A bronze statue of Tennessee Williams is now sitting by Main Street on a bench outside of the home he lived in for the first few years of his life.

Board members of the Columbus Cultural Heritage Foundation unveiled the statue Tuesday outside of the Tennessee Williams Home and Welcome Center. CCHF CEO Nancy Carpenter said the idea for the statue, and the $75,000 to create it, came about five years ago from local resident and longtime educator Dixie Butler.

“To get a complete restoration done of an 1875 home, and then to turn around … and get the statue created and bronzed and delivered and installed, we are beside ourselves,” Carpenter told The Dispatch on Tuesday. “And I do know that it will bring a lot of attention, a lot of people to downtown. And we’re really so excited about having it. I think it’ll be great for Columbus.”

The Tennessee Williams home was built as the rectory of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church. The famous American playwright was born in Columbus in 1911, and Williams spent the first few years of his life living in the Carpenter Gothic style house, as his grandfather was the reverend of the church at the time. St. Paul’s expanded in the 1990s, and the home was moved to its current site on Main Street.

CCHF reopened the home and welcome center in November, after closing the house for about six months for $300,000 in renovations. Those renovations included replacing exterior wood and interior plaster, along with others that came up as the project progressed.

Since it reopened, Carpenter said, the home has seen visitors from more than 27 states and 12 countries.

“It seems that people are finding out about the restoration of the house, and now it will really catch on about Tennessee Williams and our new statue,” she said.

Carpenter said she wanted to make sure the statue was made by the “best in the business,” which is why CCHF commissioned Bill Beckwith – an artist who previously created a seated statue of William Faulkner that sits in Oxford’s square.

Since the statue was commissioned, Carpenter said, she has personally made about 15 to 20 trips to Oxford to visit the artist and review the work. The result is the 500-pound bronze statue now sitting outside of the home, which Carpenter said went through a few different tweaks to get as close as possible to Williams’ likeness.

“I said, ‘He didn’t wear that kind of shoe, Bill. He always had this kind of buckle shoe on,’” Carpenter said. “And I said, ‘His hair was kind of bushy and his eyebrows were really thick.’ So we redid the eyebrows, we redid the hair.”

Besides the statue itself, the project also involved pouring and staining a concrete pad in front of the home for about $7,100, using a matching grant from Mississippi Hills Heritage Area, Carpenter said. She said she also purchased the bench for a little more than $2,000, before passing it on to Beckwith for the sculpture to rest on. The bench was then powder coated at the foundry in Atlanta that also cast Williams in bronze.

Mayor Keith Gaskin said it was a wonderful day to celebrate “one of our favorite sons of Columbus,” and to recognize the impact Williams had on literature. Gaskin said he hopes that visitors to Columbus take the time to sit with the new statue.

“When people want to come out and have their photograph with him, maybe they’ll have a conversation with him too,” Gaskin said. “If you’re like me, sometimes you just like somebody to listen. And if somebody wants to sit down with Tennessee Williams, I think that would be a great thing.”

The Tennessee Williams Home and Welcome Center is open Tuesdays through Fridays from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Saturdays from 8:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m.