In 1986, a group of Pennsylvanians made a trip in the middle of the night to the center of the Susquehanna River, where they erected an 18-foot-tall statue.
President Donald Trump announced Sen. Markwayne Mullin will be DHS Secretary at the end of March, replacing Kristi Noem.Forty years after it was erected, a mini Statue of Liberty still stands in the Susquehanna River, visible to drivers on Route 322 in Dauphin County.
In 1986, a group of Pennsylvanians made a daring trip in the middle of the night to the center of the Susquehanna River, where they erected an 18-foot-tall statue of Lady Liberty.“I said, boy, we should do something here just to honor her and so on," said Gene Stilp, the man behind the statue. "That's when the idea came." After Stilp and a small group of people snuck the trophy to the riverbank, they worked together to get it to the center of the river and up onto a pedestal that once held train tracks. "We talked to some of the friends who knew the river well, and then we put it on a large boat, and we had a couple of canoes and a couple of inner tubes," Stilp said, "and we took it out there, and they climbed the pier and sent down the ropes, and then we we attached a statue horizontally, and then we climbed up the ropes, and then we, five of us, pull it up."Drivers traveling up and down the river on Routes 15 or 22 were confused and mesmerized by the statue. Traffic was at a standstill, and cars were crashing into one another as drivers tried to get a peek of Lady Liberty. “There was a fog on the river that day," Stilp recalled. "So the fog was coming up from the river there, and the statue sort of was floating there. So people who are going to work started calling into TV stations, radio stations, and saying, ‘Hey, there's some kind of statue or some kind of thing in the middle of the river.’ very rewarding and made me smile." Stilp said the original plan for the statue was to keep it up for eight weeks in the summer of 1986, but the second the statue went up, it became a staple. “ going to carefully take it down on Labor Day. As quietly as it came, she was going to leave us quietly," Stilp said. "But people like it so much we just left it there. And that lasted for six years." After six years, stormy weather and strong winds tipped the statue over. But it wouldn’t be long before a new Lady Liberty took its place on the same pedestal.One of the reasons the statue has been able to stand for so long is the process behind the build. “Doctor Kushner got arranged so we can run it through the CAT scan machine. We got cross-sections there, which gave us a better feel for the actual sections," Stilp said. "Then I went to HACC, and they had the engineer over there to expand them onto a large piece of graph paper.” Now, 40 years after the original Statue of Liberty rose above the river, Stilp said it still inspires himself and others.“People could take a drive and go up either side of the river," Stilp said. "The people going up the river or down the river look over that, and I think it inspires them.”Two men from Martinsburg, West Virginia, have been charged in Cumberland County relating to a child abduction incident.A Shippensburg man was test-driving a car and speeding when he allegedly caused a crash that killed an elderly couple, according to charging documents.Chad-Alan Carr, the newly-elected mayor of Gettysburg Borough, has resigned after being sworn in on New Year's Eve.A York County man is in custody after a man was mutilated during an explosive, violent assault in February at a homeless encampment near Lowe's, court documentsA Manheim Township planning administrator is no longer employed with the township following a confrontation with another driver where he used a racial slur.
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