Lee Monument - Fort Myers, Florida - Taken March of 2021
(Courtesy of Chet Wallace)
(Note to reader: As part of my Public History class in my master's program at KSU, I decided to write about the Robert E. Lee Monument located in downtown Fort Myers, Florida. What follows was submitted on April 7, 2021, when the granite portion of the monument still stood but the bust of Lee had been removed. Since then, the entire monument has been taken down. This is an account of the controversy of the removal of Confederate monuments in the wake of the Floyd killing.)
Every town and city in the southern United States has at least one Confederate monument that is the topic of controversy in these times. Downtown Ft. Myers, Florida has the Robert E. Lee Confederate monument near the courthouse in a median on Monroe Street, very close to the Caloosahatchee River. I will analyze the monument and its history from the time of its inception, its dedication in 1966, and to the present, then determine if it is a monument that should be taken down.
The Laetitia Ashmore Nutt chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy dedicated the monument on Wednesday January 19, 1966, the 159th birthday of Robert E. Lee. It is a bronze bust of Lee on top of a gray Georgia granite shaft that stands about ten feet tall. According to the man who built the monument, George E. Crone, it was the first monument dedicated to General Lee in the south outside of Richmond, Virginia and the only one erected within the past thirty years before it was dedicated.
The erection of this monument was 50 years in the making. The Butt chapter of the UDC was formed in 1913 and the idea for the monument began immediately, but in 1915 there was a dire need for a local hospital, so the UDC used the funds for the monument to build Lee Memorial Hospital, which was also named after Lee and is, still to this day, the biggest hospital system in the area. Also, Lee County, in which Ft. Myers stands, was named after the Confederate general twenty-two years after the end of the Civil War by Captain F. A. Hendry. He said that “those pioneer residents felt a deep devotion and loyalty to their former commander in chief.” One thing that is ironic is that the street name of Monroe that the monument sits on presently, was the former name of the county.
The tarpaulin that covered the monument was removed during the dedication by Dean and Duane DesRochers, grandsons of a charter member of the Butt chapter of the UDC. So, this fact fits with the idea of historian and author Karen Cox mentioning in her book Dixie’s Daughters that children were usually instilled to pull the tarpaulin covering a Confederate monument when it was dedicated. The bronze bust was sculpted and cast by Aldo Pero in Italy.
The chairman of the county commission at the time, Julian L. Hudson, said at the ceremony that the monument “expresses the spirit of humanitarianism for which Lee is famed.” Master of Ceremonies, Hugh Richards, called the dedication not to a Confederate leader “but to a great American, recognized in both North and South.”
On my visit, the granite part of the monument is still intact but the bust of Robert E. Lee has been taken down from the top. On the south side of the monument is the inscription “Robert E. Lee 1807 – 1870”. On the north side of the monument is this inscription: “The erection of this monument was sponsored by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, Fort Myers Chapter, and completed in 1966 A.D. with the assistance of the citizens of Lee County in honor of the man for whom this county was named.” Both east and west sides of the monument are blank.
This monument is controversial because it is a Confederate monument that many in Ft. Myers want taken down but also some that don’t. Frequent television and newspaper articles have been written about it in the recent past.
As of an online article on March 24th for the local NBC news station, the local chapter of the NAACP is calling for the entire monument to be removed permanently. As mentioned before, only the granite pedestal still exists. In June of last year, the Sons of Confederate Veterans actually removed the bust from the pedestal for safe keeping because of the recent protests involving the removal of Confederate monuments in the wake of the George Floyd killing. They have every intention of eventually putting the bust back. Ft. Myers Mayor Kevin Anderson said at the time “there is a state law against destroying military monuments. We have to be careful in how we move it.” Other ideas are in the works of what to do with the median that the monument sits on. Under the monument also exists a time capsule that was encased at the same time that the monument was erected, which will remain in place, and the area will possibly be covered over with memorial bricks that will be sold to fund the $60,000 needed to dismantle the monument. While there is talk about what to do, the NAACP said to local news stations that the city is stalling and that they want the monument taken down immediately. City leaders are expected to meet in April of this year to make decisions on the future of the monument.
The monument has had a past history of vandalism. On March 12, 2019, the bust of Robert E. Lee was found taken from the top of the granite stone and lying on its side next to the monument. The Sons of Confederate Veterans arrived to place the bust of Lee back on top of the granite stone. One thing that I did notice when I visited the monument was that right-angle metal fencing that surrounds the base of the monument were missing from two corners. Most likely this was taken down at the point that this vandalism occurred in 2019. No other vandalism can be seen outside of the bust and the two corner metal fencing pieces missing. No physical vandalism can be seen to the granite monument itself.
Various protests have occurred within the past year around the monument itself. One that is quite telling occurred on June 6, 2020, in which Gen Z activists and NAACP members lay around the monument and the surrounding street in an arrest position to protest the recent killing of George Floyd. They want to move the monument by displaying it in a museum to correctly contextualize it.
No contextual markers exist at the site. It sits on a busy street in downtown Ft. Myers. As I was taking pictures of the monument, accompanied by my parents, a man crossed the street to tell his thoughts that the monument shouldn’t be taken down because it is “destroying our history.” This man, somewhat disheveled because he was doing some manual labor work at the time, probably assumed we were tourists because I was taking pictures. He said that he had lived in Ft. Myers his whole life, as well as his ancestors, and didn’t want the monument coming down. I responded to him that “our history can be preserved in many ways, not only by erecting monuments” at which the man walked away grumbling.
I believe that the Lee monument should be taken down, like all other monuments to the Confederacy in the country. It is a reminder of our dark past in American history. After all, if people refuse to want Confederate monuments taken down, they can always read about it in books. This experience of visiting a Confederate monument was an eye-opening experience that has brought the history of Confederate monuments more to my attention.
(More photos taken of the monument in March 2021.)
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