The Monument Makers

Northeast Magazine

War monuments are such mute and familiar inhabitants of the Connecticut landscape - on town greens, in cemeteries, outside government offices - that nobody knows exactly how many there are. The best estimate is upward of 250, easily making them the most common form of outdoor sculpture in the state.

No matter which war or what scale of sacrifice the monuments memorialize, they fall into two general categories. "The first kind is to individuals who served and the second kind is to those who perished. Sometimes there's both," Mary Donohue, the architecture historian who keeps tabs on the monuments for the state, said one day earlier this month as the drumbeats sounded for yet another war.

"There's trends in these things, too," Donohue said. She noted that Connecticut, one of the original 13 states, has few Revolutionary War monuments, while it has at least 142, nearly one per town, dedicated to the Civil War. "War memorials really didn't get started until the Civil War," she said. "Connecticut was one of the first states to erect a Civil War monument. We erected one during the war [in 1863, in Kensington]."

The Civil War bled Connecticut, but another reason so many Civil War monuments got built here is that James G. Batterson, usually remembered as the founder of the Travelers Insurance company, was a 19th century monument magnate."We say, `If you could make it out of metal or stone, and make a buck, we made it in Connecticut.' We took orders from all over the nation," Donohue said. One Batterson employee, the architect George Keller, designed memorials for Gettysburg as well as the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Arch in Bushnell Park. Another, a German immigrant, designed the archetypal figure of the soldier resting on his rifle who stands atop many Civil War monuments.

Donohue's formal job title is survey and grants director for the Connecticut Historical Commission. She said a statewide outdoor sculpture inventory was done about a decade ago after the Smithsonian Institution became concerned that monuments nationally were falling apart. Since then, the commission has begun a program to encourage their preservation. It also has tried to keep its monument inventory up to date.

"We discovered 20 or 25 we missed the first time," and she said, "We add about three to 10 pieces a year." Some are new war monuments. "It's become kind of pro forma; you have one for every war," she said. "You didn't see anything going up [after the Vietnam War]. It started to happen in the last 10 years, and even more recently."

So many towns are restoring monuments or building new ones, it's hard to keep track. Donohue believed that Brookfield was one of the first towns anywhere to put up a monument to the Sept. 11 terrorist attack and that West Hartford was in the early stages of building a major new monument to veterans of all wars.

Brookfield doesn't have a Sept. 11 monument - yet. But money is being raised for one, reports Marty Foncello, the first selectman, who just recently retired from the Army Reserve with the rank of lieutenant colonel. He was still in the Reserve when, soon after his election to a second term as first selectman in November 2001, he was called to active duty in Washington, D.C.

"I had to go away for five or six months. I thought it would be a few weeks," Foncello said. "A lot has happened since I've been back," he said, referring to the government's shift in the war on terrorism from Afghanistan and Osama bin Laden to Iraq and Saddam Hussein. Iraq hadn't changed the town's thinking about its Sept. 11 monument.

"This has been going on for a while. Everybody hopes somebody will blink and back off," Foncello said. "I tend to think there'll be some kind of concentration again on bin Laden."

The first selectman said the military intelligence work he did "for a couple of different agencies" in Washington was classified. He did disclose he took photographs with him of two people killed in the attack on the World Trade Center. One was of a town woman who worked in one of the twin towers and the other was of the fireman son of a reservist he knows.

"I had them stuck up on the wall while we were doing our thing down in Washington to remind me of why we were there," Foncello said.

He pointed out that the state already has erected a Sept. 11 memorial at the Sherwood Island State Park in Westport and that the town with a monument already in the ground is Brookfield's neighbor, New Milford.

Joe Hine is the man who told New Milford it needed a Sept. 11 monument. On and around its long, segmented green, the town already has monuments to the Civil War, World War I and one that covers conflict generally. Guarded by a tank and topped by an eagle, its inscription reads: "In recognition of services rendered to our country by men and women of New Milford during national crisis." World War II is not forgotten. A roster inside the town hall bears the names of the approximately 400 townspeople who served in that war.

Hine, who spent 33 years on the town police force before being elected to the town council, said he began thinking about a Sept. 11 memorial the day the terrorists struck. Like a lot of people, Hine got a phone call from someone, in his case his wife, who was at a beach cottage in Rhode Island, who told him to turn on the television.

"I could see right away what was happening and right away I started thinking we were going to have to put up some kind of monument in town. I thought of all the terrible things that happened in that time period - the twin towers, the Pentagon - I was all choked up," he said.

"I knew we were being attacked and I kind of felt uneasy. I was kind of waiting for something else to happen that day. I hated to think of it, but I keep thinking a lot about a nuclear war, if we started shooting nuclear weapons. I thought, `We're not safe anymore,' " Hine said. "It's frightening to think ... we've got these savage countries, they're in poverty, life means nothing to them ... the powers that be are eating the food and the people are starving."

Hine might have dwelled on nuclear war and apocalypse because he is an Air Force veteran (he was stationed state-side during the Vietnam War) and a churchgoer (Episcopalian). He sees the despair in the Mideast as similar to the despair in Japan after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. "People were in such bad shape, they didn't want to live," he said.

