1 Founders Monument – Old Main
The Founders Monument, featuring Old Sorrel, was created by Jerry Anderson and dedicated in 1986. Now a fixture on campus and a centerpiece of student tradition, it commemorates the sacrifice and hard work of Cedar City’s early pioneers that worked through the cold winter of 1896 to haul lumber from the nearby mountains to construct the first school building in time to start classes in the fall. Men, women and families worked through the spring and summer, sacrificing their time, energy and means to complete Old Main, the first building on campus, that set the foundation for the beautiful campus and quality university we see today.
2 Founders Monument – The Story
Gerald R Sherrat, 13th president of Southern Utah University, often referenced the early days of the school to inspire current students, faculty and friends of the institution he loved. In one telling, he wrote,
“There has probably never been a more romantic founding of any school in America. The first building was literally torn from icy crags and molded by the hands of more than a hundred men and women.
The preserving of the University was achieved by people who would never attend it. Indeed, some of them had never had the opportunity of attending any school. They were hard, rough-spoken, courageous souls; people of the type without whom the frontiers of the West would never have been conquered.
They were also people of vision who knew the significant place colleges occupy in the American scheme of things and who were determined to secure the blessing of higher learning for their posterity and for their town.
From its beginning the University has always known that its ability to meet the challenges of today and tomorrow rests in large measure with the success it has in sustaining the legacy of its founders, a legacy which calls for superior standards and for the shared belief that nothing the University can foresee, or sense, or conceive is beyond the collective will of its students, faculty, and administration. The lesson to be learned from its founders is that however difficult the task which the University faces, nothing is impossible.”
3 Founders Monument – Old Sorrel
Rob Will was one of the men that participated in the grueling work depicted here. Of the faithful horse he once remarked,
“Anyway, I was as convinced as those men were, that had it not been for “Old Sorrel” (who was not at all old at the time), that that company of 11 men and 21 horses, would have perished on one of the dugways along the old Jensen Mill Road, regardless of how faithful or willing, [and] other ways their horses were.
When I hear the children of those men say, “Why give old Sorrel all the credit, Hank and Rum, or Pack and Tim, [or] Nance and Jake, or some other team were the best in the country” I can only answer that I, a boy of 18, lay beside their fathers on the sawdust of the old mill shed that night, and heard them testify that Old Sorrel was their Savior on that occasion.”