He’s stood guard over the Public Square in Lawrenceburg for 102 years today. But did you know it took thirty years for Lawrenceburg’s statue of David Crockett to become reality?

Lawrence County has a long history of emphasizing its ties with the king of the wild frontier. Our first countywide celebration of Crockett’s birthday happened in 1890, and it drew a crowd of about 5,000 people to Lawrenceburg, which at the time was a city of only about 600 souls.

At that time, a local group known as the David Crockett Memorial Association laid the cornerstone for a monument to Crockett in what is today the Rosemont section of Lawrenceburg. Although that part of town was largely woods and pastureland in 1890, the owners of the Lawrenceburg Land Company envisioned the neighborhood as a pleasantly grand addition to the city, with the monument to Crockett serving as the focal point of a small city park to be known as “David Crockett Park” (not to be confused with the state park of the same name, which stands on the other side of the city today).

Unfortunately for the Land Company, their plans ran aground in a stormy sea of lawsuits and the vision they had for Rosemont never materialized. We don’t know what became of that cornerstone, either, but we do know that it contained a small tin time capsule into which were placed issues of local newspapers.

The plans for that original monument to Crockett were much grander than the statue that we now have of him. It was to be “carved in Italy from pure white marble and shipped to Lawrenceburg in time to be unveiled at the Annual Celebration of Crockett’s birthday in 1891.”

Despite these high hopes, the idea of a marble statue to David Crockett in Lawrenceburg never materialized.

Although we don’t know why that first statue proposal fizzled, we do know that the idea of memorializing Crockett persisted. On November 7, 1921, a mass meeting was held in Lawrenceburg for the purpose of raising money for a new bronze statue of Crockett, to be placed on the southern side of the courthouse.

Work began on this project in earnest. The W.M. Dean Marble Company of Columbia created the bronze statue for the cost of about $3,000.

Finally, after many years of waiting and several stops and starts, the statue of Crockett that stands on the southern end of our Public Square was unveiled with great fanfare on September 14, 1922.

As a result of that unique connection we have to Crockett’s life and rise to prominence, Lawrence County is home to one of the oldest and only full-body statues of David Crockett in the country.

The Crockett statue was cleaned and restored by the Terra Mare Conservation company in 2019, using funds from a $15,000 grant from the Tennessee Historical Commission.

Below is a photo of the dedication of the Crockett Statue in 1922.