Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Arch
Hartford
May 30, 2024
There are few structures in Hartford as distinctive as the Soldiers and Sailors Arch located on Trinity Street. The Bushnell Park Conservancy offers free tours of the arch every Thursday, so this was the perfect opportunity to learn about it.
Dedicated on Sept, 17, 1886, the 24th anniversary of the Battle of Antietam, the arch serves as a dual memorial. It honors the 4,000 Hartford citizens who fought in the Civil War for the Union, and the 400 who died. It also honors Hartford architect George Keller, who designed the arch. His ashes, along with those of his wife Mary, are interred in the eastern tower.
One of the most interesting aspects of the tour was learning about Airrion Bethea, a seventh-grade student from Fox Middle School who noticed that the statues on the arch only depicted one African American, a freed slave. He asked about the free people who volunteered for service in the Union Army. Through his research efforts, he discovered 128 African American residents of Hartford who fought for the Union. During the arch’s rededication after renovations in the 1980s, a new plaque was installed to honor all soldiers who fought for the Union.
After the downstairs tour guide finished talking about the arch, we were led up the 96 stairs to the top by Chris Kelly, another volunteer tour guide. Once we reached the top, we had a beautiful view of the state Capitol and the surrounding city. Chris drew our eyes upward even farther, to the terracotta statues of the archangels Raphael and Gabriel.
“They’re facing south, proclaiming their judgment and wrath towards the Confederacy for the Civil War,” he explained. The statues are recreations, as the originals were taken down during the 1980s renovations and placed in a shed that caught fire. The fire didn’t damage the statues, but the bulldozer that razed the remains of the shed destroyed them.
Chris and I struck up a conversation that lasted much longer than the tour. Before long we were the only ones up there, talking about everything from politics to sports. He told me about the champion trees that dot the landscape of Bushnell Park. I’m really into trees, and when he told me that the park offers a guided tree tour on the weekends, I marked it down in my calendar, so stay tuned dear reader.
We mostly talked about lesser-known trivia about the arch and Connecticut’s role in the Civil War. For example, the infamous phrase “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!” was uttered by Admiral David Glasgow Farragut while he was aboard his flagship, the USS Hartford, during the Battle of Mobile Bay in Alabama. Admiral Andrew Foote, who commanded the Mississippi River Squadron, was born in New Haven.
Aside from memorializing the efforts of the soldiers who destroyed slavery and saved the Union, the arch itself is a beautiful piece of art on its own. The brownstone came from Portland, Connecticut. The most striking part of the monument is the terracotta frieze, which depicts images from the War Between the States. In the center of the frieze is Hartford’s motto; Post Nubila Phoebus -- after the clouds the sun. It’s a fitting motto for the arch as well. After the storm of the Civil War, the sun rose on a country that still had decades of work to do, but at least no longer held millions of its citizens in bondage.
NEXT
The Bushnell Park Conservancy hosts tours of the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Arch on Thursdays at noon.
Jamil heads to the Greek Festival to learn how to pronounce gyros.
