If you’ve parked outside the Cooper County Courthouse in Boonville anytime in the last 75 years, you’ve walked past her without necessarily knowing her story: a small copper Statue of Liberty, arm raised, standing near the courthouse entrance since 1951. This month she got her shine back.
The statue is one of Missouri’s 25 “Liberty Sisters” — small stamped-copper replicas of the real thing in New York Harbor, about eight feet tall, each carrying a plaque dedicated to “the faith and courage of our forefathers.” A Kansas City businessman started the campaign in 1949, aiming to place up to 200 of them in cities and towns across the country. Somewhere between 200 and 300 still stand nationwide, and Missouri has the second-most of any state, behind only Kansas, according to the Columbia Missourian.
Boonville’s Sister had gone rough around the edges — a missing point on her crown, wood rot working through the interior frame that holds her up. Lisa Parks, the outgoing state regent of the Missouri State Society Daughters of the American Revolution, spotted her on a trip through Boonville in 2022 and decided the statue would be her signature service project heading into America’s 250th anniversary. It took two years to raise the money and, just as importantly, to track down someone who actually knew how to restore 75-year-old stamped copper. That turned out to be Vlad Zhitomirsky, a Ukrainian-born restorer working out of St. Louis, who repaired the crown, rebuilt the wooden interior, and sealed the whole statue in a protective wax finish.
The DAR held a rededication at the courthouse this past Saturday — about 150 people showed up, some of them in Colonial-era costume, to watch the Boonville chapter and the state society mark the finished work. It’s a small ceremony for a small statue, but it’s the kind of thing that’s easy to walk past for decades without ever asking who put it there or why. Now, for a while at least, she’ll be easy to notice again.
Missouri Life Magazine first flagged the restoration story; full details here come from the Columbia Missourian’s reporting on the rededication.
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