Lost – and found – Lincoln statue in Salzburg/Austria

[Angela]

Not long ago, the gentleman in charge of all the public statues in Salzburg swore to me a holy oath that it didn’t exist. But it does.
There is a copy of Anna Hyatt Huntington’s “Abraham Lincoln on the Prairie" to be found in the city of Salzburg.
The Austrian Minister of Education had originally seen this statue at the llinois State pavilion of the New York World’s Fair of 1963 and he admired it greatly.
A copy was gifted to Austria and due to a strike of the New York dock workers, it was taken to Genua/Italia via the USS Mountrail in 1965 and erected in Salzburg behind the freshly renovated “Teacher’s House” downtown on July 28th 1965. The ceremony was honored by a telegram from president Johnson who emphasized the friendship between two countries.
Nowadays, the ground is not public but privately owned and the statue now stands in the backyard of the “Muffin Hostel” at Leopoldskronstrasse. Apart from the fact that I can now make an offer on the privately owned statue (it would look GREAT in my backyard), I find this…sad.