Once controversial, Mountaineer war memorial hides at the West Virginia capitol

CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Motorists driving along Kanawha Boulevard past the West Virginia Capitol may notice three Civil War monuments prominently arrayed along the lawn.

One is of a Union soldier wearing a cap, or kepi, of the kind associated with that uniform. Next is a larger-than-life-size Abraham Lincoln, standing with his head bowed. There's also a monument to Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, western Virginia’s most famous Confederate officer.

The Mountaineer War Memorial

A fourth Civil War monument is, however, hidden from view—tucked in a grove of trees along California Avenue. Yet, this statue, the Mountaineer War Memorial, may be the most interesting of them all.

The "Mountaineer" monument, as it is known today, was the brainchild of William Seymour Edwards, and its story reveals much about West Virginia’s unique and complicated relationship with the conflict that led to its birth.

William Henry Edwards

Edwards was born into a prominent family in 1856, just a few years before the outbreak of the Civil War. His father, William Henry Edwards, came from a wealthy New England family and arrived in western Virginia before the Civil War, having inherited 30,000 acres of land along the Kanawha River.

The elder Edwards developed some of the earliest commercial coal mines in the state, including the mines at Cabin Creek and Paint Creek. He was a man of high energy, broad intellect, and ceaseless activity. During the Civil War, he worked to keep the mines open to help power Union rail lines and factories, purchasing a tugboat to push coal-filled barges down the Kanawha River to the Ohio.

After the war, he immersed himself in the study of butterflies and wrote the three-volume work Butterflies of North America (1872, 1884, 1886), which remains the most important natural history on butterflies to this day.

His wealth enabled him to travel the world, and he wrote several books about these travels. Late in life, he turned to the study of Shakespeare’s plays and the question of their authorship in a provocative and widely read book entitled Shakesper Not Shakespeare (1893).

William Seymour Edwards

His son, William Seymour Edwards, inherited his father’s energy, wanderlust, and intellectual curiosity. But he also developed a passion for politics. Still a boy when the Civil War broke out, he was a deep admirer of Lincoln and a lifelong Republican.

During a peacetime stint in a local militia, the younger Edwards earned the rank of colonel, and for the rest of his life, he frequently referred to himself as "Colonel Edwards." In 1892, he published "The Coals and Cokes of West Virginia" and later published three books about his own adventure travels, including one about a trip he took to the Yukon during the Klondike Gold Rush.

Fighting stereotypes of West Virginians

By the early 20th century, Edwards was increasingly concerned with the negative stereotypes of the people of his state in the national media, as the New York Times and other eastern newspapers generated a steady dose of stories about the Hatfields and McCoys and other feuding mountain clans, portraying the people of the Appalachian mountains as savage and irrational “hillbillies.”

These cartoonish and condescending depictions of mountaineers did not align with his own view of the people of his state. His West Virginians were the stalwart and steady farmers, foresters, and miners who answered Lincoln’s call in 1861, first to preserve the Union, and then to dismantle slavery.

Commissioning the Mountaineer Statue

Pictured on the state seal above the motto “Montani Semper Liberi (Mountaineers Are Always Free),” Edwards believed that West Virginians had a proud history.

As he grew more concerned about the negative portrayals of the people of his home state, he decided that the state capitol needed a monument to celebrate the heroism of West Virginians during the Civil War.

He commissioned Henry Kirke Bush-Brown, a renowned sculptor who had already produced three equestrian statues of Union heroes on the Gettysburg battlefield, to create a monument to the West Virginia mountaineer.

Choosing the Mountaineer model

Because he was most interested in redeeming the reputation of the “race” of West Virginians on the national stage, he worked with Bush-Brown to identify an ideal West Virginia specimen of that “race.”

They found their specimens in Webster County in the form of two brothers, Ellis and Eli “Rimfire” Hamrick, who agreed to pose for the sculptor.

During the Civil War, approximately 20,000 West Virginians fought in Union blue uniforms, wearing the trademark Union kepi on their heads. But many others fought for the Union as home guards, partisan rangers, scouts, and in guerrilla units.

Because he wanted his statue to represent all West Virginia mountaineers who fought for the Union and freedom, he instructed the sculptor to portray his ideal West Virginian not in the standard federal Union uniform, but in the dress of a local member of a home guard unit.

Mountaineer plaque inscription

He explained this choice on a plaque that now adorns the pedestal of his monument:

"Erected to commemorate the Valor of Those who On April 15, 1861, in instant response to the first call of Abraham Lincoln formed themselves into the intrepid Home Guards who held in check unaided the forces of Wise, and Lee, and Jackson, until the Federal Armies came and driving the Confederates across the Alleghenies made possible the creation of the state of West Virginia; and also of those who as incomparable scouts & riflemen gave themselves to the nation and with dauntless courage and sagacity assisted in assuring to mankind “That Government of the People, By the People, for the People, shall not perish from the earth.”

This decision would ultimately come back to haunt Edwards.

Confederate counter-narrative

While Edwards' plan for the monument was already underway, another group was busy designing a statue that would tell a different story about western Virginians in the Civil War.

In 1910, the United Daughters of the Confederacy erected a statue of the western Virginia-born rebel icon Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson on the Capitol grounds, part of their broader national campaign to promote a pro-Confederate narrative of the war.

Certainly, some West Virginians saw in the stoic and disciplined Stonewall Jackson a fitting counterpoint to the negative stereotypes of mountain people that pervaded the national media.

However, others were troubled that a person who fought to destroy the Union and the creation of West Virginia was honored on the Capitol grounds before anyone who fought for the Union and West Virginia had been recognized there.

