"The
status of monuments on the cusp of the twenty-first century is
double-edged and fraught with an essential tension: outside of those
nations with totalitarian pasts, the public and governmental hunger for
traditional, self-aggrandizing monuments is matched only by the
contemporary artists’ skepticism of the monument"
James E. Young, “Memory/Monument,” 2010
 |
| Lord Botetourt |
Civic Markers
II: Monuments as Ordering Elements in the City
Political
leaders across the nation followed classical precedent in the
employment of rhetorical narratives, sponsoring civic art works to
expound on important civic concepts, most often associated with a former
military or political leader. Virginia, indeed, began a tradition of
public statuary with the marble figure of a much loved royal governor.
One of the earliest examples of public statuary in the colonies, the
statue of Lord Botetourt, was placed in the central arcade of the
Williamsburg Capitol in 1773.
At
first, Richmond, in its role as the new capitol of the commonwealth,
built its narrative around political and military figures who were not
necessarily local heroes. The state’s leaders memorialized the founding
fathers and the larger-than life role Virginians played in the founding
of the nation. In 1796, Houdon’s virtuoso life-size sculpture of George
Washington took a central place in the new Capitol, a position that was
equivalent to that previously occupied by Lord Botetourt’s statue in
Williamsburg. Both Botetourt and Washington were here treated as modern
citizens in modern dress, although Washington was accompanied by the
symbols of the Roman hero Cincinnatus, who, like Washington, turned from
war-craft to farming.
As
Charles Brownell and his student Ramin Saadat asked, why, at the Virginia Capitol, had Jefferson "devised a templelike exterior and a
templelike core surrounding a white marble statue in a fashion
suggesting divine honors?” The answer, they suggest, may lie in the
popular theory, known as Euhemerism, that saw the origin of ancient gods in mortal “leaders or benefactors” whose veneration had “naively evolved into worship.”
It
became necessary to call upon at least a modicum of myth in order to
craft an aestheticized history that met the new nation’s ideological
needs. . . . “American” versions of the methods by which Italy’s
Renaissance packed the past with rich meanings eventually found their
way into the national imagination, especially after the rising
commitment to manifest destiny began to overlay republican modesty with
grandiose images of heroic glory. But in the beginning the Capitol dealt
with America’s first president in its own way. By a reversal of the
euhemeristic tradition, as we will see in the making of the myth of
George Washington, the mortal man became a demigod.
George
Washington as America’s savior general and first president would endow
the nation’s capital with what Renaissance Italy named civile-
“the affective identification of the [citizen] with a particular,
geographically defined place,” as well as “a belief in the sacred nature
of institutions and leaders, an attitude that invests things and
persons political with a mystical aura, distinguishing them from mundane
structures and from ordinary mortals.”
Public
ceremonies required the right person to represent the nature of the
republican virtues Americans were making up as they went along. . . . In
both the Old World and the new, ceremonies of adventus sealed the
relation of leaders to the people (private individuals, the military,
the administrative staffs). They confirmed the needed sense of stability
and order, backed by a coherent bureaucratic system. Over time,
however, it became unnecessary to highlight the “action” by which a
leader “arrives.” He is “just there” through a process that has been
“completed and consummated.” . . . John Quincy Adams was deeply
depressed by the implications of the inability to reach a compromise
over the final resting place of the nation’s foremost symbol of unity.
In his diary of February 22, 1832, Adams wrote that the wish for the
capitol to be the site of Washington’s tomb had been “connected with an
imagination that this federal Union was to last for ages. I now
disbelieve its duration for twenty years, and doubt its continuance for
five. It is falling into the sear and yellow leaf” [Martha Banta, One True Theory and the Quest for an American Aesthetic (Yale U Press, 2007, 77ff].
The
indoor statue of Washington, “its form the result of a transatlantic
dialog between Houdon, Thomas Jefferson, then serving as minister
plenipotentiary to the court of Louis XVI, political figures in
Virginia, and Washington himself,” depicted him as a modern Cincinnatus,
the Roman general who voluntarily returned to farming after his success
at war. Maurie D. McInnis sees this as entirely appropriate republican
imagery for the post-revolutionary period. Changes in the nation’s
self-understanding gave impetus to an entirely different project for
memorializing Washington in the 1850s, one that “captures the changing
meaning of Washington and the Revolution for different generations of
Virginians. “By the middle of the nineteenth century, however,
Washington as Marcus Aurelius, the great military leader, seemed more
appropriate to Virginia’s leading men. . . . The second, by Crawford,
was a response to the first, commissioned by a later generation of
Virginians, who, in the 1850s, were attracted not to the symbols of
pastoral virtue, but instead to the military might of Washington, as
sectional tensions dictated a celebration of Washington’s military
prowess as a defender of Southern liberties [Maurie McInnis, “George
Washington, Cincinnatus or Marcus Aurelius?” from Peter S. Onuf and
Nicholas P. Cole eds, Thomas Jefferson, the Classical World, and Early America. University of Virginia P, 2011].
