HARRISBURG: A mini-Lady Liberty

Next time you are heading to State College, don't miss the 25-foot-tall replica of the Statue of Liberty sitting in the middle of the Susquehanna River. It's near the Route 443 exit of Route 322, just north of Harrisburg. It's wholly unexpected and a wonderful sight! I saw it for the first time on Saturday, when we took a day trip to Sunbury.
According to the Weird US website, "A local lawyer and activist-artist named Gene Stilp put together the first statue with some friends for a bit of a lark to celebrate the original Statue of Liberty’s centennial in the 1980s. When the ersatz replica was finished, they displayed it the closest thing they could find to the plinth on Liberty Island—an old railway bridge piling in the middle of the river.
"There it stood for years, raising a smile from motorists, until wind and weather finally carried it off in the 1990s. People missed it so much that Stilp and his team built a more durable replacement of wood, metal, and fiberglass, moved it onto the piling by helicopter, and lashed it securely to the plinth with cables."