Davenport, Iowa: Abe Lincoln Saves a Bridge

The park and general area surrounding the statue seems really run down, but there is a brewery now across the street. Free parking is plentiful in the area.

Officially titled, "A Little Less Opinion, A Little More Fact," this is another slice-of-life sculpture ennobling America's most artistically malleable President. Unveiled in January 2016, created by artist Jeff Adams, the larger-than-life bronze depicts a beardless 1856 Abe Lincoln meeting a boy on a railroad bridge -- a predecessor of the bridge that's behind the statue.

The original bridge was the first one across the Mississippi River, and it freaked out steamboat companies because they realized that bridges would put them out of business. They claimed that the bridge was a navigation hazard, and as if to prove their point, a steamboat rammed into it and burned it down. The owners of the steamboat filed a lawsuit, hoping to prevent any further bridges from being built.

Lincoln, working for the railroad, visited the bridge, accidentally met the son of the engineer who built it, and somehow this led to a hung jury that then led to the freedom to build bridges across the Mississippi -- or at least that's what this statue suggests. Abe Lincoln! Freedom!