Ervin GoellerA Life Carved in StoneLook up, the next time you walk into the north entrance of the State Capitol. Remember who made the stone dance. Story by Linda Read Deeds Photography by Bobbi and Steve Olson |
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| Click on the above image for a slide show of images by Bobbi and Steve Olson |
Few Nebraskans recognize Ervin Goeller’s
name, although his sculptures are part of our lives. We pass by one of them
daily in downtown Lincoln. We worship in the presence of Goeller’s work,
and our loved ones lay at rest under stones carved by his hands. But at his
death in 1964, the Lincoln Journal reported Goeller had died penniless.
Look up, the next time you walk through
the north entrance of the Nebraska State Capitol. A stone frieze, “The
Coming of the Pioneers,” dances below the arched windows. It is Goeller’s.
Note how fluid the stone seems, how
the oxen bend into their harness, how the pioneers themselves lean eagerly into
the future. Note the horse prancing, the dog looking back, encouraging them
to follow, and the eagle, our symbol of freedom, winging overhead. Read the
words Goeller carved in stone: “The salvation of the state is watchfulness
in the citizen.”
Or, several hundred miles west, perhaps
you, along with generations of Nebraska school children and hikers, climbed
a steep hill near North Platte to a stone Indian looking over the great Platte
River Valley. Erected in 1931, Goeller’s noble warrior stood on the point
known as Sioux Lookout for decades before being moved to the county courthouse
lawn in North Platte.
Goeller had emigrated to the United
States only a few years before he carved Nebraska history in the form of that
statue. Born in Stuttgart, Germany in 1882, by age 14, Goeller was a practicing
stonemason. Later, during an early 1900s revolt in German South West Africa,
he served his country, first as a soldier and then as a sculptor, creating a
memorial for those killed in the fighting. It still stands in Windhoek, Namibia.
With his wife, Dorothea, Goeller left
Germany and came to Lincoln in 1924. He was employed as a stonemason by the
Forburger Stone Company, where Lyle Wilcox, now a real estate agent in McCook,
knew him.
“He was a true master sculptor
and my memories of him, his work and his counsel, are a focal point of my life,”
Wilcox, 82, said. “I was then recently home from World War II and working
as a roustabout at Forburger’s. I watched him work daily and got to know
him fairly well. I also visited him at home in the evenings. After supper he’d
have a little rest and a cup of coffee, and then do carving. I remember him
and his wife as frugal people, kind, sending much of his earnings to his relatives.
A quote of his, ‘There is heaven of this earth!’ has stuck with
me through the years.”