By Mark Wineka
mwineka@salisburypost.com
You’d never know it, but Fame and the dying soldier she carries under her wings have been places.
They’ve been to Brussels, Belgium, where this bronze grouping was cast at the H. Luppens & Co. Foundry.
They were part of an art exhibition in Paris, where a newspaper of the day said people appreciated the monument for its “sentiment and beauty as a work of art.”
They traveled to New York, where Salisbury resident Mrs. M.W. Shober first viewed them in the studio of their sculptor, Frederic Wellington Ruckstuhl, and decided they constituted the Confederate monument Rowan County was looking for.
They’ve been to Cincinnati, where in late 1990 and early 1991, Karkadoulias Bronze Art Co. cleaned, repaired and brightened the pair.
But for the past century, except for that brief trip to Ohio, the bronze grouping of Fame and her soldier have stayed put at Innes and Church streets.
Standing watch, they have become a cherished part of Salisbury’s landscape.
“What it means to me is something very familiar, and it makes me feel safe,” says Sue Curtis, who with her husband, Ed, is the foremost authority on the monument’s history.
“… You feel safe under wings.”
The Confederate Monument ó arguably Salisbury’s most iconic symbol ó will mark its 100th birthday Sunday. Its owner, the Robert F. Hoke Chapter No. 78 of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, plans a program at 10 a.m. Saturday to celebrate the occasion.
The program, free and open to the public, will be held at Rowan Public Library’s Stanback Auditorium.
“Gloria Victis,” meaning “Glory to the Defeated” or “Glory to the Conquered,” towers above the Salisbury streetscape.
From the bottom of its base in the median to the top of its wings is almost 23 feet.
The grouping itself is 14 feet tall, and it rests on a rectangular pink granite base that’s more than 5 feet high.
It’s not uncommon for students touring the downtown to stop and stare at the dramatic piece.
Tourists linger and take photographs.
While it was dedicated to Rowan’s 2,500 Confederate soldiers, Curtis believes it has evolved into “an all-wars monument” for the city. Present-day veterans find comfort in seeing Fame support the dying soldier as she prepares to crown him with a wreath.
The monument’s image has been reproduced in jewelry, paintings, drawings, logos and more.
“It’s an important piece of art to us,” says Sue Curtis, president of the local UDC chapter, “but it’s also just very special.”
Some 4,000 people attended the sculpture’s dedication May 10, 1909, also the state’s Confederate Memorial Day. It had taken almost a decade for the community, led by the UDC chapter, to raise Ruckstuhl’s $10,000 price for the grouping.
Ruckstuhl (he later changed his name to Ruckstull) was born in France in 1853, but he grew up in St. Louis and attended Washington University Art School there. He eventually set up his first art studio in Paris, and by 1892, also had a studio in New York.
The Curtises say Ruckstuhl actually created “Gloria Victis” in 1891 and would cast two of the monuments.
The sister statue to Salisbury’s Confederate monument stands on Mount Royal Street in Baltimore and was dedicated in 1903. It is different from Salisbury’s monument in that the soldier carries a furled flag, not a broken gun.
It’s not known which monument was cast first, but they were made at different foundries. A New York company produced Baltimore’s monument, while Salisbury’s was cast in Belgium.
With Mrs. Shober’s enthusiastic report, the UDC chapter in Rowan County decided as early as 1901 that it wanted Ruckstuhl’s impressive “Gloria Victis,” and it appointed noted Salisbury author Frances Fisher Tiernan (whose pen name was Christian Reid) as chair of the Monument Committee.
She allowed proceeds of her play, “Under the Southern Cross,” to go toward the monument campaign.
The statue actually arrived in Salisbury in 1905, while the fundraising continued. Sue Curtis says the chapter’s history isn’t clear, but the statue either was stored in a warehouse for the next four years, or it was in somebody’s yard.
In 1908, the Salisbury Board of Aldermen and Mayor A.H. Boyden deeded the site for the monument to the UDC, and that piece of land also remains in the chapter’s possession.
By the time $9,000 was raised, attention shifted to the need for a granite base.
The UDC women’s spouses successfully assisted in that $1,500 fund-raising project, and the stone, engraved on all sides, came from the Balfour company in Granite Quarry.
On the day of the monument’s dedication, rain threatened continually. A band played, and special guests included Anna Morrison Jackson, the widow of Stonewall Jackson; Ruckstuhl, the sculptor; and 162 surviving Confederate veterans.
Tiernan read her poem, “Gloria Victis.”
The Curtises have traveled extensively to flesh out information on the statue, and they are constantly researching the life of Ruckstuhl, who was well known for his bronze and marble works.
His pieces can be found in places such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Library of Congress, the Pennsylvania State Capitol Building in Harrisburg, the State House in Columbia, S.C., the Petersburg, Va., Battlefield and Statuary Hall in the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C.
He once submitted a plan to greatly enlarge Statuary Hall so that each state would have a room.
Ed and Sue Curtis have collected newspapers, magazines and books related to Salisbury’s statue and Ruckstuhl’s other works.
They learned that Ruckstuhl used an 1861 photograph of Confederate Lt. Henry Howe Cook of Franklin, Tenn., as the model for the dying soldier in Fame’s arms.
The Curtises made a pilgrimage to Franklin, Tenn., to learn more about Cook, who had been captured in the war and was sent to several prisons, including South Carolina, where he became one of “the Immortal 600.” He was not released from the Fort Delaware prison until June 1865.
Howe returned to Franklin, became an attorney, a Williamson County judge and chancellor for Davidson and Williamson counties. He died of cancer Nov. 2, 1921, and is buried in Mount Hope Cemetery in Franklin, where the Curtises placed a wreath for him several years ago.
Salisbury’s “angel statue” has taken its hits through the years.
Before its celebrated $14,000 cleaning in 1990-91, Fame and her soldier were black and green with the grime of some 80-plus years of neglect.
Tears seemed to run down their faces from the corrosion eating at the monument from the inside out.
The UDC has a fund started for its future maintenance and is selling signed and numbered prints by Virginia Civil War artist Henry Kidd to go toward Saturday’s program.
Over time, wayward vehicles have often run into the monument granite base, but the UDC members want it to stay where it has been for the past century.
“It’s a landmark in Salisbury, and why would you want to move a landmark?” Ed Curtis says.