[This article originally appeared in the October 2023 edition of the South Baltimore Peninsula Post community newspaper.]
You can’t miss him as you enter the Fort McHenry grounds: a 24-foot bronze statue of Orpheus, the mythological Greek hero, musician, and poet. His monumental stature is made even more imposing by the 15-foot-high marble base he stands on. Classical Homeric dancing muses are carved into the marble, along with this inscription: “To Francis Scott Key, author of the Star-Spangled Banner, and to the soldiers and sailors who took part in the Battle of North Point and the defense of Fort McHenry in the War of 1812.”
The statue of “Orpheus with the Awkward Foot” is the most unusual monument within the U.S. National Park Service, standing out as a celebrated oddity of commemorative statuary on a battlefield landscape. The statue sparked controversy both before and long after it arrived at the Fort in 1922.
The story of how Orpheus came to Locust Point began in 1912 when Maryland Congressman John Charles Linthicum introduced a bill in Congress to commission a national memorial to Francis Scott Key to mark the centennial of the writing of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The bill provided $75,000 for the creation and construction of the memorial.
In May 1916, a national competition was held by the Fine Arts Commission in the District of Columbia, the same group that gave us the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials. The design by American sculptor Charles Henry Niehaus (1855-1935) was selected from 34 entries. Niehaus was a celebrated neoclassical sculptor trained at the Royal Academy in Munich, Germany. Very popular during the Gilded Age, he was awarded more federal commissions than any other sculptor. His work includes several statues in the U.S. Capitol’s Statuary Hall and multiple Civil War and World War I memorials.
Controversy soon erupted over the statue. Niehaus chose an allegorical depiction rather than a literal portrayal of Key. Orpheus was the artful poet and musician who had accompanied Jason and the Argonauts and traveled to the underworld to convince its ruler, Hades, to release his young bride Eurydice who had died from a snake bite. Descendants of Francis Scott Key expressed outrage at the “idealistic conception” of Orpheus “chastely attired in a fig leaf, strumming on a tortoise-shell lyre” that “does not in any way typify the spirit of patriotism.”
In 1920, Baltimore Sunpapers writer Henry M. Hyde commented, “It is too great a strain on the imagination, either alien or native, to gather that the large Greek gentleman is engaged in composition of the Star-Spangled Banner.”
Even before its placement, the location of the monument was contested. Although the statue was commissioned to be at Fort McHenry, civic leaders suggested other sites such as the downtown waterfront at Pratt and Light streets. Even the abandoned Fort Carroll in the Patapsco River was suggested, so that Orpheus could welcome arriving ships into the harbor.
As late as the 1970s, the Telephone Pioneers of C&P Telephone proposed to move Orpheus from Fort McHenry to downtown Baltimore, but removal would have required an act of Congress. The idea was abandoned when civic leaders realized that the city would have to bear the cost of moving the statue.
Funding for the construction of the statue was delayed by World War I, with work finally started in 1920. The model for Orpheus was Antony A. Matysek, Sr. (1893-1963), a Czech immigrant who grew up in East Baltimore. Matysek was a vaudeville performer, a Fells Point policeman, and a weight lifter who had been proclaimed “America’s Strongest Man” in 1922 at a competition in Madison Square Garden.
The statue was finally dedicated on Flag Day, June 10, 1922. The ceremony was attended by President Warren G. Harding as well as 15,000 guests, including 500 Baltimore City school students who performed in the children’s choir. Harding’s address to the crowd, delivered in a drizzling rain, was carried by loudspeakers to Locust Point’s Latrobe Park where thousands had gathered.
Orpheus originally stood on his marble column in the middle of the entrance road leading to the Fort. In 1962, with park attendance increasing, the National Park Service moved the statue to a less conspicuous site on the west side of the park, allowing arriving visitors to focus on the Fort and the replica of the Star-Spangled Banner flying above it. Several marble benches that originally surrounded the statue were relocated to the Fort’s seawall path, where they remain today. – Scott Sheads
Other Stories on SoBo History
The Lost Peninsula Forts of the War of 1812 (November 2021)
Deep Dive into the Tunnels of Federal Hill (May 2021)
South Baltimore Peninsula Post 
Great article. Really fascinating to know the history and the backstory. How cool, too, that the model for the sculpture was a local police officer and deemed the “World’s Strongest Man.” Would like to know more about him, too!
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