I am sure that it will ever remain a monument to your art. Could Mrs. Butterfield see it, it would have her complete approval and gratify her pride in leaving a memorial so creditable to her husband and to the city. It is located, as I can tell you, only a short distance from the home of her birth and girlhood. And then the unbelievable happened. The three executors with whom most of the sculptor’s contacts had been made all died within a very short time of one another. Everything was left in the hands of the fourth, Albert Hagar, who announced that he had never liked the statue, that the “bas-relief in Utica” mentioned in the will showed the general without a hat, with his arms down, and that he didn’t think the figure was big enough. He wanted the whole thing done over and refused any further payment unless this was done. The worst feature of this arbitrary decision was that many beneficiaries of Mrs. Butterfield’s will could not be paid until the status of the monument was settled. Hagar’s sudden reversal was no doubt sincere but it made inconvenience and trouble for many. The Gorham Company offered to handle the suit which had to be brought against Hagar. The case dragged into the time when the sculptor had the aircraft investigation on his hands. Meanwhile the contractors who had done the granite work sued Gutzon for the payment of their bill. Gorham had not been paid for the casting, the architects were clamoring for their money and Stamford taxes were in arrears. The suit was carried on at Cold Spring, near Poughkeepsie, so far away that the sculptor lost a whole day every time he appeared as a witness. Of course the Gorham Company won the suit eventually, but payments were not made until 1920. By that time the sculptor had assigned what little would have been left over for him to other debtors, so it is doubtful if he ever received a penny for all his work on this big contract. It was said by people who should know that some of the Butterfield heirs went to the poorhouse while waiting for their inheritance. Gutzon blamed himself for having accepted the commission in the first place. When later the location of the statue had to be changed on account of the Rockefeller church construction he declared he wouldn’t mind if they dropped it into the Hudson River. The Vance memorial for North Carolina, of which a copy stands in Statuary Hall in the nation’s capital, was made during this period. It remains where it was put in the first place. CHAPTER FOURTEEN _AIRCRAFT INVESTIGATION_