I just completed a Thanksgiving morning walk in downtown Hartford with my two dogs and a friend. I apologize for the quality of the pictures as I had one frisky dog jumping around in my other hand which must have changed the camera settings.
I had never walked this section of the Riverfront trail as I am usually on the other side of the Connecticut River. Imagine my surprise in running across a sculpture of the first turkey that was pardoned and the reason why this morning. Of all mornings, this was PERFECT.
The sculpture was completed in 2006 by Philip Grausman and is part of the Lincoln Financial Sculpture Walk at Riverfront.
For those unable to read the rest of the plague and Jack's story:
"We reached our new home (in Indiana) about the time the State came into the Union. It was a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals, still in the woods. There I grew up."
Abraham Lincoln spoke with regret about the first time he shot and killed a wild turkey at age eight. Perhaps as a result of this traumatic event, he became the first president to issue a "Presidential Pardon" to a turkey when his son, Tad, became attached to a bird named Jack which was intended for dinner. Tad interrupted a cabinet meeting weeping and begging for his father's intervention and returned to the cook with the president's handwritten order of reprieve. Ironically, Lincoln also issued a proclamatin in October 1863 establishing the last Thursday of November as "a day of Thanksgiving and praise," inaugurating a long tradition of both turkey dinners and presidential turkey pardons.
So now you know............