The (Im)Movable Monument: Identity, Space, and The Louisville Confederate Monument

Despite Kentucky’s status as a Union state during the Civil War, the Louisville Confederate Soldiers’ Monument, erected in 1895 by the Kentucky Confederate Women’s Monument Association, is a representative example of Confederate memorialization in the South. Its history through the twentieth century, culminating in the creation of the nearby Freedom Park to counterbalance the monument’s symbolism and its ultimate removal and relocation to nearby Brandenburg, Kentucky, in 2017, reveals the relationship between such monuments and the Lost Cause, urban development, public history, and public memory. Using the Louisville Confederate Monument as a case study, this essay considers the ways in which Confederate monuments not only reflect the values of the people who erected them, but ultimately shape and are shaped by their environments.