WITH STEEL AND SONG, LAFAYETTE HONORS ITS RIVER

On a Tuesday evening in early June, with thunderstorm cells hovering somewhere to the west, a crowd gathered at the corner of South and Ninth streets in downtown Lafayette to dedicate a piece of art to the life of a river.

The sculpture had been commissioned to mark Lafayette’s bicentennial — 200 years since William Digby platted a city on the banks of the Wabash in May 1825 — but the piece that California-based Cliff Garten Studio designed is trying to do something harder than that.

The $500,000 stainless steel sculpture dedicated last week at South and Ninth streets was funded entirely through nearly $943,000 in private donations, with the remainder seeded into a new public art endowment. That endowment, held at the Community Foundation of Greater Lafayette, will support the maintenance and preservation of Lafayette public artwork for years to come. It is the kind of place-making investment that signals to site selectors, talent and visitors that this community takes its own identity seriously.

"A lot of hands built this place. And when you invest in something like this, you're telling the next set of hands — the businesses, the families, the engineer who just got a job offer in three cities — that this one has a pulse — that people here care about where they live,” said Mikel Berger, president and CEO of Greater Lafayette Commerce, the region’s primary chamber of commerce and economic development organization.

The piece arrived in five sections, fabricated from 25 sheets of stainless steel by Metal Arts Foundry out of Lehi, Utah, in November 2025, later than originally planned, at the tail end of the bicentennial year. Planters had to be placed. Sidewalks finished. Narrative plaques installed. A selfie stand positioned to angle toward downtown. Spring takes its time.

By June 9, it was ready.

“On the Banks of the Wabash” stands at 12 feet at its highest elevation and spans a footprint of 34 by 19 feet on a site that spent decades as a Village Pantry convenience store before becoming, of all things, a city pumping station surrounded by grass and waiting.

From a distance, Garten wrote in his original submission, the sculpture reads as two dynamic lines that shift in relation to each other as you move. He described the piece as a kind of threshold: an archway that could serve as the frame of a stage or the focal point for city events. The steel bends like water. The curves deliberately echo the Wabash’s own meandering path through this corner of Indiana.

The river is where Lafayette begins.

Digby was a rough-and-tumble trader and gambler who bought 84 acres along the Wabash on Christmas Eve of 1824 because he believed the site would one day be the head of steamboat navigation. He was right.

He platted the city the next year, named it for the Marquis de Lafayette — then making his final tour of the country — and three days later sold the land for $240. The Wabash brought steamboats in 1826, the Erie Canal in 1843 and with them waves of settlers who built the grist mills, tanneries, lumber operations and soap factories that turned a riverfront gamble into a city.

But the Wea people had been fishing the river near this bend for generations before any of that. Their villages clustered near the mouth of Wea Creek, just south of where Lafayette now stands, and it was for them that the French named Fort Ouiatenon when they established a trading post on the Wabash in 1717. The Potawatomi, the Kickapoo, the Peoria, the Kaskaskia and the Miami Nations had been living on and beside those same waters long before any of that as well.

Garten’s task was to hold all of it.

“The Wabash is thus a symbol of constant change,” he wrote, “and a collection of the histories that have taken place in Lafayette.”

Etched into the steel in laser-cut letters is the first verse and chorus of “On the Banks of the Wabash, Far Away,” the song Paul Dresser published in 1897 and that the Indiana General Assembly adopted as the state song in 1913. Dresser, born in Terre Haute and largely self-taught, wrote more than 150 songs in his career, but it was the Wabash he kept returning to.

The song is a study in longing — for Indiana homesteads, for mothers in doorways, for moonlight over a river you’ve left behind.

It is one layer. The letters are another.

They spell “Lafayette” across the surface and are themselves composed of smaller words and phrases, hundreds of them, gathered through community meetings, school projects and social media after the sculpture was commissioned. Children and adults alike contributed, sharing phrases, memories and reflections through public workshops and classroom participation.

“LAFAYETTE IS BEAUTIFUL.” “LAFAYETTE IS OPEN-MINDED.” “LAFAYETTE IS CONNECTED.”

“This sculpture is, quite literally, built from your voices,” said Dennis Carson, who co-chaired the Sculpture Selection Committee alongside John Collier.

The piece is lighted from the inside, so the words glow after dark.

The dedication marked the final chapter of Lafayette’s year-long bicentennial celebration, which Mayor Tony Roswarski said included more than 40 community events. The Bicentennial Committee, led by chair David Huhnke, spent several years planning the effort. The Sculpture Selection Committee reviewed 24 artist submissions before narrowing the field to five finalists and ultimately selecting Cliff Garten Studios, led by Garten and Sixto Cordero.

“This sculpture before us reflects the importance of our city’s founding on the Wabash River, and the role the river played in building Lafayette’s success for more than 200 years,” Roswarski said. “It symbolizes our connection to the past, present, and future.”

Now called Bicentennial Park, the site will be available for gatherings and performances. A time capsule buried on the grounds holds a letter from Mayor Tony Roswarski to whoever holds the office in 2125, along with photographs, school poetry, a copy of Greater Lafayette Magazine and a book on 200 years of Tippecanoe County. Scott Greeson played as people gathered, his music setline over the corner before the remarks began.

The crowd that had assembled by then, the thunderstorms having moved on, ended the evening the way people in Indiana have been ending evenings for more than a century: singing the old Wabash song together, led by Audrey Johnson of the Of Thee I Sing project.

William Digby bought 84 acres on this river on a hunch and sold them three days later for $240. Two hundred years later, the city he started is still finding new ways to say what it owes the Wabash.