A Confederate monument disappears: 'What's the big ordeal?'

FRANKLIN, Ohio – Once a week every summer for the past 55 years, Larry Etter pushed his lawn mower into a culvert and past a stand of trees on the edge of his yard so he could trim the grass and weeds around a memorial to Gen. Robert E. Lee.

As far as Etter could tell, he was the only one who paid any attention to the thing.

“They probably didn’t even know it was there,” he said of his neighbors.

They do now. In the past week, the stone memorial honoring the Confederate general has inspired a Change.org petition, a heated town hall meeting, a demonstration by Lee fans armed with guns and Confederate flags, and a late-night mission by the city’s public works department to haul the monument away under cover of darkness.

It’s been an eventful week for a memorial that was last in the news in the early 1980s, when a motorist took a turn too fast and crashed into it.

But after the racial violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, and with calls to remove Confederate memorials growing louder, this tiny patch of ground in Franklin is now on the front lines of a cultural civil war that’s once again dividing America.

On its face, the fight in Franklin is over history and how to remember it, but it’s about more than that. It’s about what these symbols from the past mean to Americans today, and why so many will go to such lengths to defend them or tear them down.

“I think the problems of the country are spreading to small towns all over the place,” said Sonny Lewis, Franklin’s city manager.

The dispute so far in this southern Ohio town, about 40 miles north of Cincinnati, has been free of violence but loaded with the kind of charged rhetoric that runs through much of the nation’s political discourse.

A Change.org petition signed by 661 people described the Lee monument as a celebration of “slavery and hate.” Supporters of the monument showed up last week waving Confederate battle flags and shouting over a megaphone.

“Don’t let them take our history away,” they said.

Later, someone put up a sign where the monument once stood describing Black Lives Matter as a “terrorist organization.” The civil rights group appears to have no presence in Franklin, but some blamed it for the monument flap anyway.

If town hall meetings and informal surveys are any indication, the sentiment here favors bringing the monument back. But it’s complicated. Not everyone embraces the guys carrying battle flags and no one is openly championing the cause of white supremacy, as protesters did in Charlottesville.

Some say the monument should return because it has historic value. Some embrace President Donald Trump’s controversial comments after Charlottesville and say they’re sick of “political correctness.” And some say they simply don’t want outsiders, like those who signed the petition, telling them what to do.

“I think they should just leave things alone,” said Judy Vullen, who’s lived in Franklin for 45 years and didn’t know the monument existed until it was removed last weekend. “It’s wrong what they did.”

Etter said he’d welcome the monument back, but not because he has sympathy for the Confederate cause. Mostly, he said, he just wants the protesters to stay off his lawn.

“I think they were hoping someone would show up so they could fight them,” Etter said of the crowd that took over his yard last weekend. “I’m glad that didn’t happen.”

How did it get here?

It’s surprising to many in Franklin that the debate over Confederate monuments is happening here at all.

Named for Benjamin Franklin, the town was hundreds of miles from the nearest Confederate state during the Civil War and there’s no evidence Lee ever visited or had ties to anyone here.

What’s more, Ohio was a major contributor to the Union effort, both in blood and treasure. The cemetery across the street from the site of the Lee monument is filled with the graves of men who fought Lee’s Confederate Army.

Yet there it sat for almost a century, a huge stone with a plaque depicting Lee on horseback. “In loving memory of Robert E. Lee,” the inscription reads. “And to mark the route of the Dixie Highway.”

That last bit is the first clue about how a Confederate general got a memorial in a Union town.

The Dixie Highway was a hodge-podge of connected roads running from the Midwest to the South. When a stretch of the highway in Franklin was dedicated in 1928, the United Daughters of the Confederacy proposed marking the occasion with a monument to Robert E. Lee.

It was a curious conflation of history and highway construction, but there’s no indication anyone questioned the logic at the time.

The dedication ceremony featured a quartet that sang “Carry Me Back to Old Virginia,” Lee’s home state, and a speech by the president of the Cincinnati chapter of the Daughters of the Confederacy. The monument has stood at the same location ever since, the only one of Ohio’s four Confederate monuments not connected to a grave site.

So why was a town in a Union state OK with this in the first place? Much like today, the decision may have had more to do with the cultural attitudes of the time than with Civil War history.

“We’re talking about a time when there was a sort of nostalgia for the Old South,” said Kevin Levin, a Boston-based author and historian who has written extensively on the war and its monuments.

He said monuments erected in the early 20th Century, particularly in the South, often went beyond honoring Confederate war dead and instead portrayed the Confederacy and its leaders as heroes of a noble cause. Sometimes, Levin said, the monuments reinforced the authority of whites over blacks, especially when they were displayed in public places such as parks and courthouses.

That’s not how the monument’s defenders see the Lee memorial in Franklin. They say Lee and the Dixie Highway, which didn’t exist during Lee’s lifetime, are historically important and it’s right to honor both with the monument.

They don’t see the monument as a defense of the Confederacy, but rather as a recognition of its place in American history.

“I think it should be put back up there,” said Jo Ann Powell, owner of the Take-a-Look hair salon, just down the road from the site of the Lee monument. “You can’t erase history. Next thing you know, they’re going to be burning books.”

Powell put up a sign during the protests last weekend that read, “Honk If All Lives Matter!” She blames outsiders, such as Black Lives Matter, for making a big deal of Confederate monuments and said she agrees with Trump’s recent defense of those monuments.

“They say it reminds people of a time when there were slaves,” Powell said. “No, it doesn’t. No one alive today was a slave or owns a slave. What’s the big ordeal?”

'We're not going anywhere'

No one is sure exactly when the monument became a big ordeal in Franklin, but it happened soon after the violence in Charlottesville.

Days later, city officials received a Change.org petition seeking the monument’s removal. “We cannot come together as a country until we decide to stop celebrating these symbols of slavery and hate,” the petitioners wrote.

Lewis, the city manager, said he was on vacation in California when the decision to remove the monument was made, so he can’t say exactly what happened. But after doing some checking, he said, city officials determined the Lee monument posed a safety hazard because it was in a right-of-way.

So they took it down, sometime after midnight last Thursday.

“When something like that is brought to our attention, we have to act on it,” Lewis said.

Several residents used colorful language to describe the move. “That was chicken s--- to do it that way,” said a man leaving AmVets Post 120 in downtown Franklin. Teresa Bogie, a volunteer there, agreed. “It’s been there 90 years and it’s never bothered no one.”

Clarissa Walton moved to Franklin just one month ago, so she doesn’t know much about the Lee monument. But as the mother of a 22-year-old son, Xavian, who is biracial, she’s leery of anything that stirs up racial tensions.

If the bickering continues, Xavian said, he’ll do his best to stay out of it, even if the dispute makes life less comfortable for him in a town that’s 96 percent white.

“We’re here. We’re not going anywhere,” he said. “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but your Confederate flag will never hurt me.”

For now, a small Confederate flag is all that marks the spot on the site of the Lee monument, which has been moved to an undisclosed location.

City officials say the monument technically belongs to Franklin Township, since the township owned the land when it was erected in 1928. But township officials, who will hold a public meeting Thursday night to discuss the matter, say it belongs to the city.

Etter, who mowed around the monument for 55 years, said he’d be happy to take it off their hands. He said he doesn’t care about the Confederacy and he’d be fine if he never saw another Confederate battle flag.

But it seems strange to him to see a muddy hole where the monument sat for all those years on the edge of his yard.

“I kind of got attached to it,” he said.