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When Sea Pines founder Charles Fraser walked up beside an alligator for a photograph in the Saturday Evening Post in 1962, he probably didn't imagine that one day the image would be memorialized in a larger-than-life bronze statue.

That day is coming April 17.

The Public Art Fund of the Community Foundation of the Lowcountry will unveil the statue for Hilton Head Island's Compass Rose Park at 10 a.m. that Saturday. It is an "amazingly accurate" likeness of the photograph, according to Carolyn Torgersen, the foundation's vice president for marketing and communications. The statue has been planned since Fraser's death in 2002.

Savannah artist Susie Chisholm is sculpting Fraser, and Arlington, Texas, artist Darrell Davis is fashioning the gator. The piece, which costs $126,600, is the first work of art commissioned by the Public Art Fund for the town.