Jefferson comes to Shelter Island: Statue makes its way from Calif. to Ram Island

Now that Bob Kohn has a 450-pound bronze statue of Thomas Jefferson in his back yard, his house on Ram Island looks a lot more like Monticello. 

The statue, which Mr. Kohn purchased decades ago, was relocated from California in August.  It depicts Jefferson seated, with a portable writing desk in his lap, a paragraph into a draft of the Declaration of Independence. Even the handwriting and the cross-outs engraved in the bronze are based on historical documents, and Jefferson’s clothing from shirt to shoes is circa 1776.

Mr Kohn was a 33-year-old on the board of directors of a company when he saw the statue on the property of a hotel while attending a conference in Palo Alto, Calif. “I was floored when I saw it,” he said. “I remember saying to myself, when he was 33 years old that’s when Jefferson wrote the Declaration.”

He tracked down the gallery that sold the statue, learned that the artist, George Lundeen had made 36 of them, purchased number 18, and had it installed at his home in Pebble Beach, Calif. on a brick base that reproduced a herringbone pattern Jefferson often used in his architectural designs.

When Mr. Kohn sold his California home and moved to New York, he had the statue moved to his brother’s house in Los Angeles, where it stayed for 12 years. Over time, the patina the artist had created on the surface of the statue was degraded by the salt air, and Mr. Kohn had the statue shipped to the artist’s studio in Colorado for repair. From there, he shipped it to Jernick Moving company in Greenport, hired Marcello Masonry to recreate the herringbone brick pad and the statue was installed on Ram Island a few days later.

That Mr. Kohn has a large statue in his yard is not unusual for Shelter Island, but why this statue at this time? The simple answer is that Mr. Kohn had long planned to move the statue from his former home state of California and a combination of the 250th anniversary of the Founding and learning that the White House had just installed an identical statue in the Rose Garden were a large part of the reason.

“I moderate a Philosophy Club which meets weekly during the summer to discuss great books, including Aristotle, Milton, Locke, Jefferson and the like,” he said. “Two years ago I mentioned the Jefferson statue and one of our members has since been asking when I would bring it to Shelter Island. It was only after I saw that New York Times article in July that I finally get off the dime to have it shipped here.”