The Confederate Monument

George B. Payne, a former private in the 4th Kentucky Infantry who had served as a courier for Gen. John C. Breckinridge and spent part of the Civil War in Bowling Green, sought a fitting monument to honor Confederate soldiers buried there. Living in Topeka, Kansas, in 1875, Payne pressed for action until the Warren County Monumental Association was formed, with Thomas H. Hines of the 9th Kentucky Cavalry in John Hunt Morgan’s command serving as president. A subscription drive began in 1875, and the monument was dedicated on May 3, 1876, when more than 10,000 people gathered for speeches, including an oration by W. C. P. Breckinridge, former colonel of the 9th Kentucky Cavalry and an important figure in Confederate veterans associations in Kentucky. The monument, designed and created locally from white limestone at a cost of $1,500.00, stands as an obelisk around which more than 70 soldiers are buried in concentric circles. A likeness of Henry Moseler’s postwar lithograph "The Lost Cause," a popular image in the South that conveyed the devastation wrought by the Civil War, was carved on the monument.

Bowling Green, Kentucky · United States