The Fountain Honesdale Built With Its Own Hands
Walk to the center of Honesdale and you will find, in Central Park, a fountain with four numerals cut into its stone: 1776, Memorial, 1876. It is easy to pass without a second look. But that fountain is one of the clearest civic lessons the town has to offer, because of how it came to be there.
When the United States marked its 100th birthday in 1876, the celebration in Washington and Philadelphia was national in scale. In Honesdale, a group of local women decided the anniversary deserved a permanent marker in their own square, and then they built it themselves. Organized as the Ladies' Centennial Fountain Association, they spent roughly three years raising the money one neighbor at a time: dollar subscriptions, food sales, sponsored lectures and plays, until they had gathered the eleven hundred dollars the fountain required. No appropriation, no distant benefactor. A public monument to the nation's founding, funded by the public that would stand around it.
The fountain was presented to the borough's common council on July 3, 1879, and the town made an evening of it, a summer festival with music, illumination, and, by one local account, a dress parade by the Honesdale Guard. For the residents who gathered that night, the founding was not an abstraction from a century before. It was something they had a hand in commemorating.
This was not the first time the same civic instinct had shaped Central Park. A decade earlier, many of the same women, first the Soldiers' Aid Society, then the Ladies' Monumental Association of Wayne County, had raised the funds for the county's Civil War monument, dedicated in 1869 by Pennsylvania Governor John W. Geary. Its bronze tablets name the 353 Wayne County men who died, and its inscription borrows Lincoln's charge from Gettysburg: that government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth. Twice within eleven years, ordinary citizens taxed themselves, voluntarily, to give their public square a memory.
