Big Ike has greeted visitors to Denison and those just passing through the North Texas town near the Oklahoma border for the last 10 years. Actually, it is just the shiny bald head of the 34th president rendered in white concrete in a small park dedicated to area veterans overlooking the highway.
Dwight Eisenhower was the first Texas-born U.S. president, though he claimed Abilene, Kan., as his hometown. The Eisenhower family had returned to Kansas before Ike’s second birthday. The frame house where Ike was born in 1890 on the outskirts of downtown Denison is now a state historic site.
Before the former president and general made a name for himself, Denison was known as the northern half of Sherman-Denison, the place where Doc Holliday practiced dentistry, and the hometown of T.V. Munson, the man who saved the French wine industry.
Big Ike came to the city courtesy of artist David Adickes. Probably most famous for his 67-foot statue of Sam Houston on I-45 in Huntsville, Adickes did a set of 18- to 20-foot-tall presidential busts from George Washington to Barack Obama for a planned park in Pearland that was never completed.
Of the three sets made, one went to a Presidents Park in Lead, S.D., and another went to a park in Williamsburg, Va. Both tourist attractions failed, and some of the concrete heads can be seen at Adickes’ studio at 2401 Nance in Houston.
As a side note, Adickes’ hometown of Huntsville is planning a new home for the presidential heads on the north side of town.
Big Ike is accessible on the south side of Denison on the west side of US-75 at exit 67.
1,567th in a series. Follow “Day Trips & Beyond,” a travel blog, at austinchronicle.com/daily/travel.
This article appears in September 17 • 2021.
