Sir Walter Raleigh, still under wraps

Sir Walter Raleigh still tied up
Poor Wally. He never got the Queen’s permission to come to the New World -- and what would become North Carolina -- before his death nearly 400 years ago. And these days his statue still isn’t on public display in the town named in his honor. He’s moved several times as the city of Raleigh’s downtown has developed, but he’s back under wraps awaiting a new position.
The 11-foot-tall statue was originally placed on the old Bicentennial Mall in downtown Raleigh directly across from the entrance of the Legislative Building in 1976. That was a fine spot – and then-N.C. Agriculture Commissioner Big Jim Graham used to stop and have a brief, daily chat with Sir Walter. They were pretty one-sided, but Graham told me he liked to keep Sir Walter up to date on happenings political and otherwise.
In 1988, Sir Walter was moved to a spot at the top of the Fayetteville Street Pedestrian Mall, directly across from the south entrance to the Capitol, and between the buildings housing the N.C. Court of Appeals and the N.C. Supreme Court.
Then in 2005, when the city began tearing out the Fayetteville Street Mall to make way for a reopening of what some were calling North Carolina’s Main Street, the statue went off to the body shop to be cleaned off and buffed up – a $15,000 worming out, as the late N.C. Secretary of State Thad Eure would have called it.
The News & Observer had a story Sunday about Raleigh’s brief reappearance in Raleigh over the weekend. Click here to read it.
As Thomas Goldsmith’s story in the N&O notes, the statue will go back into storage until completion of the city’s new convention center, where he’ll be on display at the corner of South and Salisbury Streets. It’s a few blocks south of the old Hotel Sir Walter, where legislators routinely stayed for decades when the General Assembly was in session.
The new perch is the latest in a steady southward progression of about a city block every five years or so. At this rate, Sir Walter will finally get to the beach in about, oh, a couple jillion years, give or take an epoch.