Several decades ago, students attacked the “iron horse.” Now it’s rolling again.

The most famous beastly sculpture in the college town of Athens, Georgia, is—probably—not a bulldog. It is an 11-foot-tall welded steel horse, an abstract maze of ripples and crescents, created at the University of Georgia by a visiting Chicago sculptor, Abbott Pattison, in 1954.

When a crane first lifted Pattison’s gigantic steed from the basement of the university’s Fine Arts building that spring, it was unlike anything the campus had seen before, with a cage-like midsection of sharp ribs, cubist flat planes, and a wavy, square body. -excluding mane and tail. It was obviously a horse, but it was not a classic equestrian sculpture. And the artwork got many on campus buzzing.

Last spring, when the sculpture – briefly titled “Steel Horse” and then “Pegasus” by the artist, but better known as the Iron Horse – was removed from a concrete slab in a field of corn outside Athens for conservation purposes, it was missing 32 pieces and bore decades-deep scars from carvings and graffiti, and a gunshot wound to the neck. His hooves were rusty, the color of Georgia clay.

Statues on college campuses have long been lightning rods for issues and debates coursing through society. But exactly why the Iron Horse was attacked by students may still remain a mystery.

“There’s all this mystery and misinformation around it,” said Donald Cope, a designer and metal fabricator who spent six months restoring the sculpture to its original state with a conservator, Amy Jones Abbe, both based in Athens. “He has this tradition, he has an aura.”