One of Texas’ more quirky landmarks has headed to a new home and is resting its chin somewhere along the same highway where Pilgrim’s Pride co-founder Lonnie “Bo” Pilgrim planted the 37-foot-tall likeness of himself in 2001.
And the bronze statue of Pilgrim, seated on a bench below the iconic hatted head and reading the Bible to a bronze Henrietta the Chicken, also is destined for new surroundings.
“There’s been a lot of talk about it,” Mount Pleasant Chamber of Commerce employee Elizabeth Hansen said Wednesday, one week after Pilgrim’s dismantled the structure and handed off the head to Pilgrim’s son, Ken.
“People are kind of attached to it,” Hansen said. “They see it as a landmark they can point out and take a little joy in.”
The “Bo head,” as locals call it, is in storage behind a shop the son owns on U.S. 271. It’s probably not far from the Walker Creek Pilgrim’s Pride complex Pilgrim opened at the turn of the century.
And the statue and Henrietta?
“I don’t know all the details,” Brett Price, director of marketing and brand development for Pilgrim’s Bank in Mount Pleasant, said of plans under discussion at the bank’s South Branch where the statues await their fate. “It’s really fresh and new and, at this point, it’s still under discussion.”
Pilgrim died in July 2017 at age 89. He sold the international poultry operation to Brazilian beef company JBS in 2009, and its headquarters were moved to Greely, Colorado.
Ken Pilgrim said Wednesday he had asked JBS for the bronze statues of his father and Henrietta, intending to place them in the Pilgrim’s Bank in Mount Pleasant.
The head was a bonus.
“The head was really due for some repairs — both the hat and the face and everything,” he said. “They offered it, and I took it.”
Pilgrim said his father’s head is stored disassembled behind a salvage shop he owns on U.S. 271. He said he doesn’t know yet what he’s going to do with it.
“I’ve got it in the back of my place, and I’m going to let it sit there until I figure out what to do with it,” he said.
It was a no-brainer to save the head, he said, because it meant something to his late father.
“Yeah, and it does (mean something),” he said.
The son declined to let a photographer shoot what probably looks a little like an East Texas Picasso.
“The face and the head and a side of the hat are all in pieces,” he said. “And I’ve just got it laying there. And until I figure out what I’m going to do with it, it’s going to sit there.”
Price, at the bank, said the statues’ eventual home could be a public setting of some sort.
“Yes, I believe so,” he said, without elaborating.
Statue Bo is reading to statue Henrietta from a bronze Bible, evidently a faithful reproduction of his own Holy Book. Its pages are turned to Matthew 26, where many passages are underlined including the one asking what it profits a man to gain the world but lose his soul.
The “Bo head” recently was celebrated in a November 2017 Texas Monthly article by former News-Journal staff writer Wes Ferguson.
The story begins inside Herschel’s Restaurant in Pittsburg, atop which Bo’s giant, buckled pilgrim hat sat for about three decades starting back when Pilgrim ran a fried chicken eatery there.
“He built the head to fit the hat,” Herschel’s customer Jim Seale told Ferguson over morning coffee with local wags.
