Jasper gets ready to show off new elk

JASPER — Newt the elk is antlerless.

At least for now. The 350-pound, 9-foottall elk statue is being stored in the Jasper City Hall garage until its official unveiling June 24 at the 20th annual Buffalo River Elk Festival.

“If we put the antlers on now, we won’t be able to get it out the garage door,” said Michael Thomas, a Jasper alderman and Arkansas State Police trooper.

The antlers screw on, but then they’ll be tack welded to make sure they stay in

place, he said. The statue is made of bronze-plated aluminum.

Jasper officials wanted something to promote the city as the Elk Capital of Arkansas. So the City Council decided on an elk statue.

In April, the Newton County Quorum Court granted the city use of the courtyard’s northwest corner — prime real estate on Scenic Arkansas 7, which is also the intersection of Court and Stone streets in downtown Jasper.

About 5,200 vehicles a day travel through Jasper on Arkansas 7, according to the Arkansas Highway and Transportation Department. Jasper’s population was 466 when the last census was taken in 2010.

With donated money, Jasper bought the statue for about $3,000 from a company in Boulder, Colo., said Jasper Mayor Jan Larson, who named the statue Newt, which is short for Newton County.

Donations also will provide about $4,000 for a concrete slab and spotlight to illuminate Newt at night, she said. The slab has already been poured, with leaves placed carefully in the wet concrete to form indentations.

Newt will face the intersection, with his front feet on an aluminum rock and his head turned to the right, looking northeast up Court Street.

Larson hopes tourists will stop downtown to take photos with Newt, and perhaps eat lunch or do a little shopping while they are in Jasper.

“We’re doing this for economic development,” she said. “We want people to stop. We want to create interest.”

Larson said Newt will look bronze, but he’s actually green.

“He is from recycled materials,” she said.

If spots develop in the bronze plating, they can be repaired, Larson said.

“Somebody suggested somebody might shoot at him,” Larson said. “I hope not.”

While Boxley Valley, 19 miles west of Jasper, is famous for elk sightings, elk don’t actually wander into Jasper, Thomas said.

The elk festival celebrates the reintroduction of elk to Newton County. It will be June 23-24 on the downtown Jasper square.

Elk were native to Arkansas but had been hunted to extinction locally by the 1840s, according to The Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture.

Elk were reintroduced to the Boxley area in 1981 in a cooperative program run by the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, the National Park Service, the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation and local landowners. Licensed hunting of elk began in 1998.