University of Georgia Founder Returns to Athens

Abraham Baldwin stands above all other University of Georgia presidents.

In fact, at seven-and-a-half-feet tall, atop a large pedestal, he stands above everyone. Unless that person is on stilts.

It’s fitting that a bronze representation of Abraham Baldwin, a native of Guilford, Connecticut, and a Yale graduate, be close to Old College, because it’s the place where classes began in 1801, more than 15 years after Georgia was chartered.

Heretofore, there was very little on campus to commemorate the university’s founder and first president. So alumni and administrators set about to change that. They unveiled and dedicated the $100,000+ artwork on Friday.

The husband-wife team of Don Haugen and Teena Stern, Marietta artists, created the bronze Baldwin over the past two years. Don took care of the anatomy, hands and facial features, while Teena tended to his hair and sartorial matters like his early 19th-century clothes and buckle shoes.

Haugen said they “really didn’t have a lot to go on” when trying to determine what, exactly, Baldwin looked like. In some paintings, like one of the signers of the U.S. Constitution, the celebrated one in the back of the bunch “looks very thin.” The same for the print of a portrait found in offices and halls all over the university.

But in the Haugen/Stern version, the Nutmegger—as Connecticut natives are called—looks hale, hearty and a little bemused. As well he might on a brisk Friday, watching a sea of black-and-red clad people moving and shifting on the manicured lawns of North Campus, where farm animals once wandered.