Work crews remove Lance from outside a Central Park office building. (Photos by Bill Freehling)
The Free Lance–Star’s iconic newsboy statue, Lance, has returned to its longtime home in downtown Fredericksburg.
For two decades, the bronze statue stood watch in front of the newspaper’s front entrance off Amelia Street, between Douglas Street and Washington Avenue.
Former Free Lance–Star (FLS) owners Joe and Charles Rowe worked with Alabama sculptor Clydetta Fulmer in 1994 to commission a piece that would honor newsboys for their role in carrying news of the world to their communities. The statue is chock full of details including darned socks, a newspaper bag, the outline of a small knife and change in one pocket, and an FLS edition with a lead headline reading: “Statue of Newsboy Dedicated Today.”
When the newspaper moved out of downtown in 2016, Lance came along and was installed outside the front entrance of the new office building at 1340 Central Park Blvd.
Mary Washington Healthcare purchased that Central Park building earlier this year to house a portion of its workforce, and the newspaper moved to a smaller office in the Central Park Corporate Center. Lance, however, remained on the property Mary Washington purchased, and the newspaper’s parent company, Lee Enterprises, didn’t move the statue to the new office.
The Vakos Companies, which now owns the former FLS property downtown, has long wanted to move Lance back to its former site, where there now sits an apartment building and The Publisher Hotel (whose name pays tribute to the newspaper’s history there).
Vakos Companies founder and current Chairman William J. Vakos Jr. (blue sweater in bottom-right corner) watches as crews deliver Lance to its temporary site near The Publisher Hotel.
“It seemed like the appropriate place [for Lance], it really did,” said company founder and current Chairman William J. Vakos Jr., who long considered Joe Rowe a role model. “It’s a reminder to the whole community of the contribution that The Free Lance–Star has made to the community for over 100 years.”
When Vakos’ grandson, Collin Vakos, reached out to Mary Washington Healthcare (MWHC) earlier this year to inquire about moving Lance back downtown, he found a receptive audience. MWHC officials decided to donate the statue to The Vakos Companies so it could return to its downtown home.
“We’re excited to play a role in the special delivery of the Free Lance–Star paper boy statue from the site of our future corporate office to the former site of the Free Lance–Star office, now the Publisher Hotel,” said MWHC Director of Communications and Marketing Emily Thurston. “It’s an honor to help secure this piece of our community’s history and restore it to a place of meaning and prominence.”
On Thursday, a crew with Pruitt Contracting Company Inc. carefully removed Lance from outside the Central Park office, loaded and secured him onto a pickup truck, drove him downtown, and set him up not far from The Publisher Hotel’s main entrance. The statue will eventually be moved a little closer to William Street on a site at the hotel that could include a patio, a new pedestal and landscaping.
“We are grateful to the Vakos family for bringing Lance home to downtown,” said Nick Cadwallander, the son-in-law of Joe Rowe and the former FLS publisher.
Bill Freehling covers local business for the Fredericksburg Free Press. He can be reached at [email protected].
