Ad Astra Art Foundry workers, from left, Terry Baldwin and Alan Austin work on a sculpture that depicts Pascal Fish and his daughter, Eudora Fish. The town of Eudora is named after Fish's daughter. The sculpture, designed by Lawrence artist Jim Brothers, is in honor of the town's 150th anniversary. It will stand in CPA Park in Eudora.

For a small town, Eudora knows how to throw a big party.

Eudora’s Sesquicentennial Celebration is next weekend.

“We have two days of events to celebrate Eudora’s past, present and future,” said LaDonna Russell, sesquicentennial committee co-chairwoman. “Eudora is a great town, a great community to live in, to raise your kids in. We have always been a close-knit community.”

Russell said the committee came up with new festivities that the town of about 6,300 hasn’t had before, such as street dances, a variety of bands and two monuments that will endure when the party’s over.

A time capsule, containing representations of the city as it is today, will be buried. Tom Tucker, chairman of the time capsule committee, said he’s asked people to contribute anything from restaurant menus to heirloom jewelry.

The other monument, a bronze statue, will stand 7.5 feet tall and will rest on a 3.5-foot base in the northeast corner of CPA Park in downtown Eudora. It will be placed in the center of an octagonal area and surrounded by both engraved memorial bricks and a different series of bricks. It will be unveiled at a ceremony at noon Sunday.

Commemorative bricks have been placed at the base of the statue.

Jim Brothers, a world-renowned sculptor from Lawrence, designed the statue based on a story he said he fell in love with.

That story is the history of a father and his daughter, Eudora Fish, for whom the city is named. The father, Pascal Fish, was a Shawnee tribal leader in the 19th century. In 1857, he sold 774 acres of land to the German Settlement Society from Chicago. He asked that the city be named after his daughter, and the society honored his request. At the time, Pascal Fish was 52 years old and Eudora was 9.

In Brothers’ statue, Eudora is in her bare feet and a simple dress, her arms around her father’s waist as she looks into the distance. Her ponytail and the sash around her waist are blowing in the Kansas wind.

Pascal Fish stands with one arm around his daughter and one hand holding an oar, to represent his work as operator of a ferry that went across the Kansas River.

Brothers tried to capture the story of the time with other details, such as a work knife and pistol on Fish’s waist. He said the sashes represent the Shawnee heritage.

Brothers also is the sculptor of several monumental bronzes for the National D-Day Memorial in Virginia and the National Veterans of Foreign Wars memorial in Washington, D.C.

He used a family friend, Hannah Garcia-Copp, as a model for Eudora Fish. Tucker presented Brothers with history and a photo of Fish when she was about 19. Brothers said the similarities between Eudora and Hannah were “so spot on it just blew me away.”

“I feel very honored,” said Hannah, an 11-year-old Woodlawn School sixth-grader.

Her father, Tim Copp, said, “The neatest thing is to see your daughter encapsulated in time like that. It’s pretty cool.”