War Correspondents Memorial Arch

The National War Correspondents Memorial, part of Gathland State Park, is a memorial dedicated to journalists who died in war. It is located in Maryland, at Crampton's Gap at South Mountain. Civil War correspondent George Alfred Townsend, or "Gath", built the arch in 1896, and it was dedicated October 16, 1896.

It is claimed that the arch is the only monument in the world dedicated to journalists killed in combat. However, a tree in Arlington National Cemetery was also dedicated as a war correspondents' memorial in 1986.

The book George Alfred Townsend describes the monument:

In appearance the monument is quite odd. It is fifty feet high and forty feet broad. Above a Moorish arch sixteen feet high built of Hummelstown purple stone are super-imposed three Roman arches. These are flanked on one side with a square crenellated tower, producing a bizarre and picturesque effect. Niches in different places shelter the carving of two horses' heads, and symbolic terra cotta statuettes of Mercury, Electricity and Poetry. Tables under the horses' heads bear the suggestive words "Speed" and "Heed"; the heads are over the Roman arches. The three Roman arches are made of limestone from Creek Battlefield, Virginia, and each is nine feet high and six feet wide. These arches represent Description, Depiction and Photography. The aforementioned tower contains a statue of Pan with the traditional pipes, and he is either half drawing or sheathing a Roman sword. Over a small turret on the opposite side of the tower is a gold vane of a pen bending a sword. At various places on the monument are quotations appropriate to the art of war correspondence. These are from a great variety of sources beginning with Old Testament verses. Perhaps the most striking feature of all are the tablets inscribed with the names of 157 correspondents and war artists who saw and described in narrative and picture almost all the events of the tour years of the war.

This account errs in that "Speed" and "Heed" appear under the heads of Electricity and Poetry, and the "statue of Pan" is actually a zinc copy of Bertel Thorvaldsen's Mercury About to Kill Argos created by the J.W. Fiske Company.

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