Black Aggie, Black Aggie, come back to Pikesville!

A shrouded figure brooded over Pikesville’s Druid Ridge Cemetery for decades, inspiring local legends, sleepover rituals and midnight hijinks.

By the late 1960s, the descendants of Gen. Felix Agnus had grown weary of the graveside shenanigans and donated the statue — known locally as Black Aggie — to the Smithsonian.

Now Pikesville civic leaders are seeking to summon Black Aggie back.

“It is part of the historical legacy of Pikesville,” said Tom Fekete, a vice president of the Pikesville Improvement Association. “The statue was the center of a lot of folklore.”

Dozens of visitors to Druid Ridge — Black Aggie’s not-quite-final resting place — ask about the statue each year, said general manager Debra Wholey-Teets. Mourners in the midst of planning a burial often pause to stare at the darkened patch of stone where the statue once stood, she said.

The Pikesville Improvement Association, with the support of cemetery staff and local political leaders, is petitioning the General Services Administration, Black Aggie’s current custodian, to send the statue back to Druid Ridge. Aggie currently sits in the courtyard of a federal building a couple blocks from the White House.

“Her legacy is inseparable from the cemetery’s own rich history,” Wholey-Teets wrote in a letter to the GSA. “She represents not only a piece of art, but a bridge between past and present — between memory, myth, and truth.”

The GSA’s response has been as enigmatic as Black Aggie’s expression. The agency has declined to say whether it would consider sending her home.

“GSA is committed to preserving and publicly displaying the Agnus Memorial as part of its Fine Arts Program, ensuring the historic sculpture remains protected and accessible to the public,” GSA spokesperson Leonard Buchanan wrote in an email in response to questions from The Banner.

Controversy has swirled around Black Aggie since she was first cast in bronze in the early 1900s.

While there’s only one Black Aggie, she’s not even an original.

‘Clover must, sooner or later, come back’

In 1885, Henry Brooks Adams, the grandson of President John Quincy Adams and great-grandson of President John Adams, was devastated by the suicide of his wife, Marian “Clover” Hooper Adams.

A celebrated photographer and socialite, Clover Hooper Adams died at 42 after drinking potassium cyanide, a chemical used in photography development.

“Even now I cannot quite get rid of the feeling that Clover must, sooner or later, come back, and that I had better wait for her to decide everything for me,” Henry Adams wrote to a friend the year after his wife’s death.

In his grief, Adams traveled to Japan to study Buddhism, according to the journal American Art. He commissioned American sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens to create a statue that conveyed the Buddhist concept of nirvana: floating beyond life and death, desire and pain.

Saint-Gaudens asked both male and female models to sit for the sculpture, crafting a figure whose gender was as ambiguous as its expression.

Adams requested that no name or title be placed on a sculpture after it was installed at Washington’s Rock Creek Cemetery and that a grove of tall yew trees be planted around it for privacy.

Yet visitors were drawn to the statue, often disturbing Adams as he sat in silent contemplation.

And, as Saint-Gaudens did not patent his design, copycats were also drawn to the statue.

The general’s orders

A veteran of the Franco-American War and the Civil War and the publisher of the Baltimore American newspaper, Felix Agnus sought an imposing work of art to preside over his family’s burial plot in Druid Ridge.

A Connecticut monument dealer approached Agnus in 1906, saying his firm had the rights to sell one authorized copy of the Adams memorial statue in each state, according to the American Art article. Agnus handed over $3,900.

A few years later, an attorney for Saint-Gaudens’ widow informed Agnus that he had been tricked into buying an unauthorized replica. Agnus successfully sued the art dealer but kept the monument.

Agnus’ statue was not the only replica of Saint-Gaudens’ work. A smaller copy sits in a Paterson, New Jersey, cemetery. A third sits at the Saint-Gaudens National Historical Park in New Hampshire.

After Agnus died in 1925 at age 86, the statue was installed on a stone plinth above the grave he shared with his wife. While their stories had ended, Black Aggie’s was just beginning.

‘At midnight, she sometimes gets up’

In the late 1960s, researchers with the Maryland Folklife Commission asked residents to share stories of Black Aggie.

Her eyes glowed green or red, some said. If you stared into her eyes, you would go blind. If you sat on her lap, you would die.

“At midnight, she sometimes gets up and wanders around the cemetery,” one said, according to Matt Lake’s 2022 book, “Black Aggie: The Lore and History of Baltimore’s Ghost Statue.”

The legends around Black Aggie caused real repercussions for the cemetery during the midcentury. The grass was routinely trampled around the Agnus grave. Teens scrawled graffiti around the statue and strewed trash.

In 1967, descendants of Agnus donated the statue to the Smithsonian. Two decades later, it was transferred to the GSA. The statue currently sits in a courtyard near the Dolley Madison House and United States Court of Federal Claims.

For Don Brody, that’s a travesty.

“I think it was inappropriate that it was removed,” said Brody, the Pikesville Improvement Association president, stressing that Agnus had requested that the statue be placed on his grave.

Brody and other Black Aggie boosters have collected letters of support from County Councilman Izzy Patoka, the Baltimore County Historical Society and the Greater Baltimore Chamber of Commerce, among others.

If the GSA were to give or loan Aggie back to Druid Ridge, the statue would be installed in an open area of the cemetery, not on the Agnus grave, so visitors would not disturb other residents of the cemetery, Wholey-Teets said.

To Brody, returning Black Aggie to Druid Ridge would honor the community’s unique heritage.

“We just want the rich history of Pikesville not to be lost,” he said.