'History' - Gettysburg, PA - Figurative Public Sculpture on Waymarking.com

The Soldiers National Monument at the center of Gettysburg National Cemetery. It was here Abraham Lincoln delivered his Gettysburg Address at the dedication ceremony of this church. 'History' is part of the bottom four statues regularly spaced about the base of the statue, raised up several feet in the air. 'History' is a female figure in Classical robes, a garland around her head and a book in her lap. She has a pen in her hand or some kind of writing instrument and she records the name of the dead, a very long list.

I. The SOLDIER'S NATIONAL CEMETERY, Baltimore Road to Taneyton Road, at the southern boundary of Gettysburg, embraces 17 acres and contains graves of 3,604 soldiers, 979 of them unidentified. The cemetery was established through the efforts of Governor Andrew Gregg Curtin, of Pennsylvania, and David Wills, of Gettysburg. Curtin, visiting the battlefield shortly after the troops departed, was shocked to find that shallow, scattered graves revealed portions of uniformed corpses above ground. He took measures to collect the bodies and inter them decently. In the cemetery stands the 60-foot marble Soldiers' National Monument, designed by J.G. Batterson and executed in Italy under the supervision of Randolph Rogers. It occupies the site where Lincoln gave his address. Near by is the Lincoln Speech Memorial, a semicircular monument with a bust of the Great Emancipator. --- Pennsylvania: A Guide to the Keystone State, 1940; page 232

This is the first monument of any type to be placed at Gettysburg was the Soldiers National Monument in the National Cemetery, which is pretty important as there are literally hundreds of these things. The monument was designed by the Batterson-Canfield Company and sculpted by Randolph Rogers. The cornerstone was laid on July 4, 1865, and the full monument dedicated on July 1, 1869, Abraham Lincoln presiding. The white Westerly granite pedestal supports a shaft and marble statue entitled "Genius of Liberty". The top statue is of a woman holding some kind of ring in her proper left hand. The four buttresses on the pedestal support allegorical statues in white marble. Their meanings are:

• War, depicted as a seated American soldier resting after the conflict. The soldier is said to be relating the story of what happened at Gettysburg to the second monument.
• History, depicted as a woman recording the names and accomplishments of the dead in her book.
• Plenty, a woman with a sheaf of wheat over her arm and cornucopias filled with the fruits of the earth, the result of the peace at the end of the war. a Sheaf of Wheat is also a very Masonic symbol and no doubt Masons were involved in the monument's construction.
• Peace, a mechanic accompanied by machine cogs and heavy hammers. Although statues depicting peace are generally represented by female models, the seated mechanic in this work is male.