I found this site while looking for information about ‘The Battle Monument’ which is dedicated to, and records the names of officers and enlisted men who lost their lives in the American Civil War. “The Battle Monument contains the names of 2,230 officers and enlisted men of the regular army who were killed or died of wounds received in battle during the Civil War. It was dedicated on May 31, 1897.”
Click on any photo to enlarge, and clicking on words highlighted in blue will open onto another link.
Click on “No. 2 History of the Battle Monument” to open a Google digital book that gives a lot of info on the monument.
One of the errors I’ve noticed would be contained in the caption under photo no. 5. These cannons are definitely not Civil War guns, at least not from our Civil War. As a matter of fact, I don’t think they’re even real cannons in the sense that we usually think of cannon, I believe they are non-functional imitations of a French model of cannon that were cast specifically for this monument. The battle locations mentioned in the caption are cast in raised letters on the muzzle faces of these “sculptured” bronze guns.
"5. Cannon at the Battle Monument
Civil War cannon encircle the base of the monument, each bearing the name of a major battle on the barrels. These two honor the battles of the Wilderness and Fort Donelson."
In the book it is stated that 50 actual Civil War bronze cannon were donated to be used in the construction of this monument, and these melted down guns are what provided the bronze for the surmounting statue, 16 cannons, garlands, the bands containing the enlisted troops names that encircle the globes, and any other bronze seen on the monument.
50 BRONZE CANNONSIf you look at some of the photos you’ll also notice that there are actual cannons buried upright in the lawn that form a circle around the monument.
There are a lot of interesting things to look at contained in this site, but a few artillery related things that stand out are “Wars That Shaped the Nation,” which consists of The American Civil War, The Revolutionary War, The War of 1812, The Mexican War, and the Spanish-American War. Photos of artillery in the West Point collection that would have been used in each of these conflicts are shown. Another cannon of interest would be the “150-pounder Armstrong Gun Captured at Fort Fisher, North Carolina – January 15, 1865.”
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