Skidmore Fountain

The Skidmore Fountain stands fourteen feet tall, a bronze basin held aloft by a central granite shaft and two classical Grecian caryatids. As Portland’s oldest piece of public art, it was dedicated on September twenty-second, eighteen eighty-eight, to fulfill a bequest from Stephen G. Skidmore. A local druggist who had traveled to the Paris Exposition a decade earlier, Skidmore left five thousand dollars in his will for a fountain that could refresh people, horses, and dogs.