What) Over a century ago, Cedar City was a Plain Jane rural community of about 1,500. No one gave it much chance of being chosen as the campus for Southern Utah State College (SUSC), particularly with glamorous local burgs like Beaver and Dixie in the running. But Cedar City was selected most likely because it was the only town on the list without a pool hall or a saloon. Classes began in the fall of 1897 in Cedar City's new social hall.
Then, crisis. As winter set in, Utah's Attorney General ruled that Cedar City didn't deserve a college because it didn't have any real college buildings. Cedar City would lose SUSC if it didn't build proper facilities by the beginning of the next school year. The town was in a fix. Cedar City had no money and no wood (all the logs had gone into building the social hall). So an expedition of men was sent into the mountains to bring back wood.
The snow was shoulder deep and the trail was obliterated. The temperatures plummeted to 40 below. It seemed as if all would be lost. Then the men put a horse named Old Sorrel in the vanguard. Sorrel pushed and strained against the snow, throwing himself into the drifts again and again until they gave way. He would pause, heave a big sigh, then start all over again. The men made it back to Cedar City alive, the college got built, and Old Sorrel was hailed as the savior of the expedition.
SUSC is
still in business. But for all his posthumous praise, no one
today seems to know when Old Sorrel died or where he is
buried. Still, the college canonized the horse with a dramatic
bronze sculpture that's visible from the football field. It's
the only hero horse statue in America that we know of. (1)
Where) On the east side of South 800 West between West Center Street and West 200 South.
Why) You
don't have to have read many Buckys entries to figure out the
answer to that question. 
The twelve men and women (Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, William Shakespeare, Leonardo da Vinci, Marie Curie, Thomas Jefferson, Germaine de Staël, John Stuart Mill, Galileo Galilei, Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton) whose statues stand in The Centurium have, through their devotion to the life of the mind, forged new and better paths for the generations of the future. Admired and esteemed for their intellectual contributions, they continue to foster the development of learning, many hundreds of years beyond their own lives and times. The contributions made by these intellectual giants reflect the motto of this University: "Learning Lives Forever." (2)
... the name Germaine de Staël. Hers was the only name that I had never heard of and the plaque on site wasn't much help either. (3) (4)
