Last year, Donald Trump issued an authorization of a 2021 Executive Order commanding that a Garden of Heroes in Washington for the 250th Anniversary of the Independence of the United States be built. Congress appropriated $40 million to fund the Garden. A list of people to be honored has been released. When it was announced, the Garden was supposed to be completed by July of 2026 for the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. By the Fall of 2025, the White House announced that the Garden would not be completed until late in the president’s term.
The Garden would have paths leading to themed exhibits of life-sized statues of the greatest heroes of the United States as picked by a Trump-appointed commission. It will be within West Potomac Park.
Here are the statues that have been approved for the Garden for people active during the lead up to the Civil War, the war itself, and Reconstruction:
First are the political leaders of the age: Ulysses S. Grant, Abraham Lincoln, William McKinley, Henry Clay.
Next the military heroes of the Civil War: Joshua Chamberlain, David Farragut.
Great inventors are next: Samuel Colt, Samuel Morse.
Scholars, authors and journalists: Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), Emily Dickinson, Julia Ward Howe, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Walt Whitman.
Philosophers: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau.
Humanitarians: Clara Barton.
Civil Rights Leaders: Susan B. Anthony, Frederick Douglass, Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman.
Note: Since none of the statues have been created yet, the photo is of the new Harriet Tubman statue in Binghamton, New York.
Follow Reconstruction Blog on Social Media: