History of The Monument
Simon Bolivar Buckner, Sr., a Confederate general, first proposed the idea of a monument for Davis during a reunion of the Orphan Brigade of the Confederate Army in 1907. Construction began in 1917 but stopped in 1918 at a height of 175 feet (53 m) due to building material rationing during World War I. Construction resumed in January 1922 and was finished in 1924 at a cost of $200,000. The base was constructed of limestone quarried from the site. The concrete walls are 8.5 feet (2.6 m) thick at the base and taper to 2.5 feet (0.76 m) thick at the top. The monument was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1973 as structure #73000849. The obelisk was closed to the public from 1999 until May 2004 for renovations and construction of a new visitor center. An elevator takes visitors to an observation platform at the top.
Read more about this topic: Jefferson Davis State Historic Site
Famous quotes containing the words history and/or monument:
“Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernism’s high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.”
—Gilbert Adair, British author, critic. Sunday Times: Books (London, April 21, 1991)
“It is remarkable that the dead lie everywhere under stones.... Why should the monument be so much more enduring than the fame which it is designed to perpetuate,—a stone to a bone? “Here lies,”M”Here lies”;Mwhy do they not sometimes write, There rises? Is it a monument to the body only that is intended?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)