Quasqueton’s Civil War monument will be 100 years old on Memorial Day

QUASQUETON - The Civil War Soldiers Monument at the cemetery here - one of about 80 such statues in Iowa - will be 100 years old on Memorial Day.

It was unveiled amid much fanfare on Memorial Day, May 30, 1916, 51 years after the conclusion of the bloodiest war in the nation's history, in an era when the last veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic were going to their graves.

The statue's 100th anniversary will be marked Monday in a ceremony starting at 11 a.m. at the cemetery. As in most of those intervening years, the town's children will come forth to lay flowers at its base in memory of the veterans - now more than 200 - whose remains repose in the cemetery beneath the unseeing eyes of the stone sentinel.

A century ago, Buchanan County newspapers reported that hundreds of finely attired men, women and children attended the daylong ceremonies at what was then called Greenwood Cemetery and at the local school and churches.

They came to see the statue of a Union soldier standing at parade rest, overlooking the graves of Civil War veterans, whose numbers eventually climbed to 66, the second-largest cohort of veterans buried in the cemetery, only recently overtaken by the 70 World War II veterans.

The inscription beneath crossed rifles on the statue's front reads: 'Erected to the memory of the veterans of the Civil War buried in Greenwood Cemetery who fought for the union.”

The monument, erected by J.J. Lundy of Independence, cost $1,600. The Buchanan County supervisors appropriated $1,300, with the balance donated by Quasqueton residents.

The cap of the soldier atop the monument is 21 feet above the ground. The statue, of granite quarried in Vermont, weighs 30 tons.

Because the Chicago Anamosa and Northern Railroad, which reached Quasqueton in 1912, recently had ceased operations, the monument's several pieces had to be hauled in horse-drawn wagons from the nearest rail head in Winthrop.

It is one of 423 Civil War monuments in Iowa identified by the Department of Iowa Sons of Union Civil War Veterans, which maintains a website that includes photographs and information about each one.

They include plaques, brick walls, obelisks, cannons, stained-glass windows, sculptures, engraved boulders, flagpoles and, by far the most popular, statues of union soldiers.

'By my count, there are 82 Union soldier statues in Iowa,” said Tom Gaard, who maintains the Iowa monument website. 'Most of them are of granite or marble with some in bronze, and most are in cemeteries with some in town squares and in front of courthouses.”

Iowa's reverence for Union veterans stems in large part from the high rate of Iowans' participation in the war and the honorable nature of their mission, said Alan Kirshen of Red Oak, junior vice commander of the Sons's Iowa department.

'At first they volunteered to preserve the union and stayed on, after the Emancipation Proclamation, to end slavery,” he said.

Of Iowa's 675,000 residents in 1860, 76,242 - or 11.3 percent - fought in the Civil War. No other state, north or south, had a higher percentage of its male population between the ages of 15 and 40 engaged in service. Of those, 13,001 died of wounds or disease and 8,500 were wounded - a casualty rate of 28.2 percent.

Kirshen said the monuments were built mainly in two spurts. One was shortly after the war, another, which included the one in Quasqueton, around the 50th anniversary of its end.

Gaard of Clive said the statues tend to be clustered in Eastern Iowa, which was more densely populated than western Iowa during the Civil War era.

Polk, with 22 Civil War monuments, has more than any other Iowa County, but none is of a union soldier. Linn County, with 15 monuments, has but one of a Union soldier, in Marion's Central Park.

Both Taylor and Fayette counties have eight union soldier statues by Gaard's count, but Fayette stands alone at the top when Clermont's six bronze statues are included.

The Fayette County town of Clermont (population 623) probably has more bronze statues per capita than any other town in America. All were commissioned by William Larrabee, a 19th century Iowa governor who built and resided in Montauk - the mansion overlooking Clermont - and all six, by a pair of New York sculptors, commemorate Civil War heroes.

J. Massey Rhind's statue of David B. Henderson, a Union colonel who lost a leg in combat and went on to become the only Iowan to serve as speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, stands on Main Street. Rhind's statues of Gens. Ulysses S. Grant and Grenville Dodge are on the grounds at Montauk.

George Bissell's statue of President Abraham Lincoln stands on Main Street, and his statues of Gen. William T. Sherman and Adm. David Farragut stand on the Montauk grounds.

The political influence of Larrabee and Henderson, along with their ability to raise money and get things done, helps account for the profusion of Civil War monuments in Fayette County, according to local historian Steve Story of Hawkeye, president of the State Association for the Preservation of Iowa Cemeteries.

Story, his wife, Donna, and associates have long been engaged in rectifying - at a rate of two or three per year - the unmarked status of graves of Civil War veterans buried in Fayette County's pioneer cemeteries.

'It takes considerable research to find them, and we don't guess. When we do (find them), we put up headstones identifying them as Civil War veterans,” Story said.