The Twenty-third Ohio Volunteer Infantry was the first Ohio regiment mustered for three years’ service in the Civil War and the first Ohio regiment in which the field officers were appointed by the governor of Ohio. Known as the “Regiment of Presidents,” the 23rd OVI included several future politicians in its ranks, among them future presidents Commissary Sergeant William McKinley and Lieutenant Colonel Rutherford B. Hayes. It suffered its greatest losses in the 1862 Antietam Campaign at the battles of South Mountain on September 14 and Antietam on September 17. While many of its wounded, including Lieutenant Colonel Hayes, lay in hospitals near the battlefields, convalescing soldiers resolved to erect a regimental monument to the dead and began a subscription. The city donated a plot at Woodland Cemetery, and Myers, Uhl & Co. was contracted to build the monument for five hundred dollars. By the close of the war, the regiment had raised all necessary funds within its own membership. The monument was dedicated in a ceremony on July 29, 1865, when the regiment arrived at Cleveland after being mustered out at Cumberland, Maryland. It is a twenty-two-foot obelisk of Italian marble with the national flag sculpted around its apex, and its five-foot-tall pedestal bears the names of the regiment’s dead.
