All The Presidents' Heads

From our 19th century historian, Eudora Dickinson:

Just off a dusty private drive in bucolic Croaker, Virginia, looms the deteriorating remains of a once grand and glorious Presidential Park.  The park closed around 2010, and there are 43 once-magnificent statues of all of the US presidents through Bush 43.  A small prototype for Obama was created, but no sculptor ever finished that figure in a similar final form.  No plans are in the works for any likeness of Trump.
 
The head of Abraham Lincoln was placed in the park in 1869, and at its dedication, poet Emmett Lee Dickinson (Emily Dickinson’s third cousin, twice removed – at her request) was the keynote speaker.  Lincoln had been one of Dickinson’s best friends (information HERE), and at the dedication, Dickinson read a brief but poignant poem about the heads:

Statues of decaying faces
From the distant Past
Are a fine pedantic warning –
Nothing new will Last!

Dickinson’s poem inspired his third cousin Emily to pen her poem, “Portraits are to daily faces”:
 
Portraits are to daily faces
As an Evening West,
To a fine, pedantic sunshine –
In a satin Vest!

Emmett Lee Dickinson based his 1869 poem on an earlier version of the poem he had written in 1853, when he attended the unveiling of the bust of Millard Fillmore:
 
Statues of decaying faces
Looking toward the Past
In profound, pedantic mourning –
Nothing now will Last!