Daniel Sargent’s South Natick Iconic Garden Statue: Our Lady of the Charles River

September 18, 2005

On this day, The Boston Globe shared a short Q&A segment written by Matt McDonald.

A reader had asked,

Why is there a large statue of a woman on the south bank of the Charles River in South Natick?

Matt's Answer was as follows:

The 9-foot-tall statue represents Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception, a Roman Catholic name for Mary, the mother of Jesus.

It can be seen from a dirt pullover area on the shoulder of Route 16.

But, from a distance, it's not obvious that the statue is of Mary.

Its placement on a rock outcropping overlooking the river with no structures nearby is unusual.

So, the statue has led to imaginative theories about why it's there.

"I can't tell you how many call up and ask who it was that drowned," said Janice Prescott, president of the Natick Historical Society.

It turns out the statue was put in place by Daniel Sargent (1890–1987), a grandson of the wealthy horticulturist Horatio Hollis Hunnewell.

Sargent converted to Catholicism as a graduate student at Harvard.

He placed the statue in the back of his beautiful property overlooking a bend in the river.

A 1938 newspaper clipping shared the Latin inscription at the [base of the statue, which translates] as "May flowers bloom on this earth."