When you're the subject of a new hit movie and it's the 150th anniversary of your most famous speech, you probably want to get spruced up a bit. So a marble bust of Abraham Lincoln that has gazed down a main hallway of the Vermont Statehouse for a century could be getting some attention.
Civil War historian Howard Coffin says it's about time. Says Coffin of Vermont's Lincoln, "He's discolored, he's dirty and in desperate need of cleaning."
Coffin got a friendly hearing from the Senate Institutions Committee when he asked for more than $11,000 to have the work done by the Williamstown Art Conservation Center of Williamstown, Mass.
The bust is the work of sculptor Larkin Goldsmith Mead. His widow gave it to the state in 1911.
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