Voie de la Liberté Milestone
Near Green Bay, Wisconsin
The stone marker here is a replica of a monument that stretches more than a thousand kilometers across Europe. It is called the Voie de la Liberté, the Way of Liberty, and it follows the path of General George Patton's Third United States Army after the D-Day invasion of June nineteen forty-four. A French liaison officer suggested marking the route of liberation with a stone at every kilometer, and the sculptor François Cogné designed the form, capped with a flame and a ring of stars.
More than eleven hundred of these markers run from Sainte-Mère-Église in Normandy across France and into Belgium, ending at Bastogne on the doorstep of Luxembourg. Along that road the Allies pushed back Nazi forces and freed France, Belgium, and Luxembourg, with Luxembourg City liberated on the tenth of September, nineteen forty-four. This copy stands here so an American community can honor that march to freedom, half a world away from where the original stones were laid.
