Civil War Monument, East Providence, RI

We were driving to Dick and Trauti's on Route 44 in East Providence, and within two minutes passed not one, but two monuments with statues of a soldier on them!  And this is in East Providence which is much smaller in population than Providence itself, with one-quarter the population.  The current population is 47,000.  I mention this fact because on the face of the rock, are a list of nearly 280 names of soldiers from East Providence that died during the Civil War!  Local politics split over slavery during the American Civil War, as many had ties to Southern cotton and the slave trade. Despite ambivalence concerning the war, the number of military volunteers routinely exceeded quota.  I have come to love these beautiful sculptures of soldiers that I have seen in the last ten years or so.  I think the first one I noticed was in front of City Hall in my home town of Milford, Connecticut and I posted it on my blog at the time. Here is a link: WWI Doughboy, Milford.  Two years later I really saw, for the first time, a sculpture of a soldier in Glen Cove which I hadn't really noticed and I have been by it thousands of times since I arrived here in 1966.  The Soldier. It was by the SAME sculptor!  So these two figures in East Providence meant I would have to come back and photograph them and find out more about them, which I have done.

Boy I didn't do a good job on this "assignment" because I only photographed the top of the plaque and this is only one-third of the list of names, totaling nearly 280 men who gave their lives.  I was not able, by the way, to ascertain who the sculptor was.  Tomorrow I will show you the WW I memorial with statue.