Over the long holiday weekend, many small parades and ceremonies throughout the state began or ended under the watchful gaze of uniformed Civil War Soldiers standing atop nearby monuments. And in researching a book I co-authored about war memorials, I learned some interesting facts about these so-called 'standing sentinels.'They were put up in the civic-minded, post-war glory of Union victory. On many, the names of the local dead are inscribed. And they were modeled on a 250 ton granite 'American Volunteer' statue known as Old Simon, which still stands on the Antietam Battlefield.
After the war, several northern manufacturing companies had recognized an unprecedented marketing opportunity and sent traveling salesmen into the towns and villages of both North and South.
About 2,500 of these statues were erected in the North and roughly 500 in the South in celebration of ordinary soldiers, the 'grunts' of later war parlance. It was a revolutionary break from the classic commemoration of great men on horses.
Vermont had a few other non-military Civil War monuments, such as 'America' by Larkin Mead in St. Johnsbury, and 'Goddess of Liberty,' by Daniel Perry in Swanton 鈥� in which the sacrifice of local citizens was commemorated by allegorical representations in feminine form.
Ironically, the first wave of Southern monuments looked a lot like Yankees because they were all from the same design. Only the belt buckles were different, with the initials 'C.S.' instead of 'U.S.'
The First World War produced its signature 'Dough Boy' statue, but only a few Vermont communities bought them, like St. Albans and Swanton. Otherwise, the public turned toward alternatives like the Memorial Auditoriums in Burlington and Barre.
The statue along the Potomac of the marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima is arguably the most iconic physical memorial commemorating World War Two. And Barre sculptor Frank Gaylord's Korean War soldiers stand in the nation鈥檚 capital not far from the Vietnam Memorial, which is made of Bangalore marble polished and engraved in Barre.
The most recent addition to my list stands in Randolph's Veterans Cemetery - a privately-funded 'Fallen Heroes Global War on Terror' monument to the forty plus Vermonters killed in Afghanistan and Iraq.
