baxter. Anne-Leslie Owens, of Metro Arts, tells Gonzalez “I suspect if you asked anybody on the street, you’d have a hard time finding anybody who knows who Jere Baxter is.”
Really? The second or third most interesting Baxter brother and Owens thinks no one knows who he is? Granted, he lacked the superb facial hair of his brother, Edmund, and he wasn’t some great Confederate officer like his brothers, but he was still awesome. The town of Baxter, Tennessee was named after him. He, like his brothers, was a huge proponent of public education for everyone, black and white. I don’t think this was necessarily because they went from Confederate slave owners to progressive civil rights activists, but because they wanted an educated workforce for their railroads.
Plus, y’all, I already told you the greatest story about Jere Baxter and that statue and the anti-Jere Baxter statue his enemies claimed to have put in Centennial Park. Teaser:
Jere Baxter dies and his friends put up a statue in honor of him. Did his enemies really put up a counter-statue of John Murrell in Centennial Park, since, if Nashville was going to be honoring famous thieves, might as well honor the most famous?
If you can read about something that funny — a guy so loved his friends put up a statue to him and so hated his enemies retaliated with another monument — and not remember the name Jere Baxter, then that’s on you. Jere lived a memorable life.
Also, just on a side note, Jere’s mortal enemy, the leader of the faction that might have put up an anti-Jere statue, was Judge Jacob Dickinson (though I don’t think he had anything to do with the anti-Jere monument), who you may remember from recent news stories as the guy who sold Polk Place to developers thus necessitating us rescuing the Polks and reburying them on the State Capitol grounds.
If I wasn’t already Team Jere because of my fondness for his family’s facial hair, I would be just because Dickinson hated him.
