Sunday, May 17, 2020

The Mysterious "Citizen-Soldier"


     In the vault at the Montour Falls Library is an old photo of a monument that has been a mystery for a long time.  The monument is a Civil War monument called “The Citizen-Soldier,” dedicated to the men of Montour Falls who served in the war.  Written below the photo is a note that says this was a monument at Gettysburg.  The problem is—there is no such monument at Gettysburg.  So where was the monument?  As I researched this further I discovered that the monument was intended to be placed in a park to be created in Montour Falls in front of the waterfall, but it never arrived.  The reason was that its donor, Halsey Ives, a distinguished citizen from Montour Falls, who helped form and lead the St. Louis Art Museum in Missouri, suddenly died in 1911, and his estate did not leave enough money to ship the statue to Montour Falls.
     Ives had commissioned a well-known sculptor named George Julian Zolnay to create the statue.  Zolnay, known as the “sculptor of the Confederacy” for the many Confederate monuments he made, used some rather unusual license in making the monument.  At the top of the monument can be seen the bust of a man.  Incredibly, when I began investigating other works by Zolnay, I recognized a similarity with another statue.  Zolnay’s statue in Nashville, Tennessee dedicated to Sam Davis, a Confederate hero executed as a spy by Union forces, has the same head as the statue Zolnay planned for Montour Falls.  Zolnay put the bust of a Confederate hero on top of a monument intended to celebrate Union soldiers from Montour Falls!
     The monument never made it to Montour Falls, but it did exist at one point as attested by the photograph.  The monument was subsequently dismantled.  The bust of the man still exists in the archives of the St. Louis Art Museum.  When I contacted them they showed me a picture of it, and it was simply labeled as “the head of a man.”  What happened to the rest of the statue is unknown.  I can only wonder that if Ives had lived longer and the statue had been shipped, what would have happened when the citizens of Montour Falls discovered that their statue memorializing their Union patriots was topped by a Confederate hero?  Zolnay’s deceit would have been—busted.
(left click on the photo above to see a larger image)

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