Thinking about St. Christopher's School a couple weeks back set me to thinking that I needed to put up a post on Richmond monuments.
I wrote some about the monuments around the Tennessee statehouse and had a series of posts on the monuments around the South Carolina statehouse, so I guess it's time to post a few pictures from the Virginia statehouse. Sometime in the past twenty years since I worked in Richmond, they've cut down the magnolia trees from in front of the Virginia capitol building, so you can now get a really nice view of it (see upper left).
I took these on a trip home from Philadelphia last summer, just after Eric Muller's post on the White House of the Confederacy. I stopped by to see the White House — I toured it years ago, back before I was all that much interested in (or knew anything about) issues of memory and race. So I wanted to see it again and then as long as I was in the area, I thought I'd stop by and see the latest on the capitol grounds.
The image in the upper right is of the Washington Monument — Washington's on the horse; John Marshall is there, too. Jefferson, too, I think — not sure about the others. This is, as I recall, an antebellum monument – – as in, it was put up before the Civil War. It's used as an emblem on some Confederate currency, I think — or on the seal of the Confederacy or some such. At some point I need to think some more and do some reading on antebellum monuments (like the Bunker Hill monument and the Washington monument — started before the war and completed after it; the Paoli massacre monument near my hometown was put up shortly after the turn of the nineteenth century, as I recall. So was the South Carolina monument to the Mexican-American war.)
And to the left is a picture of the church where Robert E. Lee worshiped when he was in Richmond. It's across the street from the capitol grounds.
The trip back to Richmond was really a lot of fun; it's a place I have very, very memories for — and wow has it changed in the twenty years since I lived there. Lots of new sky scrapers and buildings where there used to be parking lots, as well as parking lots where there used to be buildings. One of these days I'd love to spend a few weeks there doing some research at the state archives.