Genius of Electricity
Evelyn Longman was born in a log cabin on a farm near Winchester, Ohio, and had to pay for her own art education. She worked during the day at a store in Chicago and took night classes at the Chicago Art Institute.
She worked with many noted sculptors and her work caught the attention of Daniel Chester French, sculptor of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC. She became French’s only female assistant while continuing to do her own pieces. “Victory,” an allegorical figure, was her biggest success, and it was installed in Festival Hall in St. Louis for the 1904 Exposition where it won a silver metal. A replica is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Longman continued to get many important commissions including bronze doors at Wellesley College and the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis. She was the only sculptor for whom Thomas Edison agreed to sit. Probably her best-known work today is the iconic, gilded “Genius of Electricity” (pictured on an old Bell Tel directory) which stood atop the AT&T building in Manhattan. Two other works, the Louisa Wells Memorial and the Storey Memorial, are in the Lowell, Mass. Cemetery (77 Knapp Ave in Lowell).
In 1920, Evelyn Longman married Nathaniel Horton Batchelder, and they moved to Windsor, Connecticut, where he was headmaster of Loomis School. She continued to sculpt after her marriage and died in 1954 at age eighty on Cape Cod. She was the first woman sculptor elected a full member of the National Academy of Design.
A working sculptor 