"Spirit of the American Doughboy"

Following the United States' entry into World War I (1917-1918), more than 100,000 Georgians were involved in the war effort, with the state suffering over 1,000 casualties. The rural community of Berrien County experienced an extraordinarily high rate of loss, particularly in the 1918 sinking of the troopship HMS Otranto, the greatest maritime disaster of the war. Answering President Woodrow Wilson's call to honor those who died in the war, Berrien County commissioned the first Doughboy statue sculpted by Americus, Georgia, resident Ernest Moore Viquesney. Completed in 1921, the statue was unveiled in 1923 when the community raised the funds to acquire and install it. Known as "The Spirit of the American Doughboy," the design was replicated all over the country to memorialize soldiers lost during World War I.