Soon after the Sept. 11 attack, Hine organized a committee to plan and raise money for New Milford's newest war monument. It was dedicated last Sept. 11, at the edge of a parking lot behind the train depot overlooking ball fields and the Housatonic River. In keeping with minimalist fashion, the monument is deceptively simple: a pole flying the American flag embedded in a block of granite inscribed only with the phrase "In memory of Sept. 11, 2001." But as with most monuments, it does not reveal its meaning in a glance. The base, for instance, is pentagonal, and a garden will be planted to represent the Pennsylvania field where one of the hijacked jetliners crashed.

"I come by usually every day," Hine said one afternoon two weeks ago when he stopped by to show off the monument. "We find people leave objects here. They'll light a candle, or set down a piece of paper with a note, or a flower." Hine, a soft-spoken man of 64, had just bent down to brush snow away from the base of the monument.

"I believe this is the only one put up by a town," he said. "It was all done by donation. Believe it or not, a lot of the donations came from recyclable bottles. The Catholic Church had tons of them."

The monument cost about $20,000, plus a lot of volunteer labor. Hine kicked some more snow away from the spot where the garden will be planted and pointed to two lights sunk into the ground on either side of the monument's base.

"There are two lights that represent the twin towers. Actually they don't work as well as we hoped. We bought them from the same company that manufactured the ones in New York [the beams at Ground Zero]. It was going to run the town two dollars a month to run these lights. Believe it or not, we did have people question it. Maybe two people," Hine said.

The low-wattage lights are timed to come on at dusk and go off at dawn. Hine is disappointed they don't shine high enough to illuminate the flag. "We'll have the electrician come back and see what can be done," he said.

Fourteen people served on the New Milford monument committee. One was Father Jack Hoak, the associate pastor at Saint Francis Xavier Church. Hoak said he was probably chosen because people had often seen him on patriotic occasions in his Navy uniform. He is a chaplain in the Reserve with a rank of lieutenant commander. During the Persian Gulf War he was stationed at the Newport, R.I., Navy base, and later he spent six months with the peacekeeping force in Sarajevo.

"Some of the Serbs said, `As soon as you go we are going to start up again,'" Hoak recalled. He said his church prays for a peaceful solution to the Iraq standoff, but that he thinks an invasion may be necessary as a last resort. If war comes, he expects it will be brief and fought mostly from the air, like the Persian Gulf War.

Hoak said the committee decided against putting the Sept. 11 monument near the war memorials New Milford already has. "We looked at the north end of the green," he said, "but the more we looked at that we thought there might be too much clutter. We didn't want to have a green filled with too many memorials and monuments."

At the dedication ceremony, Hoak read a prayer that praised the American spirit and "ordinary people" who become "extraordinary heroes." Hoak, who during his seminary years performed with a folk group that called themselves the New Day Friars, also sang a song, "Together We Stand," written by town resident Dr. Leonard Diamond.

Diamond, a psychiatrist who splits his practice between New Milford and Manhattan, said he composed the song soon after the Sept. 11 attacks. "I was depressed, as most of us were, so my wife said, `Why don't you do what you always do to express your feelings?' " said Diamond, who also is a professional songwriter.

In his 40 years as a psychiatrist, no event, he said, not even the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, affected people as much as the Sept. 11 attack. "I think everyone is still suffering, at least here in New Milford and in New York," Diamond said. "It seems the country has gone into chronic depression. Without being too technical, I'd say it's post-traumatic stress syndrome. ... I'm not sure war is the answer to resolve that. I think most people had a feeling of invulnerability, and that feeling of invulnerability has been shattered. Whether it's going to be restored I don't know. I think that's probably why a lot of people want it (an Iraq invasion). On the other side, there are people who think it's not going to do anything, or they just don't want to see it, period."

Joe Hine said of Iraq, "I think they should have taken care of the situation when they went over the last time. I hate to see young Americans lost, or anyone's life lost. No one comes out a winner." Hine had a cousin killed in Vietnam, and he and his wife together have seven children. Still, he thought the chance Iraq might build nuclear weapons justified an invasion. "I think it's necessary, yes," he said.

After showing off the Sept. 11 monument, Hine had driven over to the town soup kitchen in the basement of a converted school on the other side of the green. He said he attended the school as a child and that he loves New Milford so much he feels no need to leave it on vacations. He gave a brief history of its various war monuments. "I forgot to mention the Civil War monument," he said. "We got Abe Lincoln up there; it's got the Gettysburg Address on it. The problem they run into up there is they can't find anyone to clean the thing."

The monument on the grounds of the New Milford Historical Society looks solid, but its bronze etchings have turned green. The Gettysburg Address is legible on its south face. On the north face, however, the list of battles in which New Milford men fought is obscured by pale stains running down its surface like tears.

On Monday Iraq arms inspectors are expected to make their report to the United Nations Security Council, an event that may be the final prelude to war. On Tuesday the West Hartford Veterans Memorial Committee is expected to show the town council its plans for what committee members believe will be a war monument unlike any other.

