Robert Emmet, namesake of Emmetsburg, Iowa, was an Irish patriot born in 1778 and killed in 1803, regarded by many as the most romantic patriot in Irish history and loved as "The Darlin' Of Erin" for opposing British rule in a campaign for freedom. Before his execution, he wrote from Killmainham jail in Dublin to his brother Thomas, "I am just going to do my last duty to my country. It can be done as well on the scaffold as on the field." In his famous speech at the dock before the hanging, he declared in part, "Let no man write my epitaph until all Ireland is free." A statue of Emmet was commissioned in 1918 by the Emmetsburg Ancient Order Of Hibernians Chapter No. 1 and sculpted by Jerome Connor. After arriving in Emmetsburg, a donny brook prevented the statue from gaining a resting place, and it spent most of the 1920s in a local basement and the 1930s, 1940s, and most of the 1950s with a family in Minnesota before being returned in 1958 for the town's centennial. Connor made four of these likenesses, with the others in St. Stephens Green in Dublin, nearby the Emmet home, Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, and the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C.