The bronze statue of Amelia Earhart that stood for nearly two decades in the Spirit of Harbour Grace Park in Harbour Grace, Newfoundland, vanished one night in April 2025. Police investigated. The town waited. Then, for months, nothing.

On 20 May — on the 94th anniversary of Earhart’s solo transatlantic flight — the statue came home. Repaired, repainted, reinstalled. A small, quiet event in a town of fewer than 3,000 people, and one of the more emotionally satisfying stories aviation has produced this year.

Why Harbour Grace

Harbour Grace, on Newfoundland’s east coast, was a long-vanished name in commercial aviation by the time Earhart picked it. In the 1920s and 1930s, before paved transatlantic routes existed and before any aircraft could safely make the crossing without one fuel stop, Harbour Grace was the launching point. Most of the early transatlantic attempts — Lindbergh-era pilots, Italian air-racers, Australian aviators — staged from its tiny grass strip.

On 20 May 1932, Earhart took off from Harbour Grace in her bright-red Lockheed Vega 5B, intending to fly solo to Paris. She instead landed 14 hours 56 minutes later in a cow pasture near Culmore, Northern Ireland — the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic. The Vega 5B survives. It hangs today in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC.

The town of Harbour Grace never quite let go of that morning. The local Conception Bay Museum keeps the story of that morning alive. In 2007, on the 75th anniversary of the flight, a bronze statue by Newfoundland sculptor Luben Boykov was unveiled in the Spirit of Harbour Grace Park. It became a fixture of the town and of every transatlantic-aviation tour guidebook printed since.

The theft and the long wait

On the morning of 24 April 2025, residents discovered the empty base in the Spirit of Harbour Grace Park. The life-size bronze, bolted to its mount, had been cut free and carried off during the night, along with neighbouring plaques. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police took the case. Nothing surfaced for more than three months.

On 8 August 2025, the RCMP responded to a public tip that the statue was lying in a wooded area near Heart’s Content, a short drive from Harbour Grace. Officers found it cut into five pieces — apparently destined for the scrap-metal trade — but every piece was accounted for. The statue had survived. It was badly damaged, but it was recoverable.

A small town, a big flight, a bronze that came home

The re-installation ceremony on 20 May 2026 drew a cheering crowd to the park, with a parallel celebration in the local school gym where the unveiling was streamed live. There were songs, speeches and even an Amelia Earhart impersonator. A five-plane flyover, organized through a local chapter of the Canadian Owners and Pilots Association, marked the moment the cover was pulled.

The restored statue is built around a new stainless-steel internal skeleton, and the town has added enhanced lighting and security cameras. Harbour Grace is taking no chances.

Amelia Earhart vanished in 1937 somewhere over the central Pacific, five years after her transatlantic flight from this small town. Her aircraft was never found. Her body was never recovered. The mystery of her disappearance has occupied aviation historians for nearly a century. The bronze that stood at Harbour Grace from 2007 was, in a real sense, the place she had last clearly existed in — the launching point, the runway, the moment before the flight. To lose it and get it back was, for the people of Harbour Grace, the closest aviation history can offer to a happy ending.

Sources: Flying Magazine, CBC News, Newfoundland Bronze Foundry, Newfoundland and Aviation History.