Missing Memorial to the “Dignity of Southern Womanhood”

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Did you know this monument to the memory of Eliza Johns is actually the base to a now missing statue? 

Though it took almost fifty years to erect, is stone and concrete plinth is all that remains of the statue that once stood here, the culmination of the hard work and dedication of Dr. Benjamin Brooke Temple and his wife.

Dr. Temple was born on the 22md of March1839. He had just turned 22 and was “studying medicine in Paris when the storm broke, and he hastened home and joined the colors”. One of eight sons born to Benjamin and Lucy Lilly Temple, he joined the cause of the Confederacy and fought alongside six of those brothers. The prospect of so heavy a loss was almost more than his mother, who had buried five children already, could bear. He watched with a heavy heart as his mother not only bore the grief of being separated from her children as they seemingly marched toward their deaths, but she took on the work of running the home as her husband, too, joined the fray.

Mrs. Temple was one of the few lucky women of the Civil War. Unlike so many others of her time, her husband and sons returned, though wounded, ill, and in the case of one brother, with shattered health that heralded an early demise.

Benjamin never forgot what his mother had suffered, and he was left with the indelible impression and a strong feeling “that the women of the Confederacy who shared a heavy burden of sacrifice with the men of the south were being forgotten and that while monuments and memorials were being erected in the south commemorating the valor of the fighting men, the women were not receiving their just due.”

With the support of Cabell Graves Camp of the United Confederate Veterans, he began raising funds for the purchase of a memorial for women. He began with a modest $50 deposit and added to it periodically while he canvased for subscriptions. The Temples were not wealthy, and so it took years to raise any significant funds. And then, on the 11th of March 1905, Dr. Temple suffered a stroke and died. As a legacy, he left behind an unfulfilled dream and $500 in an untouched savings account.

In the years that followed, Mrs. Temple was approached by many who thought that, with the death of her husband, his dream, too, must surely die, and so the money might be used for larger projects meant to memorialize the Confederacy. But her husband’s dream had not died, and so, though belatedly, beginning in 1923, the balance in the bank was $600. It was growing, but not quickly, and so Mrs. Temple and her son George decided to make a concerted effort at raising the necessary funds, estimated at $2,500. Of the many donors are some names we know Mrs. F.X. Burton, Mrs. Henry Wiseman, and Mrs. Harry Ficklen to name a few.

At last, in 1925, the money was raised. The Bee announced that, “The long cherished dream of the late Dr. B. B. Temple that the women of the Confederacy should be memorialize in an adequate way in Danville is about to come true.”

Mrs. Temple hired Dudley Thompson Warren of Roanoke to sculpt, “a typical Confederate mother, contemplating the knapsack and the cap of her son killed in the struggle.”  Soon, the base was erected on the grounds of the Confederate Monument, now the Danville Museum of Arts and History, in preparation for completion of the sculpture.

At four o’clock on June 16, 1927, nearly fifty years after Dr. Temple began his crusade to memorialize the heroic dignity of “Southern Womanhood,” the statue was unveiled to great fanfare.

“Mayor Harry Wooding paid a glowing tribute to the heroism of the Confederate women during the war.” …”Dr. Smoot commended the cherished sentiments…. ‘It was befitting,’ he said, ‘that there should be a memorial in the last capital of the Confederacy to perpetuate the heroism and unfaltering courage of the Southern women.’ The speaker said that in time of invasion women and children always suffer the most; this was especially true during the Civil War. The women suffered doubly as they were forced to labor unceasingly while enduring the most horrible suspense. They tended the plantations and raised supplies for the army. ‘The ingenuity with which the women met the problems of these stormy days was incomparable,’ Dr. Smoot said.”

And then the statue was unveiled.

The depiction was of “a southern mother, who has given her only son to the Confederate cause.”

The Bee reported that, “the general feeling as to the execution of the work was disappointment.  The figure of the Confederate mother is somewhat heavy, coarse and lifeless.”

Three days later, after public appeal and letters to the editor lauding the efforts and intent of Mrs. Temple, while simultaneously disparaging the statue for its crude and brutalist representation of the proud, indominable, and ever graceful southern woman, the monument was removed and taken to the local marble yard of W. D. Rowe at 417 Patton Street (site of the present courthouse).

“Authorization to remove the massive figure was given by Mrs. B.B. Temple, who devotedly had given herself to the task of making the memorial possible and who, though approving of the memorial personally, assumed a highly altruistic stand by yielding to the pressure of public opinion which was opposed to its maintenance. … [W]hen she was approached by various persons who suggested the removal, she said … that she had told them that they could do as they pleaesed about the matter.”

As it turned out, Mrs. Temple had only raised enough to pay for the materials. It had been her hope and, indeed her belief, that once the statue was erected, further donations would come pouring in. Instead, what the sculpture received was harsh criticism.

The crowds which had not shown up to the official unveiling showed up in droves to see the spectacle of the dethroned monument to the southern woman standing in its shame inside the marble yard on Patton Street. The traffic of spectators became such a nuisance that Mr. Rowe decided to cut the statue up and end the matter once and for all. It may be supposed she did not go to waste, however, but was likely made into headstones.

Some suggested the city should replace the monument with one approved by the City Council in cooperation with the Daughters of the Confederacy, but, exhausted, the matter was dropped.  It does seem a pity that Mrs. Temple died just four years later without realizing the dream she shared with her late husband.

Sources:
Danville Register and Bee articles available through Newspapers.com. 1923-1927
Familysearch.org
Findagrave.com