Monuments and memorials

Beneath the Lincoln Memorial's gleaming marble columns lies a vast hidden basement — complete with century-old worker graffiti, naturally formed stalactites, and a tiny ecosystem that thrived undisturbed in the dark for decades.

By the time she set out to build monuments, Daisy Breaux was a woman accustomed to getting what she wanted. Unfortunately, her plans for a memorial to America's mothers never got off the ground. In a legal snarl, she accused the architect of blackmail and extortion. He charged her in turn with sabotaging the project from the start.

In the 1840s, northern abolitionist Charles T. Torrey had had enough of intellectual debates and meetings, so he headed south and teamed up with Thomas Smallwood to free hundreds of slaves in the D.C. area. Following his arrest in 1844, Torrey was imprisoned in the Maryland Penitentiary where he would become a martyr for his cause.

Half a century after the Civil War, Southerners were trying to change what the country remembered about the rebellion, including the realities of slavery. One way that they did this was by putting up monuments all over the United States glorifying Confederate heroes and "faithful slaves." While dozens of memorials and statues were erected, one in Washington, D.C. fortunately never came to fruition.

Recently, Washington’s Black community has – rightfully – pushed for more memorials and markers honoring Black leaders and the city's rich African American heritage. While we wait for our city’s landscape to reflect more of its history, we highlight some existing sites that deserve more attention.

With the recent protests in response to the murder of George Floyd and the continued unearthing of our nation’s racist history, conversation regarding what history we set in stone is back at the forefront. In the District, memorial removals are extremely rare occurrences, but that doesn’t mean they have never happened before. In the late 1950s, two of the Capitol building’s most significant monuments were removed, despite the fact that a future president himself advocated for their installment: Horatio Greenough’s The Rescue and Luigi Persico’s Discovery of America. Largely due to public pressure, the statues were taken down during the building’s remodeling in 1958 and never re-erected.

Today, discussion regarding public monuments and which historical figures deserve to be memorialized is source of a heated debate among historians and the general public alike. But even a hundred years ago, D.C. lawmakers spent nearly fifteen years bickering over whether a certain someone’s likeness should or should not be set in stone.

To the average visitor, the Lincoln Memorial appears to be a timeless part of the National Mall. However, this classical commemoration to the sixteenth president was dedicated less than one hundred years ago, in the presence of Civil War veterans, Robert Todd Lincoln, two Presidents and a crowd of thousands. 

Colonel Ninian Beall, a towering Scottish settler who helped found Georgetown and lived to 92, earned a bronze‑plated memorial in 1910—complete with a hidden surprise. The stone carver was an aviation enthusiast who tucked newspaper clippings and a biplane photo into a compartment inside memorial, turning a colonial tribute into a quirky time capsule.