The oldest war monument in America is a cairn of stones in Cumberland, Rhode Island, raised in 1676. The newest are still being dedicated. Forty-six monuments, memorials and markers along one road — three and a half centuries of names the highway drives past at sixty miles an hour.
Before this was a highway it was already a road of goodbyes. Baltimore raised its Battle Monument while the defenders of 1814 were alive to see it. Bridgeport dedicated its Soldiers and Sailors Memorial while the widows of the Civil War were still young. Their grandchildren got old looking at them.
Stone is not the promise we think it is. Delaware County dedicated a triumphal arch to its World War One dead before five thousand spectators; thirty-two years later the engineers widening the bridge called it “a monstrosity” and chiseled it to rubble. The bronze tablets — 280 men and two women — have been moved twice since. The rest of the trail weathers more politely: rain down the lettering, lichen in the dates.
The carving never stopped. NC State’s Belltower took sixteen years and the WPA to finish. The Stone of Hope opened in 2011. A church fence in Philadelphia takes a paper tag for every neighbour lost to a bullet — and every December, wreaths made in Columbia Falls, Maine, ride this road south to more than two thousand cemeteries.
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