Council Bluffs cemetery whose entrance is marked by the 1918 bronze "Black Angel" memorial to Ruth Anne Dodge, a National Register monument wrapped in curse and watching-eyes folklore.
623 N 2nd Street, Council Bluffs, IA 51503
Age
All Ages
Cost
Free
Free public access during daylight hours.
Access
Wheelchair OK
Paved approach at the memorial near the cemetery entrance; grass and inclined drives within the older cemetery sections.
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1918 · Ruth Anne Dodge Memorial (Daniel Chester French, 1918) — the sculptor's only Iowa work · Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, 1980 (ref. 80001457) · Contributing property, Lincoln-Fairview Historic District (2007)
Fairview Cemetery occupies a hillside on the north side of Council Bluffs, Iowa, and dates to the city's 19th-century growth as a Missouri River railroad town. Its most recognized feature stands just east of the cemetery entrance at the intersection of North 2nd Street and Lafayette Avenue: the bronze figure locals call the Black Angel.
The statue is officially the Ruth Anne Dodge Memorial. Ruth Anne Dodge was the wife of Grenville M. Dodge, the Union Army general and chief engineer of the Union Pacific Railroad whose home, the Historic General Dodge House, remains a Council Bluffs landmark. As she was dying in 1916, Ruth Anne reportedly described a recurring vision in which a winged angel standing on the prow of a boat offered her water from a vessel; on the third visitation she accepted the water and died.
Her daughters, Anne Dodge and Ella Dodge Pusey, commissioned a memorial depicting that vision. They engaged Daniel Chester French, the American sculptor who also created the seated Abraham Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial and the Concord Minute Man, with architect Henry Bacon designing the pink-marble pedestal shaped like a ship's prow. The 8.5-foot bronze angel holds a basin of water and wears a laurel wreath. It is French's only work in Iowa.
Created between 1916 and 1918, the memorial's originally golden bronze gradually oxidized to a dark patina, earning it the popular name Black Angel. The Ruth Anne Dodge Memorial was individually listed on the National Register of Historic Places on February 8, 1980 (reference number 80001457), and in 2007 it was incorporated as a contributing property within the Lincoln-Fairview Historic District.
Sources
Generations of Council Bluffs residents have attached folklore to the Black Angel. The most enduring claim, repeated in the original anonymous account that circulated through haunted-places indexes, is that the angel's downturned eyes seem to follow visitors no matter where they stand, and that anyone she 'blesses' becomes sickly afterward. Visitors also describe small lights drifting among the trees behind the older grave sites and the sensation of someone walking close behind them.
Local news coverage by 3 News Now records additional modern variants: that touching the statue may bring a curse, that the entrance stairs seem to change in number going up versus down, and that photographs or video taken at the monument are sometimes lost. Tom Emmett, director of the Historic General Dodge House, dismisses the supernatural readings and describes the statue instead as 'a symbol of hope, of life, and of our heritage.'
A secondary thread of the 'black angel' reputation stems not from the paranormal but from the tragic life of Audrey Munson, the artists' model widely identified with French's figure, who spent decades institutionalized — a real human sadness that folklore has folded into the statue's somber aura. No paranormal claim associated with the memorial has been verified.
Notable Entities
Visit the Black Angel, the 8.5-foot bronze Ruth Anne Dodge Memorial by sculptor Daniel Chester French at the edge of Fairview Cemetery, then walk the older 19th-century burial sections of the hillside cemetery.
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