History

The Statue

You may have wondered about the history of the statue of a young woman on the boulevard, at the intersection of Clarendon and the boulevard. The bronze sculpture, A Memorial to Young Womanhood (or The Spirit of Youth), memorializes the spirit of youth and Constance Witherby, a girl who died of heart failure just before her sixteenth birthday while on a vacation climbing in the Swiss Alps. While a student at Lincoln School, she began to write poetry, which was published as a collection after her death entitled Sunshine & Stardust. She is the author of the phrase engraved on the statue.

The statue was originally in a small park across from the Salvation Army on Waterman Street, given to the city by her parents because they lived in that neighborhood, and named Constance Witherby Park. After the statue was vandalized toward the end of the last century, it was repaired by the city and moved to its present location on the boulevard. Her surviving brother, Frederich Rowland Hazard Witherby, approached the Blackstone Park Improvement Association for help in landscaping it, and paid for trees, shrubs, and the two granite benches at the site. Volunteers watered the following summer to insure the survival of the plantings, dragging a hose across the boulevard from a neighboring house.

The sculptor was Gail Sherman Corbett (1871 - 1952) from Syracuse, New York with ties to Rhode Island. Sculptor, painter and art teacher, she was the daughter of Frederick Coe and Emma Jane (Ostrander) Sherman and was born in Syracuse, New York. Her father was descended from Philip Sherman of Dedham, Essex, England, who came, in 1633 to Roxbury, Massachusetts, and afterwards, with eighteen others, founded the town of Portsmouth and the Colony of Rhode Island. She was a student of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, one of the most important American sculptors of the nineteenth century. The statue was dedicated in 1930.

 Click here to read "Rhode Island Ends an Era; Last Trolley on Last Run".