Since the dawn of American independence, the strength of this nation has been measured not in the power of its government, but in the spirit of its people—everyday citizens who, when united for a singular purpose, can do anything…even when government can’t.
This is the Forgotten History of the First Washington Monument.
The sun rose over the dew-covered hills on a warm Fourth of July morning and the people of Boonsboro, Maryland gathered in the town square to mark the 51st anniversary of American independence—but not with a parade or party, with a mission.
Two years earlier, in 1825, the Maryland General Assembly had announced plans to build a monument to President George Washington but, the people of Boonsboro noted, like with most government plans it went nowhere.
For more than a quarter century after the first president’s death, Congress too had been unable to agree on a design for a memorial in Washington, D.C. and the people of Boonsboro believed that neither their national nor state politicians would ever actually build one.
So, they decided to erect their own, and what better day to do so than on Independence Day?
“The men seemed actuated by a spirit of zeal and ardor almost bordering on enthusiasm,” one of them, William Bell, wrote in a local newspaper. They weren’t master craftsmen or stone masons, but farmers and laborers dedicated to succeeding where their government could not.
“Though the majority of them were from that class of society who earn their bread by the sweat of their brow,” Bell noted, “I can say safely, and as proudly say, that not one of them returned home intoxicated, so much superior was their desire to accomplish the work undertaken than the love of self-gratification.”
Their love was for their country and its father, and they climbed South Mountain with tools in hand. By the late afternoon, they had constructed the very first monument to George Washington in the young nation’s history—a full 23 years before construction on the far more famous one in the nation’s capital even began.
A stone tower in the shape of a milk bottle about 15 feet high and 54 feet in circumference, the Boonsboro monument was crudely built but uniquely American in its imperfection.
“As it was raised in much haste,” Bell explained, “we cannot boast the regular accuracy of perfect beauty, yet it possesses both solidity and durability. It has such strength as I think will preserve it for ages.”
Within just a few decades, though, the monument began to crumble. The townspeople didn’t use mortar to bind its stones together, and over time they began to collapse. By the onset of the Civil War, just a small portion of it remained standing. During the Battle of South Mountain in 1862, Confederate General Robert E. Lee mistook it for a Union outpost and attacked it—finding not enemy soldiers but Boonsboro locals gathered to watch the battle.
20 years later, the monument was almost totally in ruins, but the people of Boonsboro didn’t turn to the government to pay for the repairs. Instead, a private organization called the Order of Odd Fellows stepped in and financed a complete reconstruction and rededicated it in August 1881.
By the early 1900s, however, it had fallen into disrepair again as vandals targeted it and, according to one local legend, an angry father blew part of it up with dynamite after discovering his daughter’s boyfriend had been taking here there. Once again, the people of Boonsboro knew they needed to save their monument, which was, as the Baltimore Sun noted, “not only a memorial to Washington” but “equally a memorial to the patriotic spirit of the Marylanders of 1827 who conceived it and whose strong hands built it.”
Once again, those patriotic Marylanders didn’t rely on government and instead took matters into their own hands. The Washington County Historical Society purchased the monument and surrounding land in 1822 and then 12 years later the organization’s president led a group of Boonsboro citizens in purchasing ten more acres of land to deed to the State of Maryland for a new state park.
From there, the people worked hand in hand with government through President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps to fully restore the monument to its original design, but bigger and far sturdier, so much so that one park superintendeent remarked that “nothing short of a bomb will ever destroy the monument again.”
On July 4, 1836—109 years after that sunny morning in Boonsboro—the permanent monument was rededicated; not just to Washington, but to the American spirit that both he and those who had worked on the structure for the past century embodied.
“In dedicating this monument,” University of Maryland President H.C. Byrd told the gathered crowd, “we are not so much dedicating a pile of cold stones as we are dedicating ourselves to the perpetuation of certain ideas of government and the relationship of government to its people.”
And the First Washington Monument stands to this day as a testament to the people of Boonsboro’s and, really, the American people’s selflessness, dedication, and independence.