Scattered from coast to coast, roughly along the route of U.S. HIghway 40, sit twelve identical statues, each ten feet high and weighing five tons, made of poured stone and concrete. These are the Madonnas of the Trail, commissioned by the Daughters of the American Revolution in the 1920s. Designed by sculptor August Leimbach, each madonna stands tall, rifle under one arm and baby in another, sunbonnet on her head and toddler clinging to her skirts. Some years after the DAR placed Madonna #5 at the entrance to a city park in Richmond, Indiana, town fathers there renamed the park to honor local boy Glenn Miller; American history just swings right along. But today's Good Morning features Madonna #1, in front of the post office in downtown Bethesda, Maryland, at the eastern end of what was once America's first turnpike for the westward bound, the Old National Road, now known as Old Georgetown Road.
For eighty years or more, Madonna #1 sat unperturbed on the sidewalk while Bethesda's farmland turned into suburban housing and then into offices and condos and high-end retail establishments for a shiny-new satellite city just outside Washington, D.C. The Baronet Theater next to the post office became a Hyatt hotel. The People's Drug Store next to that became a hole in the ground with a fake waterfall, the entrance to Washington's new Metro subway system.
When the sidewalk under Madonna started to collapse, she had to be removed for a few years. The picture above shows the ceremony marking her recent return. Below is the bottom of the waterfall underneath her feet, where buses pick up and drop off subway passengers.
Below the bus lanes, at the bottom of a long escalator, is the subway tunnel and its Bethesda station platform:
Meanwhile, up above the head of Madonna #1, transportation is by elevator:
Madonna should not try to bring her gun onto the subway.
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