 |
| Thomas Crawford's equestrian Washington, 1858 |
Thus
the Richmond tradition of outdoor public military monuments began with
a sculptural composition to immortalizing in bronze and granite
Virginia’s role in the nation’s founding and Virginia’s most famous
citizen, George Washington. Maximilian Godefroy, who prepared landscape
plans for Capitol Square, had proposed a triumphal arch in front of the
capitol’s portico as well as a viewing platform/water tower to its west.
The General Assembly authorized a public subscription for a monument
and burial place on the Capitol Square for Washington in 1817. After
years of inaction, a committee of citizens proposed a competition for
the monument, which was held in 1849. The selected sculptor was Thomas
Crawford, an American working in Rome. The popular and successful
monument was not only a tribute to Washington as military and political
leader, but an elaborate allegory linking Virginia with the national
polity.
The monumental composition stands on a granite base appropriately shaped like a hexagonal star fortress. The design includes two
tiers of supporting sculptures around a massive bronze equestrian
figure of Washington, cast in Germany. The upper row of pedestals
support statues of six Virginia patriots- Thomas Jefferson, George
Mason, John Marshall, Andrew Lewis, Thomas Nelson, and Patrick Henry.
The lowest tier consisted of six allegorical female figures and trophies
representing revolutionary virtues (and places) allied with the six
patriots. Andrew Lewis is allied with “colonial times,” Patrick Henry
with revolution, George Mason with the Bill of Rights, Thomas Jefferson
with independence, Thomas Nelson with finance, and John Marshall with
justice. Crawford died having completed only the sculptures of
Washington, Jefferson, and Henry. His student, Randolph Rogers,
completed the remaining pedestal sculptures after the Civil War. The
monument strongly reinforces the urban order by serving as a objective
at the end of Grace Street at the entrance to Capitol Square. It stands
on axis with the Governor’s Mansion and in an effective non-axial
introductory relationship with the Capitol itself. The nearby Washington
Tavern was renamed the Monumental Tavern in its honor [Hopson Goddin,
Richmond Virginia 1861- 1865, Civil War Centennial Committee, 1961].
 |
| Henry Clay Statue under the octagonal canopy, 1860 |
The Washington monument did not stand alone in Capitol Square for long. It was followed
by the life-sized Henry Clay statue in 1860, located north of the
Capitol. Henry Clay, born in Hanover County, Virginia, was a renowned
statesman, orator, and long-serving speaker of the the U.S. House of
Representatives who had studied law in Richmond with George Wythe. Clay
was a hero to the Whig population of the city, who favored federalist
policies promoting economic, social, and moral modernization in
opposition to the populism of Andrew Jackson. The artist was the
Kentucky-born sculptor Joel T. Hart (1810-1875). The statue was
commissioned in 1845 by the Ladies Clay Association, in order to rescue
his cause “from the foulest slanders ever invented for party purposes”
during the presidential election of 1844 and to “teach our Sons to honor
[his] name- and imitate [his] noble deeds” [The Papers of Henry Clay, January 1, 1844-June 29,1852, 1991: U P of Kentucky:203].
It
took Hart until 1859 to arrange production of the marble sculpture in
Italy. The statue was placed under an octagonal, domed covering soon
after its dedication in 1860. The cast-iron canopy, supported on eight
Corinthian columns, was itself a major public amenity in Capitol Square
and emphasized the heroic status of Clay in the eyes of the city.
Unfortunately, the fifteen-year delay in the production of the monument
meant that its intended influence in favor or compromise and federalism
was of no use at the start of the Civil War. Unlike George Washington,
the significance of Henry Clay was largely forgotten by the early
twentieth century. The domed temple was demolished in the 1930s and the
statue placed inside the Capitol.
A life-sized statue of
Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson was placed nearby in 1875, beginning a
line of monuments that would be erected in the twentieth century along
the northern edge of the square. The bronze sculpture was made in 1875
by Irish sculptor John Henry Foley and was the gift of “English
gentlemen as a tribute of admiration.”
It
was a result of its former role of “national capitol” that Richmond
acquired an extensive and more urbane collection of public art
surpassing that of other state capitals of comparable size. The armature
of monuments extending from the old city into the projected suburbs to
the west was the serendipitous result, not of public planning, but of a
family who wished to extend the city through their property.