Jim Tierney, the committee chairman who is a retired career Navy officer, bursts with excitement in describing the effort already underway to collect soil samples from battlefields all over the world where Americans died and cemeteries where they are buried to mix with West Hartford earth.

"Let me tell you, we are doing something different and unique from anyone I'm aware of," Tierney said over the telephone. "We intend to consecrate and hallow the ground. Now how do we do that? We intend to get soil from Gettysburg. We intend to get soil from Arlington National Cemetery, from Bunker Hill, from Anzio and Normandy. We have soil coming from Vietnam, from Saipan and Okinawa.

"All this will be mixed with our West Hartford soil. That's the beginning. This could take as much as three years. We are also waiting to hear from the Navy to see if we can get water from the North Atlantic, from the South China Sea, from the Mediterranean. ... This will be spread on the soil from throughout the world."

Later at his house, Tierney handed over a two-page list of battlefields from which soil might be sought. Iraq and Kuwait are on it. "This is not an in-your-face kind of thing," he said. "In fact, while we are talking here, let me add one more." He took the list and penned in the Pentagon.

The notion that West Hartford needed a new war memorial came before Sept. 11, from Councilman Al Turco. He recalled being struck by reading that the town of Bristol was restoring its war memorial and, as someone born in 1945, that his parents' generation, the "greatest" one that fought World War II, was passing away. At present, West Hartford's main war monument is in the parking lot behind town hall, an unsatisfactory location for patriotic celebrations. Built only in 1987, it bears the names of 170 dead from the Civil War through Vietnam.

The site chosen for the new memorial is a half-acre park in the town center, where North Main Street runs into Farmington Avenue. Expected to cost about $700,000, its design also may be unique. The consecrated ground in the center will be left unmarked, while a low wall and walkway will curve around the perimeter. The names of the dead will be inscribed on top of the wall at intervals, but the long wall will also double as a time line of history running from the Colonial era up to the present. Where wars occur, there will be jagged breaks in the wall, their onset marked by up-spewing water and their end marked by up-shining lights.

An early plan had water flowing continuously across the top of the wall over the names of the dead, but that posed practical problems, said Vincent Stryeski, the architect for the Kaestle Boos firm of New Britain, who is the memorial's chief designer. Instead, the element of flowing water will be used in a separate installation that is being called the Weeping Rock or the Healing Rock. The long wall that is the time line is being called the Wall of Peace. There is nothing to glorify either the heroism or suffering of soldiers.

"A lot of committee members, for whatever reason, have always been sympathetic to keeping the memorial quiet and relying on symbolic gestures to give it strength," Stryeski said. All the two dozen committee members are veterans. Stryeski, who had uncles who saw combat in World War II and a brother who served in Vietnam, said he feels honored to work with them.

"You hear their stories, whether it's the Marines or Army or Air Force - I don't separate the services - there's a lot of lessons to be learned because they were there. ... You mention Iraq [and] there's fear there, because they've all experienced it. I don't see anyone waving swords in the air," he said.

Perhaps the most ingenious aspect of the Wall of Peace, which shows how often wars have occurred, is that it is designed to extend into the future. Room has been left to add 200 or more years of history to its time line. The wish must be that the wall continues unbroken. The Persian Gulf War is built into the wall, but Stryeski said the memorial committee has struggled over how to incorporate the attacks of 9/11 and the very present confrontation with Iraq.

"We're trying to take a stand-back perspective. If you say, `Did you read the latest this morning?', the latest this morning might not belong in concrete or granite," Tierney said.

"If you take 9/11, how about the embassies in Africa? How about the ambassador assassinated, wherever? Are we looking at the passengers on Pan Am Flight 103, which is part of the war on terror? And incidentally at whatever point you stop, you're wrong. Someone will say you're unfeeling, a terrible person. You get the slap in the face. You ignored my cousin, uncle, brother who lost his life for nothing," he said.

Asked about Iraq, Tierney rubbed a hand across his face. He enlisted in the Navy in 1944 at age 17 and retired with the rank of lieutenant commander in 1967 to begin a second career in sales. "OK, now we're getting into political thoughts. I feel there's been a radical turnaround in our national direction ... we are recognizing we are a world power and with that we have responsibilities and this grows doubts in my mind as to where it all leads."

Tierney worried about descent into a new world war. "I feel there's a deep feeling of enmity between the Muslim world and all others," he said, noting that he is a Jew. "This is the natural movement of a convulsive turn of events."

Stryeski said that as of the moment the wall is designed with a break for the war on terror. "It's not a declared war. But if we go in and things develop in February, it's a war," he said.

He said the sections of stone that denote war will be jagged. He picked up a sample and punched at it. "It's like you took a fist and bang. I mean, the ends are broken," he said.

"When you see the Wall of Peace shattered, there's a very strong lesson there to learn from the past. I just really see myself standing at the end and contemplating future generations and the symbolic connections in the up-lights. At the end of each war there's a light that connects to the sky. You have a war and everyone prays it's the last one, the war to end all wars. At the end of World War I there's a light. At the end of World War II, there's a light." But right now, he said, "there is no light at the end of the wall."

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