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Confederate Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument tagged overnight

TOP via Philip O’Connor / BELOW via Mark Kronenthal

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Screen Shot 2015-07-03 at 9.40.08 AM

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Overlooked RVA has a great history of the monument:

One such veteran was Wilfred Cutshaw, a former colonel who’d lost a leg in an 1865 skirmish but by 1894 had become Richmond’s principal city planner, already responsible for a comprehensive redesign of the city’s layout during the Reconstruction. As an impressionable engineering student at VMI in the 1850s, he’d learned about Pompey’s Pillar in Alexandria, Egypt, and its grandeur – utterly imagined, of course – would retain a curious stranglehold on his vision for Richmond more than 30 years later.

Evidently prominent in that vision was a monument honoring veterans conspicuously like himself. The Monument to Confederate War Dead had already been built in Hollywood Cemetery, and a statue honoring Robert E. Lee was soon to be unveiled on what would become Monument Avenue, but in 1889 he put forth plans before a handpicked committee to add yet another local tribute to the Confederate cause.

Want to go back in time? Get a heavy dose of historical context from this souvenir pamphlet from the unveiling of the monument in 1894 (PDF).

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Unveiling of the monument (1894)
Unveiling of the monument (1894)(via Overlooked RVA)

21 comments

John M 07/03/2015 at 8:53 AM

Richmond monument dedicated to Confederate soldiers and sailors vandalized
http://wric.com/2015/07/03/richmond-monument-dedicated-to-confederate-soldiers-and-sailors-vandalized/

Reply
JessOfRVA 07/03/2015 at 8:53 AM

*slow clap* Thank you RGB for being rude.

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GraceStreetResident 07/03/2015 at 11:26 AM

Thank you so much for linking that pamphlet. Fascinating stuff. Hope the monument gets cleaned up soon.

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crd 07/03/2015 at 12:57 PM

Apparently the city has someone at the monument cleaning it.

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bill 07/03/2015 at 3:40 PM

when the monument is gone all of life’s problems will be solved

Reply

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