On Monday, the Lowndes County Board of Supervisors voted to relocate the Confederate monument, which has resided on the southwest corner of the courthouse property since it was erected there in 1912.
The plan is to move the 32-foot marble and mortar structure to a site at Friendship Cemetery, although some obstacles to the plan remain.
For all the controversy surrounding the removal — there were some clashes between protesters and counter-protesters in the weeks leading up to the vote, though no one was injured — the supervisors’ vote may turn out to be the easy part, said Key Blair of Columbus Marble Works.
“Moving it is going to be a challenge, I believe,” said Blair, whose family has owned Columbus Marble Works since 1908. First opened in 1846, Columbus Marble Works is easily the oldest continually operating business in Lowndes County. “It’s a pretty big production. These things weren’t put up with the mindset of moving it one day.”
Under the ownership of the family patriarch, Arthur McGahey, Columbus Marble Works built and erected six Confederate monuments across the state between 1907 and 1926, including the one at the Lowndes County Courthouse, according to the Mississippi Department of Archives and History.
Now, a century or more later, Columbus Marble Works is charged with removing many of those monuments. Blair said he’s talked with officials in Macon, Okolona and Greenwood about relocating their monuments. Although he has yet to discuss the Lowndes County monument, he expects to hear from county officials, too.
“There aren’t a whole bunch of people who do this,” he noted.
Later this month, Columbus Marble Works will relocate the Confederate Monument on the Ole Miss campus, which he said will give him some idea of what the company might face if it is contracted to move the Lowndes County monument.
“The one at Ole Miss is pretty simple: It’s more of a shaft with a statue on top,” Blair said. “It’s not as large as the one in Columbus, either. But there are things we’ll learn doing that that will help us if we wind up relocating the one in Columbus.”
Blair said relocating monuments is like taking apart and then reassembling a jig-saw puzzle.
“You start at the top and work your way down, piece by piece,” he said.
The Lowndes County monument is an especially big puzzle, Blair noted.
The monument includes three statues, including a 7 1/2-foot Confederate soldier holding a flag on the top, four 9-foot columns and a 16-foot marble base.
There are other complications that make relocating the Lowndes County monument tricky.
“We’ll have to have a larger crane because we have to be able to reach over the trees next to the monument,” Blair said. “Another question is the location. There’s not much room and there’s a lot of traffic there. Where do you put the crane? Where do you put the flatbed trailer and truck? There’s a lot of logistics involved.”
One of the biggest challenges, Blair said, is removing the base.
“We really won’t know what we’re getting into until we begin to take it up,” Blair said. “A piece of marble that big is probably not solid, so it’s probably sitting on some type of raised foundation.”
That’s where the experience of moving the Ole Miss monument is likely to prove helpful.
“We know that the base at the one at Ole Miss isn’t solid because a car hit it a year or so ago and we had to make a piece to repair it with,” he said. “What we saw is that there was some kind of brick foundation that the monument was sitting on. I’m guessing it’s the same with the one here, but we won’t know that for sure until we start pulling it up.”
That’s a problem of its own. Because the big equipment needed for the job is rented on a daily basis, a new foundation with the same dimensions must be ready at the new site so that there is no long delay in reassembly.
Another challenge will be accessing the new site, Blair said.
“The place where the Confederate soldiers are buried is a problem,” he said. “How are we going to get a crane in there? How are we going to get an 18-wheeler in there? The little road (through the cemetery) has too many twists and turns for an 18-wheeler, so that’s another part of the puzzle.”
Blair hesitated to estimate the cost of relocating the monument. Right now, he said, there are too many unknown cost factors.
“If I had to guess, I’d say $100,000 maybe,” he said. “That’s another problem. None of these places we’re talking to budgeted for this. Where’s the money going to come from?”
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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