How was the Statue of Liberty shipped to America?

The Isère sailed from Rouen, in northern France, on 21 May 1885 and reached New York Harbor on 17 June. Her cargo had nowhere to go. The Americans had run out of money for the pedestal, so the crates waited on Bedloe's Island, now Liberty Island, for almost a year.

A statue that stood in Paris first

The sculptor, Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, had her made in a Paris workshop. Workers hammered thin copper sheets by hand over wooden moulds. The sheets hung on an iron frame designed by Gustave Eiffel, a few years before he built his tower.

By 1884 she was finished, standing over the rooftops of Paris: 46 metres, about 151 feet, from her base to the tip of the torch. On 4 July 1884 she was formally handed over to the American minister in Paris, Levi Morton.

Then she came down again. Every piece was marked so it could go back in the right place, like a giant jigsaw. The 350 pieces went into 214 specially built wooden crates. Some weighed a few hundred pounds. The heaviest weighed several tons.

The pedestal nobody had paid for

The deal was that France paid for the statue and Americans paid for the pedestal. By early 1885 the American committee had almost no money left, and work on the base had stopped. Boston and Philadelphia offered to take the statue instead.

On 16 March 1885, Joseph Pulitzer, the Hungarian-born owner of the New York World, launched an appeal in his paper. He promised to print the name of every donor, however small the gift. When the Isère set sail two months later, the money still wasn't there.

By 11 August the World had raised $102,000 from more than 120,000 people. Most gave less than a dollar.

Putting her back together

The pedestal was finished in April 1886. The crates were opened, and workers raised Eiffel's iron frame on top of it, then fixed the copper skin back on, piece by piece. It took them about four months. The statue was unveiled on 28 October 1886, sixteen months after the ship came in.

Where to stand

Get off the ferry at Liberty Island and stop by the dock, with the statue across the lawns. This is the island where the crates waited. Later, at the front of the pedestal, find the pointed stone walls around its foot, shaped like a star. They belong to Fort Wood, the army fort the pedestal was built inside.

Hear it where it happened

The Trevlo tour of the Statue of Liberty starts in Battery Park, by Castle Clinton, and tells the story of the crates at its second stop, by the ferry dock. It goes on to Eiffel's hidden frame, the pedestal Pulitzer's readers paid for, the unveiling that went off mid-speech and the original torch in the museum. Six stops, about twelve minutes of listening, at your own pace.

The first stop is free to play on this page, and your first tour in the app is free.