“Every great public square, every great public park features moving water,” Andrew Silver, chairmen of Friends of Tattnall Square Park and professor at Mercer University, said during a press conference on Thursday. “All we have to do is listen to moving water, and we’re in a place of peace,” he said.
Friends of Tattnall decided to build the fountain this year to honor the 100-year anniversary of the restoration in 1915. Once the $350,000 project is finished, it will be the first working fountain in the park since 1934, Silver said.
“There’s nothing that we can’t do together,” said Silver said to a crowd of fountain-enthusiasts.
The funders of this project are the Knight Neighborhood Challenge, Sierra Development Corporation, Piedmont Construction Group, Mercer University and Friends of Tattnall Square Park, according to a news release.
“I think that it’s realistic for us to expect that five years from now when we Google ‘‘What are the best municipal parks in the state of Georgia?’ We’ll pull up a list that will include Piedmont Park in Atlanta, Forsyth Park in Savannah and, right there with those two, Tattnall Square Park in Macon, Georgia,” Mercer President William Underwood said at the press conference.
The new fountain is modeled after the original fountain and will be over 17-feet tall and over 12-feet in diameter. The four-tiered fountain will have cast iron frogs at the base to mirror the original fountain, according to the news release.
Silver said the original fountain was called “the crown of the park,” and he said, “The crown is coming back to Tattnall Square Park.”
“My hat is off, literally as well as figuratively, to Mercer University for stepping up to the plate and kind of shepherding this,” Macon-Bibb County Mayor Robert Reichert said, as he began to take off his hat.
Silver ended the press conference with a “passing of the frog” in which he gave a frog from the original fountain to Eliza Grace Wood, a first grade advocate for the park, who gave it to Luke Robinson with Robinson Iron in Alabama.
