"Things like that just don’t disappear." — Lackawana County Historical Society President, Mary Moran-Savakinus
Well, apparently things like that DO disappear. You say you’ve lost the remote again? Lost your car keys? Lost your marbles? Well, don’t be so down on yourself, or assume that you’re getting Alzheimer’s, because the odds are you’ll never loose anything that compares to what the town of Scranton, Pennsylvania lost (which is the setting of the American version of The Office).
They’ve lost their sixteen foot high Abraham Lincoln Memorial. And they’d really like it back, please.
What We Know So Far
On July 4, 1909, Scranton was all a-buzz with a huge unveiling of the Lincoln memorial in beautiful Nay Park. July 4th celebrations were a big thing back then (in comparison to today’s celebrations). This memorial got a lot of press, as Lincoln was a popular President in Pennsylvania. The park, at least, is still there today.
However, the incredibly heavy bronze and stone sixteen foot high memorial isn’t. The last known documentation of the memorial is a photo taken for a postcard with it in the background in 1921.
So, sometime between 1921 and 2008, the Lincoln memorial disappeared.
And no one noticed.
We’ve Been Busy In Scranton
Scranton wouldn’t have realized it had anything missing if it hadn’t been for the work of a couple of local historians and postcard collectors. A Scranton postcard collector had a postcard picturing the Lincoln Memorial, dated 1909. He thought it might have been a fake and took it to historians, who searched through archives of the local papers to discover that yes, indeed, they had a Lincoln Memorial on the lam.
The oldest residents of Scranton have been quizzed and they do not remember ever seeing a Lincoln Memorial in Nay Park. Newspaper archives also fail to mention what happened to the memorial. My Mom’s theory is that about 1922, college students removed the memorial as a prank…
…and no one noticed. Although nicknamed "the Electric City", Scranton is kind of like Philadelphia on downers. I’ve been to Scranton once and cannot remember a single moment of the trip.
Scranton is putting a call out in all news services, collectable sites and historical societies to see if anyone just happens to have a sixteen foot Lincoln Memorial stashed in the attic. My theory is that the memorial itself grew a longing to be anywhere other than Scranton and plunged into the river, where it finally found its home.
Conspiracy theory believers — better sharpen your pencils with this one.
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