Monument Avenue
Richmond's
great urban processional route, Monument Avenue, represents the
transformation of loss and suffering into a symbolic reconstruction of
the partially burned city as a monument to its aspirations. As Lucien
Steil has said: "The city is indeed the highest form of commemoration, the highest expression of resilience, the most beautiful synthesis of human culture." Lucien Steil, "Reconstruction and Commemoration." American Arts Quarterly, 4:3 (Winter 2015).
Monument
Avenue was laid out in 1887, not only to serve as an appropriate
setting for the heroic statue of Robert E. Lee planned to stand at the
center of a great circle at its eastern end, but as a grand extension of
the city to the west.
As
was documented by Jay Killian Bowman Williams, Monument Avenue was
largely the creation of its property owners, beginning with the Allen
family, who owned the site of Lee Circle. The city and most of the
promoters of the statue wanted it to be placed in a familiar and
existing location such as Capitol Square, Libby Hill, or Monroe Park.
The Board of the Lee Memorial Association, having been convinced by,
among others, Augustus St. Gaudens, that an accomplished European
sculptor would produce the best work, hired Frenchman Jean Antoine
Mercier and mandated a calm, serene Lee who would project a sense of the
moral and aesthetic seriousness of the southern cause missing in the
booming New South city that doubled in size between 1860 and 1890 [Jay Killian Bowman Williams, Changed Views and Unforeseen Prosperity: Richmond of 1890 Gets a
Monument to Lee (Richmond: privately printed, 1969)].
Col.
Otway Allen promoted his vision for his tract of undeveloped land at
the western end of Franklin Street as the best place for the monument.
Franklin Street was the pre-eminent residential axis, extending from
Capitol Square’s Bell Tower to the city’s western limits. Allen insisted
that “no better situation (as far as a site for the Lee Monument) could
be obtained than at the head of Franklin Street. There is a prospect of
the street being opened, and a place similar to Monument Place in
Baltimore being laid out. Should this be done, where is a situation to
compare with it?”
 |
| A famous image
of the Lee Monument, with a crop of tobacco growing in front of it.
This has always looked to us like a a publicity stunt. |
Writers,
including Henry James, who have mocked the messy selection process and
the lonely situation of the Lee Monument in an undeveloped landscape,
have failed to grasp the developers’ foresight and the similarity of
this project other grand urban expansions. Early Monument Avenue
compares favorably with the dreary expanses of nineteenth-century
District of Columbia. In previous decades, Baltimore’s Washington
Monument (1815-1829) preceded development of its projected setting in
Mount Vernon Square by many years.
By
the late nineteenth century, Richmond’s civic leaders lacked the
political capacity to imagine or provide such a generously scaled
setting for the monument on their own. This kind of effort required an
unprecedented manipulation of the city’s grid, as ambitious, in its own
way, as the creation of the great boulevards that were driven through
the heart of Paris by Hausmann. Collison Pierpont Edwards Burgwyn, a
civil engineer, novelist, and playwright employed by the Allens, laid
out the 200-foot diameter Lee Circle and the two 140-foot wide
boulevards converging on it. Monument Avenue closely resembles Frederick
Law Olmstead’s contemporary project at Commonwealth Avenue in Boston.
In a similar way, Commonweath Avenue was laid out on private land as the
idea of developer and street railway operator, Henry M. Whitney.
 |
| Monument Avenue looking west from Stuart Circle |
Monument
Avenue gradually extended to the west and its intersections became the
settings for a sequence of public sculpture on a scale rarely achieved
in an American city. Monumentally scaled statues of Confederate figures,
some more effective than others, and none as fine as Lee’s, were
eventually placed at the center of every other intersection for more
than a mile.
Older
parts of the city had made no distinction among streets or sections by
building type or land use, and streets were able to incorporate changes
in form and use over time. This new boulevard was intended serve a
distinctly residential suburban sector and was not intended to be a
principal thoroughfare. Eventually, however, with the coming of the
automobile it became a convenient commuters’ route into the
city. Oddly, and due to its emphatically axial form, Monument Avenue
doesn’t accommodate public buildings quite as well as the older,
reticulated parts of the city. Except at Stuart Circle, where two
churches, a hospital, and an apartment building manage to enclose the
more intimate circle there, churches and the few other larger buildings
fail to fully engage with the street’s massive scale. One success in
this regard is the temple-form church at the south end of Allen Street,
which effectively terminates that street.
Other Post-Civil War Civic Markers
While
the Allens were developing Monument Avenue, another individual was
responsible for creatively managing urban-scale improvements across a
post-war city with little interest in spending money on public works.
