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[[newspaper clipping]]
PRACTICALLY EVERYBODY IN SYRACUSE, except children in diapers, knows there is a park in E. Genesee st. opposite the Medical Arts building. The name of it is Forman park.  Forman ave. runs alongside it. Nearly everybody knows that at the western end of the park — i. e., the end towards downtown — there is a statue, with two life-size figures, one seated and one standing with one toe pointing towards the center of the earth.

A good citizen who has lived in a house in E. Genesee st. for half a century or so asked another good citizen who lives in the University section and has been a Syracusan ever since he was born, about 70 years ago, who the fellow is who is sitting down.  The second good citizen said he didn’t know, but he thought it might be W. H. H. Smith, Mr. Powell's partner in the nursery business half a century ago. He would ask Folks and Books.

So it is necessary to "disclose," as the newspaper stories put it, the fact that the statue in Forman park has nothing to do with W. H. H. Smith, nor with Chancellor Day, nor with Uncle Bill Cogswell, nor with Harvey Baldwin. The standing figure represents Lewis Redfield, who operated a newspaper here a century ago. The seated figure represents Joshua Forman, Redfield's friend who was called the Inventor of Syracuse. He it was who got the state legislature to deepen the outlet of Onondaga lake so that the level of the lake would be lowered and dry land appeared in the village of Syracuse, as in the Book of Genesis. He also — more than anyone else in Onondaga, or perhaps in the whole state — moved heaven and earth to get the Erie canal dug.  “Clinton’s Ditch,” it was called, and the great governor made the project his own. But it was Joshua Forman who got himself elected to the legislature on the “Canal ticket" before Clinton got started.

There’s a statue at the west end of Fayette park, too, and few, I suppose, know the meaning of it.  But that’s another story.
[[/newspaper clipping]]

^[[Something about Forman Park in Syracuse]]