Stevens Thomson Mason Statue - Statues of Historic Figures on Waymarking.com

This is a life size bronze statue of the governor on a 10 foot granite base. He is wearing a suit of the period and is standing.

Stevens Thomson Mason was born in Loudon County, Virginia in October 1811. In 1830, President Andrew Jackson appointed Mason’s father, John T. Mason, secretary of Michigan Territory. One year later, John T. Mason resigned, and Jackson appointed Stevens T, who was then nineteen-years old, to the position. As secretary, “Tom” Mason (as he was familiarly called) became acting governor when Governor George Porter was absent. Then, in 1834, Porter died of cholera, and the then-twenty-two year old Mason became full-time acting governor. He was later elected governor in his own right.
As governor, Mason led Michigan through a border dispute (known as the Toledo War) with Ohio and ultimately helped the territory achieve statehood.
The Panic of 1837 caused great economic hardship in Michigan, and Mason came under fire for his handling of financial matters. As a result, Mason did not run for re-election in 1839. By then, he had married a New York City socialite named Julia Phelps and in 1841, the couple moved to New York. On January 4, 1843, the thirty-one year old Mason died of pneumonia. He was buried in New York’s Marble Cemetery.
On June 4, 1905, Stevens T. Mason’s body was transported to Detroit by train. Stevens T. Mason’s remains were interred beneath the site of Michigan’s first state capitol.
This reburial is not quite the end of the story. In 1908, a life size statue of Mason was placed over the grave. Later, in the 1950s, Mason’s body had to be moved again, with “the modernization of downtown Detroit” made this move necessary. Another move took place when in 2009 they rebuilt Capitol Park. This time the governor’s remains were interned here, on the celebration of his 199th birthday, October 27, 2010

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Date Logged Log User Rating   10/18/2022 bobfrapples8 visited it 07/18/2013 The D Zone visited it 04/19/2013 Vante & Sammy Pants visited it

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