Monuments found in odd places

Monuments to historic events and people can be found in unusual or out of the way places. On family trips over the years I have always been on the lookout for plaques and monuments that relate to the Civil War or to history in general.

Recently I was reminded of a monument I discovered in Gatlinburg, Tennessee on a family vacation there in 2010. Today this town is familiar to many as the gateway to the Great Smokey Mountains National Park. Extremely built up as a tourist town, this plaque would once have been on a post as a standard sign. Presumably as the space was required for the building it is hanging on in this photograph, they left it in the vicinity and just attached it to the structure instead. As the photographs show, an odd place indeed.

The plaque itself

The location... on the side of a building with a Pizza Hut

As these photographs were taken in 2010, I can not guarantee that it is still hanging there for two reasons.  The first is as this is a Confederate monument so there is no guarantee it has survived the purge of monuments occurring in the country.  The second being the wild fire of 2016.  The tourist areas of Gatlinburg were largely spared, but I do not have any personal knowledge of the survival of this particular spot.


John Reagan, Confederate Postmaster General

-Corporal


Portrait of Postmaster-general John H. Regan, officer of the Confederate States Government. United States, None. [Between 1860 and 1865] Photograph. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/cwp2003000422/PP/. (Accessed February 11, 2018.)