LEWISTON — Back in 1965, workers were busy inside City Hall fixing things in the building’s vast interior when Mayor Robert Couturier called their attention to four weird dragon-like sculptures hanging above archways on the first and second floors.

The mayor ordered the removal of the plaster figures, painted the same cream color as the surrounding walls. They didn’t look like much.

Fortunately, an amateur artist and full-time house painter, Emile Bolduc, happened to overhear the order.

“You can’t do that,” he told Couturier. “Those statues are mythology. They’re beautiful. They should be preserved.”

The mayor asked Bolduc if he was willing to do the work necessary to preserve them. When the painter said yes, the mayor agreed to let him.

“I guess you could say he saved them,” Couturier told the Portland Sunday Telegram.

Bolduc, who spent four years carefully painting the figures in bright colors, decided they looked like the Greek mythological figures Echidna and Typhon, along with their offspring Chimera.

But he probably didn’t get that right.

The Lewiston Evening Journal wrote in 1892, when the building opened, that a Boston sculptor named Richard E. Brooks had created the “high-class” ornamental work.

“The first thing he did while in Lewiston was the making of a design of two large dragons whose bodies are interwoven and who seem to be quarreling over something,” the paper said.

“The design is from the artist’s mind,” it said. “He has no model to work from.”

The paper said Brooks made a clay model and cast the four dragons for City Hall. It’s not clear how they were painted initially.

He collected $400 for his work – the equivalent of $3,400 in today’s currency – and got his travel and room at the DeWitt Hotel covered.

The dragons he installed don’t look much like the fire-breathing monsters of Greek myths that are made up of a strange mix of creatures: a lion, a goat and a dragon.

They look like dragons.

Robert Parent, president of the Maine Franco-American Genealogical Society, speculated in a 2023 email to City Clerk Kathy Montejo that perhaps the monsters were installed because of the fate of previous city halls, which both burned down.

Maybe, he said, “the monsters were put there to ward off fire. Sort of like the gargoyles on cathedrals.”

If so, perhaps they’ve helped the city building avoid the fate of two of its predecessors and account for its 132 years of history.

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