Most scholars of Civil War memory consider the years between 1890 and 1914 to be the heydey of Confederate monumentation. During this time period, many hundreds of Confederate monuments sprung up on courthouse lawns and town squares across the South. One reason for this was the formation of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the pre-eminent southern women’s memorial group, who established chapters in small towns all over the region and dedicated much of their time and energy to erecting memorials to the Lost Cause.
This paper, however, examines another cause of the monument boom in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the mass production and mass marketing of memorial statuary by monument companies. This presentation will focus on the evolution of this phenomenon in Kentucky, the site of Louisville’s Muldoon Monument Company, which sold Civil War monuments all over the U.S. During this time period, Kentucky was also home to a particularly active Confederate memorial culture. This paper argues that while changing technology made monuments more affordable and accessible to Confederate groups across the state, it also led to the proliferation of standardized statuary. While this phenomenon certainly led to increased power and prestige of the Lost Cause version of southern history, it also circumscribed the stories of sacrifice, valor, and remembrance the monuments conveyed.
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