The Minnesota Monument
Near Little Rock, Arkansas
This memorial in the Little Rock National Cemetery was a gift from a state more than a thousand miles away. The Minnesota legislature created a commission to honor its sons who had died in the South during the Civil War and lay buried in distant national cemeteries. The result was this granite and bronze monument, dedicated in nineteen sixteen.
It remembers Minnesota soldiers who fell in Arkansas, thirty-six of them buried right here. The bronze figure shows a Union soldier standing bareheaded, his head slightly bowed, hands resting on the butt of an inverted rifle. The dedication drew state officials and aging veterans.
