COLUMBUS – The long struggle to get Thomas A. Edison to Washington has come to this: crowd-funding.
READ MORE: In The Columbus Dispatch
The folks in Milan, the northwestern Ohio birthplace of the great American inventor and entrepreneur, have single-handedly raised nearly all the money for the project to commission an 8-foot bronze statue of Edison for installation in U.S. Statuary hall in Washington, D.C., which contains two statues from each state.
Unable to get financial help from the Ohio Statuary Hall Commission that coordinated the project, Edison backers in Milan this week set up the “Send Edison to Washington” fund on gofundme.com, a crowd-funding site. As of Thursday, the fund had collected $420 from eight donors toward a $35,000 goal. The website is www.gofundme.com/tomedison.
The Edison statue, created by Zanesville artist Alan Cottrill, is completed. It debuted at the Statehouse in May. It now appears that Cottrill, a former farm boy turned pizza parlor owner turned famed statuary artist, will donate his work for free.
Cottrill’s Edison holds aloft an incandescent light bulb, arguably his greatest invention, but unfortunately it sheds no light on the fundraising struggles that plagued the project from the beginning.
What was originally a $2 million privately raised budget is now down to $66,000, half of which is being raised by the people of Milan and the rest through a matching grant from the Charles Edison Fund, founded by one of Edison’s sons.