The next meeting of the Nashville (TN) Civil War Roundtable will be on Monday, April 18th, 2011, in the visitor’s center of Ft. Negley Park, a unit of Metro Parks, Nashville, TN. This is located off I-65 just south of downtown between 4th Avenue South and 8th Avenue South on Edgehill Avenue/Chestnut Avenue. Take Exit 81, Wedgewood Avenue, off I-65 and follow the signs to the Science Museum and Greer Stadium. The meeting begins at 7:00 pm and is always open to the public. There is no charge to attend.
OUR SPEAKER AND TOPIC
“Lest We Forget: Monuments and Memorial Sculptures in National Military Parks on Civil War Battlefields”
Visitors to the many Civil War National Parks have certainly paid notice to the many monuments that dot these historic landscapes. Some, like Gettysburg, have lots of monuments while others, like Fort Donelson, have far fewer. Yet all of them are there for important reasons. Our program this month surveys these monuments and memorials erected in National Military Parks established at Gettysburg, Vicksburg, Chickamauga, Chattanooga, Shiloh, Antietam, and the smaller parks between 1890 and the present day. These monuments were intended to mark the historic sites and commemorate the soldiers’ valor and often add important information for the visitors.
Michael W. Panhorst, Ph.D., an historian of art and architecture will trace the development of Neo-classical style funerary monuments erected immediately after the war, some with popular “Sentinel” type figurative statuary, to more realistic “Active-Soldier” type statuary dedicated around the 25th anniversary of the war. Reconciliation imagery that appeared between the 25th and 50th anniversaries of the war, as well as Southern memorials dedicated during the centennial of the war will also be covered, also some of the newest Civil War battlefield monuments. Dr. Panhorst specializes in outdoor sculpture and public monuments. He has lectured and been published widely on outdoor sculpture and its conservation. His current work focuses on the Alabama Confederate Monument in Montgomery and a guidebook to the monuments at Vicksburg National Military Park.
The Nashville Civil War Roundtable is made possible by Nashville Metro Parks and the Tennessee Chapter of the Society of Military History.