Col. Wilfred Emory Cutshaw, a VMI-trained engineer, began a long career
as city engineer in 1873. According to Tyler Potterfield, Cutshaw, who
was responsible for the planning and supervision of municipal projects,
“fully recognized the importance of neighborhood squares, tirelessly
advocated for their improvement and oversaw a team of assistant city
engineers who proved to be talented landscape designers.” Preparation
for his position included travel to study up-to-date parks in the North
and in Europe in 1879.
 |
| Soldiers and Sailors Monument by William Ludwell Sheppard, 1894 |
Cutshaw
landscaped Monroe Park and the large “promontory parks” overlooking the
James. He also acquired the small triangular parks that enliven Park
Avenue in the Fan District and organized a sophisticated tree-planting
program that provided shade throughout the city’s streets and parks in
accord with the City Beautiful movement, an urban design branch of the
American Renaissance. His plan to create a dramatic monument to Robert
E. Lee on the top of Libby Hill Park was rejected, but in
its place he projected the Soldiers and Sailors Monument of 1894, which
took the form of a Roman monumental column, placed on a highly visible
axis carefully aligned with Main Street to the west [T. Tyler Potterfield, Nonesuch Place: A History of the Richmond Landscape (History Press, 2009)].
 |
A triumphal arch constructed as a temporary
entry gateway to the popular Street
Carnival held on Broad Street
in 1900. |
Arches
have long been a theme in monumental Richmond. Street-spanning arches
were proposed, but not built, for both George Washington and Jefferson
Davis. Their lack of success is particularly instructive in the inherent
contentiousness of myth- and monument-making in a democratic regime. A temporary triumphal arch "beautifully festooned with flowers and evergreens," was built over Main Street at 19th Street beside the Union Hotel for Lafayette's parade in 1824. Thirteen girls "stood upon the arch to represent the thirteen original states" [Dan Murphy's Reminiscences, Part II]. The success of temporary arches built over Broad Street in 1900 and 1901
for street carnivals that were designed to “boost” the city seems to
have prompted the United Daughters of the Confederacy to propose a
monumental arch in 1902 over Broad Street at the intersection of Twelfth
Street as a memorial to Jefferson Davis (the dramatic location where
Broad Street drops off into the Shockoe Valley attracted propsals for
structures at the urban scale over the years, starting with the Shockoe
Market and Latrobe’s unexecuted project for a new Episcopal church, both
proposed for the center of the street).
 |
"Triumphal" arch in stone proposed for Monroe Park soon after Jefferson Davis' death in 1889.
An arch was again suggested to span Broad Street in 1901 [City on the James, 1893]. |
The
grandious project broke down due to the sensible objections of Davis'
widow, who indicated that she was opposed the location and the form of
the proposed monument, not to mention its being harnessed to the
promotion of the city. She declared that "arches, as monuments, have
been built to perpetuate deeds of men and to express the idea of a
‘victory achieved.’ A triumphal arch to the memory of a man whose cause
failed. . . is surely an inappropriate way to express respect for his
memory, and certainly might excite ridicule in many quarters. Bound by a
thousand most tender ties and a warm sympathy to Richmond, yet even to
beautify the city I cannot approve the site at Broad and Twelfth
Streets. . . . [at] the intersection of two of the noisiest and busiest
streets, lined with shops and frequented by crowds of people of a
prosperous and growing city" [Richmond Dispatch 1 June 1902].
 |
| First Regiment of Virginia Monument at Park Stuart and Meadow streets by Ferruccio Legnaioli |
Additional Statues
A
tradition began of placing statues at key points around the city, begun
by Cutshaw, continued to punctuate the axes of transportation routes
and along paths in public parks. These include the statue of A.P. Hill
at Laburnum and Hermitage and the figure of Williams Carter Wickham
(1820 –1888), a lawyer,
judge, politician, and Confederate Cavalry commander, who image was
placed in
Monroe Park by his war-time comrades and employees at the Chesapeake and
Ohio Railway in 1891. It was sculpted by Richmond’s Edward V.
Valentine. The Richmond Howizers Monument (1892) and the Monument to the First Regiment of Virginia Infantry (1930) punctuate the irregular route of Park Avenue as it wends its way through the Fan District.
Columbus statue and fountain
As
the Fan District was extended to the
west, Boulevard was laid out in 1875 as a grand cross street to connect
Reservoir (Byrd) Park to Broad Street. The terminus at the foot of the
great reservoir was given an suitably architectural effect by the
placement of a small cascade fountain symbolizing the civic provision of
water fronted by a statue of Columbus. This was placed in front of the
fountain in 1925 by a group of citizens of Italian origin and sculpted
by immigrant sculptor Ferruccio Legnaioli.
The discourse on Richmond's Civic Markers will continue with Part III- Fountains.
For a discussion of contemporary monumental art, see Public Art and Community Memory: Richmond's Maggie Lena Walker.
