In Fort Thomas where North Fort Thomas Avenue, Waterworks Road and Burnet Ridge come together, you may notice a bronze statue of a little girl reading a book. While it’s a pretty addition to a small garden created on the median by the Fort Thomas Garden Club, there is more to the story.
The bronze statue honors Amy Head Fennell, a longtime Fort Thomas resident and past president of the garden club who passed away in 2021. Fennell grew up in the city and raised her family there. She attended Fort Thomas schools and graduated from Highlands High before earning a degree from the University of Kentucky College of Design. After establishing a career at design agencies in the region, she opened her own business, Ahead Design, in the city.
A hometown romance
Fennell’s husband, Bill “Frell” Fennell, said he and Amy grew up very near each other in Fort Thomas. Their parents were friends and had a tight and active social circle. The children grew up playing together and spending summers together, including trips to Florida for spring break.
The families spent those summers in what Fennell calls “old Florida” before the building boom of condos and businesses in the 1980s and ‘90s.
“We had a really cool place. It was 1,500 feet of beach. It was kind of like the old Dirty Dancing type of resort. It was one large cabin and four or five small cabins. They chopped it all up between parents and kids. It was under the Florida pines, so you could get out of the sun. You could have a fire on the beach every night…We just had the time of our lives.” said Fennell.
Fennell said he went to college at UK as well, and love blossomed between the two longtime friends. The pair married and established their own home in Fort Thomas and raised their sons there.
Although she stayed in her hometown, Frell Fennell said his wife had a creative mindset and talent that sometimes took her far from home. She worked on projects throughout the Cincinnati-Northern Kentucky region, but her work also took her to Tennessee, Florida, New York and North Carolina. She designed homes, condos, restaurants and boutique hotels.
She was always up for a challenge, he said.
“She always did things that everybody said, ‘You can’t do that.’ She once accessorized an entire condominium in Ashville in one day including driving down and back. It was an empty industrial building with exposed brick and drywall…She installed all the furniture, window treatments, pictures on the wall, made the beds with sheets, lamps, books, everything, so it was ready to live in. It was just crazy,” said Fennell.
Community connections
Amy Fennell was an active community volunteer throughout her life, often drawing on her design and business skills in support of area schools and other projects in the city, said her husband.
“She was always giving back, doing something for someone else,” he said.
When their sons were in school, she volunteered to chair fundraising events. At Johnson, she volunteered for the school’s annual Hullabaloo fundraiser and later served as chair. While the record for earnings for the event had been around $25,000, as chair Fennell more than doubled the proceeds.
“She was very talented and creative…and she always accepted a challenge by going the extra mile,” Fennell said.
When their sons reached high school, Amy Fennell turned her attention to supporting her alma mater, where she served on and chaired committees to raise funds for sports teams and other school needs.
It was this spirit of giving back, especially to the area schools, that the garden club wanted to celebrate with the little statue, said current club president Lori Wendling, a close friend of Fennell.
“Amy was a lifelong member and a generational member of the garden club of Fort Thomas. After she passed, many friends donated to the garden club in her honor. It was decided that a permanent statue of the young girl reading a book would be the perfect memorial,” Wendling said.
She said the location, near Johnson School, seemed fitting since Fennell supported the school in many ways for many years.
“We chose that because Amy had a very strong connection to Johnson. She went there as a child. She’s always lived right in that community area. It was her home school. It was the elementary school for her kids. And she volunteered there a ton. And we thought, you know, that’d be a good memory,” said Wendling.
Wendling and another club member Alison Murphy, owner of Branch Out Design, worked on the project and oversaw the purchase and installation of the statue. They planted rose bushes and a variety of pink flowers around it. Fennell’s friends and family wanted something permanent and something that would reflect her lifelong connection to the community.