Worth Saving

This is the Civil War memorial building in Little Valley, a village not far from us. A group of western New Yorkers, many of whom had ancestors who fought in the conflict, are campaigning to save it from demolition. It used to have a dome, long gone now.

Here's the inscription above the door.

And the date.

The building was actually dedicated in 1914 and local politician James S.Whipple, son of a soldier who was captured at the Battle of Gettysburg and died a prisoner of war, proclaimed that the building would represent the  “sacred memories of the past; the prayers of mothers for boys on tented fields, the loves of maidens who gave up their sweethearts for the nations’s  honour and the sorrows of those who looked in vain for loved ones to return.” They don't make speeches like that any more.

  Interestingly, Mr Whipple alluded to another conflict, then raging in “fair and foreign lands”  calling it a “whirlwind of war and destruction that will change the map of nations and shock the whole world.”  He was more right than he realised.  I hope the Little Valley building gets saved.