The Warrenton Warrior statue in the 1969 Warrenton High School yearbook.

WARRENTON — The Warrior has found a final resting place.

The steel statue melded from hundreds of little cut-out Warriors, created by students and placed at Warrenton High School in 1969, was installed Tuesday by a group of volunteers at the corner of Harbor Drive and Main Avenue.

“I was afraid this thing was going to disappear,” said Roger Searle, who as a student helped fabricate the statue.

Searle said he and other Warrenton alumni approached Don Patterson and Robert Fulton, who own the commercial complex on the street corner. Patterson, an Astoria High School graduate who has lived in Warrenton for nearly 30 years and won the city’s Richard Ford Award for citizen of the year in 2006, said there was a lot of support for placing the statue in a prominent location.

“It’s just nice to do something for the community,” he said. “Warriors have a lot of pride.”

A regular target of senior pranks, the statue has been dressed up and swiped throughout the years. Most recently, the Class of 2016 deposited the statue in front of Warrenton’s post office, a few hundred feet from the new location, before being taken back and put into storage by the school district.

The statue had recently become the most visual impact locally of a statewide ban on Native American mascots. Warrenton-Hammond Superintendent Mark Jeffery said the school board left it to him to dispose of the statue, as the district divested itself of most Native American imagery.

“I just couldn’t come up with a group to more respectfully deal with it,” Jeffery said of Searle’s group, adding it was fitting that someone who helped make the statue found a home for it.

Searle said his metal shop teacher in the late 1960s, Earnest Moon, had a bunch of scrap metal lying around and came up with the idea of cutting out small warriors and welding them into the statue.

“I’d say it took two school years to build,” Searle said, showing off a picture of he and Moon standing with a group of students around the statue as it was lowered onto a porch above the front entrance to the high school.

For its new spot, local contractor Flint Carlson excavated a hole and helped place the statue. Mark Baldwin built the concrete slab it is bolted into. Sherwin Williams donated a new coat of purple paint. Searle said the statue will be lit from underneath, with a plaque explaining its history.