David Owen Dodd - Legacy

Legacy

Dodd's story has been told in the poem The Long, Long Thoughts of Youth by Marie Erwin Ward, a full-length play and a 1915 silent Hollywood movie whose film has not survived.

There are more monuments to David O. Dodd in Arkansas than to any other of its war heroes, including General Douglas MacArthur. A monument marks the spot of Dodd's hanging, now in the corner of the parking lot of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock's School of Law. Dodd's grave is marked by an eight-foot marble monument, engraved "Here lies the remains of David O. Dodd. Born in Lavaca County, Texas, Nov. 10, 1846, died Jan. 8, 1864." Nearby is a marble scroll with the words "Boy Martyr of the Confederacy." David O. Dodd Elementary School in southwest Little Rock is located on land that was once a part of Washington Dodd's Farm. A stone marker on school grounds, believed to be the place where he was captured, was erected by the David O. Dodd Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, Pine Bluff, Arkansas, and is dedicated to "Arkansas' Boy Hero of the War Between the States."

In 1908, the Arkansas Division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy starting raising funds for a stained-glass window in Dodd's honor. The window was built by the Charles F. Hogeman Company in New York City and depicts Dodd as Southern saint and martyr with curly blond hair, even though his only known photograph shows him with straight black hair. The David O. Dodd window was unveiled at the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond, Virginia on November 7, 1911 where it was displayed for several years. In 1988, it was found in storage and was moved back to Arkansas. The David O. Dodd window debuted at the Arkansas Museum of Science and Industry in January 1990. The Dodd window was returned to Richmond in 1998. In January 2004, the Museum of the Confederacy again loaned the Dodd window to Arkansas to commemorate the 140th anniversary of Dodd's trial at the renamed MacArthur Museum of Arkansas Military History (formerly the Little Rock Arsenal).

Each January, the Sons of Confederate Veterans honor Dodd in a ceremony at his grave site. In November 1984, the Sons of Confederate Veterans awarded the Confederate Medal of Honor to Dodd, one of only twenty-two persons so honored.