Markers of History

It’s amaz­ing how great the Internet is for find­ing infor­ma­tion that you didn’t even know you were miss­ing. I’ve men­tioned Markeroni reg­u­larly on these pages, but I haven’t yet men­tioned The Historical Marker Database or HMDB (except for adding a link to the sidebar).

Schenectady, NY. Photo: Howard C. Ohlhous, 2007. Courtesy of hmdb.org

Yesterday, though, I learned through the exper­tise of one of their edi­tors about links between a war memo­r­ial I had vis­ited in Portsmouth, VA and oth­ers across the coun­try. Almost two months ago, I saw a memo­r­ial com­mem­o­rat­ing those who served in the Spanish-American War. But through an editor’s links, I found that the depic­tion on that 1942 mon­u­ment, ded­i­cated to those who vol­un­teered from Portsmouth and from Norfolk County, was actu­ally some­what famous.

Their data­base includes exam­ples from three other places:

• Schenectady, NY, ded­i­cated in 1921 (and reded­i­cated in 1996) to honor those who served from Schenectady County;


Savannah, GA. Photo: Mike Stroud, 2008. Courtesy of hmdb.org

• Savannah, GA (a city my wife and I will be vis­it­ing next month), erected in 1931 to honor those who vol­un­teered from Georgia; and


Arlington, VA. Photo: Richard E. Miller, 2008. Courtesy of hmdb.org

• Arlington, VA, where it has stood in Arlington National Cemetery (where my wife and I attended a bur­ial ear­lier this year) since 1965.

According to Wikipedia, there are many more copies around the coun­try, with esti­mates of 39 in an arti­cle on another exam­ple to roughly fifty, accord­ing to the arti­cle on the sculp­tor, Theo Alice Ruggles Kitson (1871 – 1932). Born in Brookline, MA, she was denied entry to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, because she was female. She started study­ing with sculp­tor Henry Hudson Kitson in 1886 and went on to marry him. Kitson was the first woman to be admit­ted to the National Sculpture Society.

So next month, when we go to Savannah, I think I’ll have to see if I can get to this marker. And I’ll def­i­nitely be keep­ing my eyes open online to see what else I can learn about his­tory (and his­tor­i­cal mark­ers) from others!

It’s amaz­ing what you can learn from the Internet these days!

On Monday, this blog will con­tinue our trip towards Yorktown and later in the week, we’ll travel from there to Jamestown on the Colonial Parkway. I hope you’ll join us.