A Confederate memorial is slated to be erected this month near Montgomery, Alabama, notwithstanding mounting efforts to dismantle similar monuments across the country.
The monument to “unknown Confederate soldiers” is currently being installed next to the Dry Creek RV Park in Brantley, Ala., and will be formally unveiled during an afternoon ceremony slated for Aug. 27, AL.com reported Friday.
“The public’s invited,” Jimmy Hill, commander of the Alabama division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, told the website. “Anyone who wants to can come to celebrate the unveiling of another monument to Confederate soldiers.”
Dry Creek’s operator, fellow Sons of Confederate Veterans member David Coggins, has maintained a Confederate memorial park on an adjacent plot of privately owned land since 2015, AL.com reported, the likes of which is currently adorned with replica cannons, lights and various commemorative markers.
“It’s been a dream for him to make the park better and better,” Mr. Hill told the website, starting with this month’s unveiling of the unknown soldiers monument.
“He’s putting it up [to memorialize] soldiers who came out of Crenshaw County or surrounding counties who never came home,” Mr. Hill told the website.
“He had the marker made over in Georgia for the unknown Confederate soldiers. It won’t be as elaborate as the unknown soldier’s tomb in Arlington,” he added.
Mr. Coggins did not respond to requests for comment, the report said.
Plans for a new Confederate monument in Brantley, about 50 miles south of Montgomery, were announced on the Alabama division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans’s website Sunday, AL.com reported, a day after a demonstrator died while protesting a rally attended by white supremacists held in support of a statue commemorating Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia. Heather Heyer, 33, died after a man identified as an attendee of that rally drove his automobile into a crowd of counterprotesters, injuring 19 others and spurring calls for the dismantling of similar monuments throughout the country.
This month’s unveiling was planned prior to last week’s tragedy, Mr. Hill told the website.
• Andrew Blake can be reached at ablake@washingtontimes.com.
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