The Civil War monument was a grand and expensive construction on Monument Hill—which was named for it—dedicated in 1871. Today Monument Hill is covered with buildings of the Community College of Allegheny County; the monument was moved to its present location in 1931, where it looks over Lake Elizabeth in West Park. When it was moved, it was substantially redesigned, but many parts of the old monument were incorporated in the new one.
This part of the shaft, for example, which is now near the base, was the whole column of the original monument, as we see in this old postcard:
The statue of Fame on top of the monument was damaged by a lightning strike in 2008; the repaired monument was rededicated in 2016.
An eagle examines us from behind the Allegheny County arms.
The left half of the inscription: “Erected to the memory of the 4,000 brave men of Allegheny County who fell in the great struggle to maintain the integrity of our Union. The eye of God rests upon their graves even when unmarked by man, and their sleeping dust shall arise in the morning of the resurrection.”
The right half is taken from the end of Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address: “With malice towards none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us finish the work we are in to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphans, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”
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