The Confederate Flag in the Dairy Aisle: Forgetting Monuments in Rural America

This December I made my annual trek north from Dallas, Texas to my hometown in the farthest (and coldest) reaches of Northwest Iowa. The small hamlet boasts only 1400 people. It’s quiet and rural. While out on a walk with my brother’s rambunctious golden doodle, I decided to stroll through the city park to soak in a bit of nostalgia despite the blustery winter weather. I ended up in the part of the park dedicated to patriotic memorials, and my reflections shifted from childhood shenanigans to the implications of history, memory and monuments in rural Midwestern communities.

Over the past several years, we have heard a lot about the role of monuments in public memory, and particularly Confederate monuments in the South. In rural Iowa, on the contrary, it seems people rarely discuss our monuments. As I wandered toward the plaza of monuments in the park that day, I wondered what they said about the community and what kind of narratives it wanted to celebrate and remember.

The oldest monument in town is located near the center of the park, just north of the municipal pool. It’s a simple granite obelisk with an eagle perched atop it and was dedicated during the Independence Day celebrations of 1912. It simply reads, “Lest we forget. In memory of our heroes. 1861-1865.” On each of the three remaining sides of the monument, it lists the names of 78 men who served in the Union army during the Civil War. It is, at first glance, a simple memorial to the community’s role in fighting for the Union’s cause.

This first monument becomes a bit more puzzling when you realize that my hometown did not send a single soldier to serve in the Civil War because the town didn’t even exist yet. Like many towns in Northwest Iowa, Western Minnesota, and the Dakotas, it did not spring up until after the war. In the case of my hometown, it was founded in 1878, a full thirteen years after the Civil War had ended. I do not doubt that the men named on the monument served in the war or that they, at least for a time, called the town their home. Nevertheless, unlike the other memorials in the community, this monument does not celebrate soldiers from the community but rather those who at some point after their service decided to settle there.

The monument struck me because while it certainly honored veterans of the Civil War, it did something more for the community. It gave a town that didn’t exist during the 1860s a place in the story of the Union’s struggles. The town—through the veterans who served and eventually settled in it—contributed to the Civil War. With this simple memorial, like the many others that pepper rural towns in the area, the community insisted that it did its part in the nation’s struggle. It sacrificed for the Union. Unless someone knows the date that the town was founded, the monument crafts a tidy narrative of this rural community’s contribution to preserving the Union. It reminds those of us from the community that although this is just small town on the prairie we rural folk did our part.

There are many excellent studies of monuments and memory, particularly in light of the controversies that have swirled around Confederate monuments over the past several years. What strikes me about this rural monument and the others like it is how, much like Confederate monuments, it shaped communal memory and created a mythology around the events and meaning of the Civil War. It made important statements about the community’s own history and values. It argued that before the community even existed it sacrificed. Before the first wagons rolled onto those distant prairies, these rural citizens answered the call to serve. They had a stake in the nation.

Just a few feet to the away from this Civil War monument is a new series of memorials that sprung up in the years following 9/11. Glossy black slabs stand in a semi-circle and name every member of the military who hailed from the community, noting the conflict in which he or she served. Just a few yards away from a busy highway, this memorial holds a particular place of honor in the community and is always illuminated. The grey obelisk, in contrast, now sits in the dark.

On my walk through these new memorials and while trying to placate an increasingly antsy canine, I briefly surveyed the names listed on these slabs, and I noticed that the monument included no Civil War veterans. They had been left on their own monument, doing their own work, rooting the community in the quintessential American struggle. Built in the mid-2000s, this new monument no longer needed to remind the community of the part that it played in the conflict that tore the nation apart. Instead, it displays the fervent patriotism extolled in the wake of 9/11. Every veteran is honored, except for those who remind the community of a time when the country tore itself in two. Rather than remove the old monument, it’s now simply outshone by one that’s shiny and new, perpetuating a different narrative of unity and patriotism and glossing over the divisiveness of the Civil War.

While walking through the local grocery store a few days later, I came face to face with a potential consequence of the relegating of the granite Civil War memorial to the background. I passed a young man, probably in his early twenties, wearing a winter jacket with the emblem of the confederate flag plastered across it. It gave me pause. What a contrast to the invocation “Lest we forget” inscribed in granite in the city park! Just over a century after the community built a memorial at the center of the city park to memorialize its role (whether real or imagined) in the Civil War, I was the only one who batted an eye at the Confederate battle flag strolling down the dairy aisle.