All summer, the pedestal in front of Old City Hall stood empty, its 8½-foot, one-ton occupant nowhere to be found.

On Wednesday morning, however, following a three-month absence for repairs, the Benjamin Franklin statue made its triumphant return to the Freedom Trail.

“He’s all set,’’ said Josh Craine, the owner of Daedalus Inc., the local monument, sculpture, and fine arts conservation firm charged with nursing the statue back to health. “He’s sitting out there, looking good.’’

It had been an eventful past few months for one of the city’s more noteworthy statues, which has stood in the same location since 1856.

In May, the Richard Saltonstall Greenough-designed piece unexpectedly fell from its perch, the result of a freak accident in which a gust of wind blew a nearby event tent into the statue.

Shortly after, it was transported to Daedalus’s Watertown workshop, where the severity of the damage could be determined and the piece could undergo needed repairs.

But despite initial concerns about the damage — concerns exacerbated by photos depicting the statue’s head cracking the sidewalk below — the statue had suffered relatively minor damage: some small scratches, a chip at the statue’s base.

Over the course of the next three months, Craine went about fixing them, as well as applying coating and protective wax in preparation for the reinstallation.

By 6 a.m. Wednesday, workers had gathered in front of the Old City Hall building, the statue strapped to a truck. By 9 a.m., they’d used a crane to place it back atop its pedestal — along with a new fastening device designed to prevent another tumble.

As of Wednesday afternoon, there was some work left to do; Craine was still touching up some of the surrounding plaques, for instance.

But Franklin had returned to the only home he’d known for the past 160 years, and a ceremony in his honor was scheduled for noon on Sept. 8.

Said Sean McDonnell, president of the Architectural Heritage Foundation, “He looks better than new.’’

Dugan Arnett can be reached at dugan.arnett@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @duganarnett.