The homage to the men and women, black and white, who served during 1861-1865, has now been sculpted financed with donations made, and now we are exploring the most practical way of having it cast in a metal for perpetuity – which we estimate will be in the region of £1500 and we have to consider the metal used to deter its theft!! £1500 quickly eats into what we have already raised leaving only some financial resilience for the next stage.

With help from supporters since January 2022 we have raised an incredible £3754.83. And whilst this has helped to finance the work to date - creating the sculpted inlay with figures, we need to fund the monuments marble centre-piece too. And the monument's construction itself. If you make a donation you’ll be funding labour and material costs, the very bricks and mortar that will create the monument. And if we're over budget, any funds will be used to obtain headstones for individual veterans. We plan to make the Monumental Project a life-long endeavour.

We’ve seen the Monuments sculptured design, so what will the marble centre-piece say?

We don’t intend to name individuals as by doing so will inevitably leave somebody out. And our ethos I to be inclusive as possible, hence the design created representing men and women, black and white, and the branches of service land and sea.

The inspiration for the marble centre-piece comes from John A Logan, Commander in Chief, Grand Army of the Republic and his General order No 11.

It will say -

Why should I donate, surely there are plenty of monuments to Civil War Veterans?

Not in the United Kingdom. Surprisingly despite approximately 50,000 people from the UK serving in the American Civil War, there is no monument sited in the United Kingdom for all the 1-2 % for who returned to the home of their birth. We feel that that should change - all Civil War veterans surely should some form of remembrance. Men and Women returned to the UK after the conflict with nothing more than the thanks of a grateful nation, but they carried with them life-long mental and physical ill-health burdens related to their service.

Our mission is to secure at least one monument for American Civil War Veterans buried in the United Kingdom, and where possible obtain individual headstones for veterans too. There are hidden costs, even by obtaining a single headstone. Customs duty sometimes gets charged at about £150, then we have to obtain permission for placement, which occasionally comes with a cost attached. Hidden costs even include obtaining service records, then producing and posting material to the Department of Veteran affairs to obtain headstones.

Many lived in poverty, often in workhouses, and relied on the goodwill of peers who had served too, One veteran was John Davis, a London City Mission worker, and former veteran himself. John managed to connect over 100 former veterans living across London. He formed the London Branch of American Civil War Veterans in 1910 for peer support, fellowship and to share experiences.

The London branch veterans were successful in helping to secure for some their Federal Pensions. However, despite their success many were still buried in unmarked plots,. For example, until recently despite their "London Branch" work after the war, its founder Ensign John Davis and member Major Seth Herrick did not have any headstones to honour their service. We aim to carry on where they left off - we plan to honour them and all other veterans who returned to the UK.

Where will the monument be sited?

It has been agreed in principle that our monument will be placed sited in a North London cemetery that has at least eight known veterans interred there, who served in either the Civil War or Mexican war. We know of over 520 veterans’ but they are buried all over the United Kingdom. The cemetery provides an accessible location and is close to our nation’s capital where the Lincoln Memorial is all sited.

Who it will represent?

We will not be naming individual veterans, but the memorial will be designed to allow individuals to place "time capsules" inside with any veterans or units names. "Known only unto them". To accompany our mission a book is in the process of being written that will aim to identify as many veterans as possible. We utilise newspapers, ancestry records, pension files and service records to find those veterans and widows.

#TheMonumentalProject story so far....

The sculpture has now been completed by Stuart Stefany, an artist and member of the Sons of Union Veterans of the American Civil. His ancestry shares .people who served on both sides of the conflict.

The bronze casting now completed says, :“We have shared the incommunicable experience of war, we have felt, we still feel, the passion of life to its top. In our youth our hearts were touched with fire” (Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr)

We now need to take the project forward and that means more fundraising, obtaining the marble centre piece, and then commissioning the monuments construction. We are making progress, but there is still much to do.

I want to know more about your ethos, and what #Themonumentalproject does when its not fundraising?

We're on Linktree https://linktr.ee/TheMonumentalProject

And you can can follow us on Facebook (we have a closed group too).

https://www.facebook.com/AmericanCivilWarUKMonumentalProject

Day to day,we're conducting research to seek out and find veterans and their stories. So far thats over 525 men and women. To date we have secured three official burial markers for-

George Denham Company, F 111th Pennsylvania Volunteers, Francis Albermar, Company E, 111th Pennsylvania Volunteers, and James O'Neill Company K 61st Massachusetts volunteers.

We have just started the process of getting a burial Marker for John Taplin USS Morning Light and Henry Sissons Blackbourn, 72nd Pennsylvania Volunteers,

We have a number of public shows that we''ll be attending in 2023, and where able we'll give talks to local history societies. Our work is all about, "show and tell", we want to raise awareness, not just monuments, to men and women who have almost been forgotten. To that end we will work with any organisation, whose values of inclusion and remembrance align themselves with our aims and beliefs.