This being summer, some of my colleagues are out of town. And that means it's time for pictures from trips. Long-time readers of the faculty lounge know that one of my interests is monuments -- though I'm usually interested in southern monuments to the Civil War. That's why my colleague Bill Turnier's pictures of two monuments in Camden, Maine, are particularly welcome. The first, at right, is the monument to the twenty-two young men from Camden who died in the Civil War.
Bill also sent along a picture of a granite boulder to one particularly obstinate Camden soldier who refused to take down the US flag during a surrender at Pensacola in April 1861.
Update as of June 18 -- I've added a close-up of the soldier monument, which shows what Bill's talking about in the comments -- the reference to the war as the "great rebellion."
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Posted by: loveclair | June 16, 2011 at 10:58 PM
Maine lost more soldiers in the Civil War than any other state. You could devise an entire tour of beautiful, tragic Civil War monuments the length and breadth of the state. Some of my favorites: Bar Harbor and Winthrop. Visit some of these moving sites yourself:
http://www.maine.gov/civilwar/monuments.html
Better still, attend church anywhere in Maine on the 4th of July and sing The Battle Hymn of the Republic as the recessional. Those Mainers have long memories.
Posted by: Ann Marie Marciarille | June 17, 2011 at 11:41 PM
Ann Marie, thanks for the link. Symptomatic of the feelings in Maine is the fact that the principal Camden monument refers to the war not as the Civil War( a term preferred in the South) but as The Great Rebellion. I especially loved the monument in Camden to the quartermaster who refused an order to lower the colors. I will see what I catch on the list you provided. I was in Castine last weekend and did not know they had a monument. Before law school I had a life as a history grad student in Pennsylvania (PSU) and my wife and I were amazed at how many Civil War (aka Great Rebellion) monuments we saw in small towns there.
Posted by: Bill Turnier | June 18, 2011 at 11:25 AM
Ann Marie--thanks for the link and for the information on Maine's losses. That's astonishing to me and something I'd like to look into more. I recall my grandmother (who was born at the end of the nineteenth century in Bangor) talking to me as I was a child about veterans she knew growing up -- but I had no idea that Maine bore such a disproportionate share of the losses.
For some reason the pictures on the maine.gov site aren't coming up for me; not sure if that's temporary or not.
Posted by: Alfred Brophy | June 18, 2011 at 02:16 PM