Battlefield Monuments

More than 600 stone and bronze monuments were erected on the battlefields here between 1890 and 1930, with most designed and placed by Chickamauga and Chattanooga veterans under the direction of the Park Commissioners and funded by the U.S. Government, the states, and veterans organizations. The monuments are notable for both their artistic and commemorative value and the information they provide: at Chickamauga, Union regimental monuments identify where units saw their heaviest fighting, while Confederate monuments mark their farthest points of advance. Many include bronze bas-relief plaques depicting battle scenes based on veterans’ eyewitness accounts, making them among the best visual records of the battles because no photographs of the fighting exist. Surviving veterans of the 77th Regiment of the Pennsylvania Veteran Volunteer Infantry gathered before their newly dedicated monument in November 1897, whose bronze plaque showed the battle as they remembered it. The New York Monument at Point Park on Lookout Mountain, dedicated in 1910 at a cost of nearly $80,000, is the tallest in the park, built of Tennessee marble and pink granite and topped by bronze soldiers with clasped hands symbolizing the reconciliation of North and South.

Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia · United States