Civil War Monument in Boulder, Colorado

My summer trip has taken me through three states out West.

When I got to Boulder, Colorado I looked up my sources to see where Civil War markers and monuments existed in Colorado so I could visit them. I saw that there were none in Boulder where I was meeting friends. We went to have a drink at the Bohemian Biergarten on 13th St. and Pearl St. After a meal and beer, we took a walk on the public square across the street in front of the Boulder County Historic Courthouse and we found in the fog of night a Civil War statue right in front of it! If you are familiar with Boulder, this is one of the most visited streets in the city. It is a popular location for restaurants, bars, and outdoor performances.

It was dark and it was hard to read what was on the monument. Colorado was a territory during the Civil War. When the Confederates invaded New Mexico in 1862, several Colorado regiments were raised and the Colorado men and their Unionists from New Mexico were able to push the Confederates back into Texas. Apart from that successful campaign, the massacre of Native Americans at Sand Creek by two units of the Union volunteers east of Denver is the only other incident that settles in the minds of most students of the Civil War.

I rarely take photographs of monuments in the night, but I thought these were particularly evocative.

At the start of the American Civil War, Boulder was a very small settlement. The authorization for the placement of what is now the University of Colorado at Boulder was issued in November of 1861, but coming as it did in the first year of the war, nothing really happened to get the college off the ground until a decade later. In 1870, the Census recorded that only 343 people lived in Boulder. The University did not open until 1877.

While there may have been some sentiment behind honoring the Coloradoans who volunteered for the army, by 1914 when the monument was erected, the city had gone through double digit growth every census from 1870 onward. In the Census of 1910, very few people living in Boulder had been born there. However, many of the men had served in the Civil War from all across the North and in later life they had moved to Boulder.

On the monument itself, the words say it is dedicated to “Our Honored Dead,” but they don’t mention Colorado at all! The back of the monument says it was erected by the Nathaniel Lyon Women’s Relief Corps. Lyon had no connection to Colorado. He was a Union officer who died in Missouri, two states east of Colorado! Many men and their families came to Boulder decades after the war and on the fiftieth anniversary of the Civil War the women raised money to honor their service.

The type of statue is of a private soldier at parade rest.

On the left side of the monument are etched in cavalry sabers. The statue itself has clear lines, but the side etchings are very eroded and barely visible.

The back of the statue shows that the monument was put up by the Nathaniel Lyon W.R.C. (Women’s Relief Corp).

 

In 2020, a one day art installation covered the statue with a black hood. When the permit expired, the artist refused to remove the hood. According to the artist, Morey Bean, the statue is of a member of the 3rd Colorado Cavalry which carried out the Sand Creek Massacre. However, the statue appears to be an infantryman similar to many others throughout the country. According to the Daily Camera newspaper:

According to Silvia Pettem, a Boulder author and Daily Camera historical columnist, Lyon was the first Union general to die in the Civil War. The statue, however, is not a model of Lyon himself.

A bill of sale that was discovered in 1996 in a time capsule beneath the statue referenced it as a “soldier monument.” The statue was created and placed in Boulder in 1914, according to Pettem. The statue has a similar appearance to the “Soldier at Parade Rest” statues commonly seen in New England, which were created to pay homage to Civil War soldiers, Pettem said.

“In 1914, when Boulder’s statue was erected, many of the Civil War veterans living in the county at the time served in Iowa or New York or some other Midwestern or Eastern state,” Pettem wrote in an email. “Those were the men Boulder honored, and they deserve to be respected. Instead of destroying history in order to erase it, we need to keep it and learn from it.”

The Sand Creek Massacre was an unprovoked killing of 230  Cheyenne and Arapaho civilians by Colorado Unionist troops.

The right side of the monument shows infantry rifles etched in. Below is the clearest picture I could get of the sabers.

The plaza is a small urban park with tree cover and flowers.

Below are my friends Glen Abolofia, Barbara Brown Abolofia, my wife Michele, and me (at the right) at the Biergarden.

And, of course, here is the view of the Rockies from Boulder.

The address of the monument is 1325 Pearl St, Boulder, Colorado.

All photos were taken by Pat Young. To see more sites Pat visited CLICK HERE for Google Earth view.

Follow Reconstruction Blog on Social Media:

•