In Virginia, Gov. Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat elected by a wide margin in November, recently signed laws to further distance the state from its past as the capital of the Confederacy, the 11 slave-holding states that seceded from the country, igniting the Civil War.
Good.
In Maryland, a Union border state, monuments honoring the Confederacy and those who supported it came down a decade ago. Until that happened, Confederate monuments outnumbered those that celebrated the Union, an insult to the thousands who served and died to save the country in the 1860s.
Today you can still admire the Union Soldiers and Sailors Monument in Baltimore’s Wyman Park. The bronze sculpture was erected in 1909 to honor the estimated 60,000 Marylanders who fought for the Union. The United States Colored Troops Memorial Statue stands in Lexington Park, St. Mary’s County, and there are monuments honoring Union outfits at Antietam National Battlefield.
There’s one more Union memorial, far less known, inside an old church in Lansdowne, Baltimore County. But its future is uncertain.
I did not know about the Hull Memorial at Lansdowne Christian Church until alerted to it by Scott Murphy-Neilson, who attended the church while growing up.
Here’s the background, as I reported it in my Baltimore Sun column three years ago:
Charles W. Hull, a real estate developer who had fought for the Union during the Civil War, gave land for the church just a year or two into the 20th Century. The first service at Hull Memorial Christian Church, its original name, was held in 1905.
Hull and his wife, Mary, had made the gift with a stipulation — that the church be dedicated to the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), the large organization of Union veterans that formed right after the war. The Hulls also required that the congregation hold a special Sunday service every May in honor of Civil War veterans.
And that it did, year after year, with members of the GAR and the supporting Women’s Relief Corps attending a service and banquet during Memorial Day weekend.
The tradition continued through generations and through changes in the church — it became Lansdowne Christian Church and home for Disciples of Christ many years ago — and even as the congregation started to dwindle in size.
The simple, wood-frame church with twin bell towers sits at Clyde and Baltimore avenues in a section of the community once known as Joshua. The church is adorned with stained glass windows that memorialize the GAR and the Women’s Relief Corps.
In 1977, the church was added to the National Register of Historic Places as the only church dedicated to the GAR, an organization that once claimed hundreds of thousands of members and had considerable influence in the long-gone Republican Party of Lincoln. The GAR was racially integrated; it pushed for voting rights for Black Americans and government support of veterans. The organization dissolved in 1956, after the last Civil War veteran, Albert Woolson, died.
Now Scott Murphy-Neilson reports the sad news that Lansdowne Christian has been closed for services.
“The congregation has now dwindled to where the board has decided that it can no longer sustain the facility,” Murphy-Neilson says. “A glimmer of hope is that the Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War [SUVCW] may take an interest in becoming its new steward.”
The Chesapeake branch of that organization has always been part of the church’s Memorial Day service, Murphy-Neilson says.
“We have asked our contacts in the local chapter to appeal to their national organization with the proposal that SUVCW adopt the building,” he says.
Members of the organization will be having a discussion at the church on the morning of Friday, April 24.
Says Murphy-Beilson: “In a period of declining memberships of all kinds of churches, we see the best hope for our beloved facility as being that of a secular national landmark rather than house of worship.”
The survival of this modest memorial to long-gone Americans who fought to preserve the Union would be a fine thing, even if open to the public but a few times each year. Our fellow citizens, struggling through the republic’s present crisis, need all the history lessons we can muster.
Dan Rodricks writes weekly for Baltimore Fishbowl. He can be reached at djrodricks@gmail.com
