Feb 22, 2018 2 min read

For the past two years, Washington Junior-Senior High School students, teachers and visitors have been going about their daily tasks under the gaze of the school’s namesake.

Sculptor Alan Cottrill, a former Washington resident who owned Four Star Pizza, created and donated a bust of George Washington to the school district where he was board president in the early 2000s.

George Kostelnik, manager of custodial and maintenance employees, constructed a stand when the entrance to the junior high – the most direct route to the gymnasium – was chosen as the sculpture’s permanent location.

“He’s displayed pretty much throughout the school,” said Chet Henderson, junior-senior high school principal.

A vinyl graphic banner in the gymnasium depicts Washington crossing the Delaware River during the Revolutionary War, and an image of the first president is incorporated into a prominent “Home of the Prexies” message.

One of Cottrill’s full-bodied George Washingtons stands at Nemacolin Woodlands in Farmington, Fayette County, where he shares a tableau with Chief Nemacolin, the Marquis de Lafayette and Albert Gallatin. (More about Cottrill’s other Washington in Washington later.)

Cottrill’s work also graces South Main Street in Washington, where a threesome from the Whiskey Rebellion confer near the site of the annual Whiskey Rebellion Festival.

Farmers who grew rye grain could make a tidy profit hauling their distilled product over the mountains and selling whiskey in eastern markets. The cash-strapped fledgling federal government’s decision in 1791 to tax whiskey led to an insurrection that posed the first significant challenge to its authority.

Small producers of whiskey had to pay a 9-cent-per-gallon tax in cash, so they were none too happy. Washington became the only sitting president to ever lead troops, and he did so to quell the rebellion.

The whiskey tax proved difficult to collect, and it was repealed in 1802 during the presidency of Thomas Jefferson, who shares, with Washington, a corner of the Washington & Jefferson College campus in the form of another Cottrill sculpture at East Beau and North Lincoln streets.

The artist, an Ohio native, now has a studio in Zanesville.