Andrzej Dajnowski, director of Conservation of Sculpture and Objects Studio in Forest Park, worked to create a rubber mold of a plaque on the Haymarket Martyrs monument in Forest Home Cemetery Oct. 22.
The Illinois Labor History Society raised more than $5,400 in an Indiegogo campaign to make a cast of the bronze plaque. The society was reacting to cemetery thefts of bronze plaques.
In the 1980s, laurel wreaths were stolen from the front of the monument. The Illinois Labor History Society paid Dajnowski, $55,000 to recreate the wreaths. Had a mold of the wreaths to have existed prior to the theft, the replacement cost would have been $6,000, said local Labor Historian Mark Rogovin.
The plaque commemorates the 1893 pardon by Gov. John Altgeld of men arrested and convicted in the Haymarket incident, 1886.