Charleston’s black newspaper, the Charleston Advocate covered the dedication ceremony of the Jackson statue, and noted that many of those in attendance wore “Lily White” buttons on their lapels, the symbol of a political movement that sought to impose Jim Crow segregation on the state’s public transportation and facilities, and that at least one politician who spoke at the event promised the assembled crowd that he intended to make racial segregation West Virginia law.

The state’s Union veterans also felt the sting. Local members of the Grand Army of the Republic—an organization dedicated to remembering the sacrifices of Union veterans—began raising funds for a Union soldier monument to be installed at the Capitol.

The 1912 Dedication Controversy

In 1912, two years after the Stonewall statue was erected, Edwards’ monument to a member of a Union home guard unit was ready for its unveiling. However, 1912 was proving to be a momentous year for both the state and Colonel Edwards.

In April of that year, coal miners in the Paint Creek and Cabin Creek mines went on strike for higher wages and safer working conditions. These were the coal fields that the Edwards’ family had first developed. That strike soon turned deadly and remained unresolved for more than a year.

This would be just the beginning of a decade of bloody mine wars across the state. Also at this time, Edwards’ name had climbed to the top of the list of candidates for one of the state’s U.S. Senate seats. He hoped that the dedication ceremony for his new statue would serve to unify a state divided not just by the memory of the Civil War, but also by an increasingly pronounced class divide between miners and mine owners.

And on a personal level, he must have assumed that a successful unveiling would increase his chances of winning a seat in the U.S. Senate.

Edwards devoted many hours to planning and preparing for the dedication day. He penned a song for the event, “The Hymn of the West Virginians,” and commissioned a composer to put it to music. He enlisted one thousand flower-carrying school kids and a one-hundred-strong adult choir to perform his new anthem at the dedication.

The chorus of Edwards’ now forgotten state song placed West Virginians at the center of the nation’s history,

They are calling from the mountains!
They are calling from the plain!
Hear the great refrain!
From Maine to San Francisco
O’er our blessed, cloud-kissed land!
West Virginia! West Virginia!
Rolls the echo grand!

Across five verses, Colonel Edwards’ hymn recounted the brave deeds of western Virginians as they fought in each of the nation’s wars.

A verse on the Civil War was a rebuke of the pro-Confederate Lost Cause interpretation of the conflict, embodied in the Stonewall statue, and also emphasized the unity of West Virginians of all classes:

And when the dark cloud of secession
Came creeping over the land;
When slavery’s silent aggression
From whisper turned into command
Then instant, from mountains and valley,
From mansion and cabin as one,
At the first call of Lincoln they rally,
And save what their fathers have won!

After the speeches and singing, Edwards planned to formally present the monument to the Grand Army of the Republic as a demonstration of his generosity and commitment to the state.

But at the last minute, the organization decided to boycott the ceremony and refuse the gift. This was not the statue of a federal soldier that they were seeking, and they feared that accepting it would undermine their efforts to see a kepi-wearing Union soldier soon adorn the statehouse grounds.

The distaste for Edwards' home guard statue by the Grand Army was at least partly the result of longstanding negative prejudices against scouts, home guards, and partisan rangers who took up arms in their own communities during the war.

One Ohio soldier depicted these prejudices in a piece he published in his hometown paper. He referred to these men as “greybacks” and claimed they were:

“A race peculiar to and indigenous to the Western Virginia hills. When you see a man here, dressed in the homespun of our ancestors, wearing deerskin moccasons and a black, lop-rimmed felt hat, with a piece of red flannel tucked under the band, you may swear he is a ‘Grey-back’ or, as denominated by himself, a ‘Home Guard!’

Why in the name of common sense, they claim the last title, I am unable to say, for whenever they receive an injury from a Bushwhacker, they run to us and make a doleful face, and want us to avenge them. My opinion of this sect is this: when Federal troops occupy the country, they are good, sound, Union-loving citizens, and believe in exerting every power to put down the rebellion; but when Floyd or Wise is here, they are as good secessionists . . .”

This questioning of both the courage and loyalty of men who served in irregular units was widespread both during and after the war, and it partly explains the organization’s angry response to Colonel Edwards’ statue. Years later, in 1930, when the organization finally dedicated the Union soldier monument it had long desired, one speaker could not resist taking a dig at Colonel Edwards’ statue.

“The squirrel hunter is alright,” he said. “He had his place in the war, too. But he doesn’t represent the Union soldier."

The last-minute withdrawal of support for the monument from the Grand Army was an unexpected embarrassment, and Edwards’ political opponents pounced on his misstep. His prospects for election to the Senate evaporated, and “The Hymn of the West Virginians” he created for the moment was soon forgotten.

The glorious moment of unity he had dreamed would emerge at the ceremony descended into an ordinary display of ungenerous and petty American politics.

The West Virginia Mine Wars

During the winter of 1912-13, the violence that roiled the Edwards’ family coal fields continued to escalate, and in February, the sheriff of Kanawha County sent an armored train dubbed “the Bull Moose Special” into the Holly Grove miners’ settlement, where his posse let loose with high-powered rifles and machine guns on the residents of that camp.

The last strikers did not give up the fight until July of that year, by which time more than fifty persons had met violent deaths, and many others had died from starvation and malnutrition. The West Virginia mine wars did not abate for another decade.

Edwards was not around to see the return of peace. He passed away in December 1915, less than three years after the disappointment of his big day at the Capitol. He was 59 years old.

Legacy of the Mountaineer War Memorial

His monument still resides on the new Capitol grounds, but not in the place of prominence on the front lawn that the Grand Army's monument, the Stonewall Jackson monument, and the Lincoln monument occupy. His Mountaineer is tucked around the side of the Capitol in a shady grove of trees, unnoticed by most people who walk past the Capitol today.

Bellefleur, the home William Henry Edwards built in 1871 near the Cabin Creek mine, still stands and is occupied by members of the Edwards family. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.