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EXPLORING
KENTUCKY - September 2004 by Katherine Tandy Brown A Monumental Facelift
The tallest concrete obelisk in the world, this 351-foot tower erected at the famous Kentuckian’s birthplace is the fourth-tallest monument of any kind in the U.S., behind the St. Louis Arch, and the San Jacinto (Texas) and Washington Monuments. Just reopened after nearly five years of renovation, the memorial pays tribute to a son of the Commonwealth and statesman far greater than many assume. Ironically, his Civil Wartime adversary, Abraham Lincoln, born eight months later and less than 100 miles away, was inaugurated as president of the Union just a month after Davis became president of the Confederacy. A reluctant secessionist, Jefferson Davis was a West Point graduate, Mexican War hero and brilliant politician, serving as a Mississippi congressman and senator and as secretary of war during the Pierce administration. Married to the daughter of Zachary Taylor, he shone outside political circles as well. Founder of the Army Medical Corps, Davis suggested the purchase of the Panama Canal Zone and advised that a transcontinental railroad connect the Atlantic and Pacific; ordered the frontier be surveyed (specifically that the West be explored for geographic and scientific purposes); and wrote The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government. Imprisoned in chains for two years after the Rebel defeat, the former Southern leader was unjustly charged for war crimes, yet never brought to trial to clear his name. As Kentucky never officially seceded from the Union, there were no organized Kentucky regiments, so its sons became the Orphan’s Brigade of the Confederate Army. At a 1907 reunion one of its members, noted Kentucky general Simon Bolivar Buckner proposed an idea to give Davis his due. In 1917, construction of the obelisk began, took a World War I hiatus, resumed in 1922 and was completed in 1924 at a cost of $200,000. Built from concrete produced on-site, the monument rests on a bed of Kentucky limestone. Its walls are seven feet think at the base, tapering to two feet thick where the crown inclines into a pyramid. An elevator climbs to an observation room near the top. A part of the renovation, that elevator is new, as is a standby generator, just in case… Now handicapped accessible, the monument was pressure-washed and waterproofed after 10,000 square feet of concrete damaged by lightning and years of freezing and thawing was jackhammered off and replaced. Surface patches were faux painted with sponges to blend perfectly enough to meet Martha Stewart standards. “A lot of people think it’s brand new because it’s so clean and white,” says Mark Doss, park manager for the 19-acre Jefferson Davis State Historic Site in Todd County. “It doesn’t look eighty years old.” Much older than the spit-and-polished spire, the tiny burg of Fairview – now home to around 300 souls – was founded around 1793 by Revolutionary War soldier Samuel Emory Davis, who opened a post office at Davistown in 1802, six years before his son Jefferson was born in a log cabin on the spot where the current town post office stands. Opened in 2001, a visitor center has reclaimed the Davis memorabilia that had been stored at the Pennyrile Museum 10 miles away in Hopkinsville since 1977, and now features interpretive exhibits and a film on the man and his monument. Groups can take pre-arranged guided tours of the obelisk and peruse Civil War mementos at a gift shop. Once a year, the historic site turns back the clock to celebrate its namesake’s birthday, an official state holiday on June 3rd in Alabama, Florida, Mississippi and South Carolina. During the first full weekend in June, the South does indeed rise again in Fairview, with a living history encampment, a fancy dress ball (costumes optional) with live period music in an open-air pavilion, a mock battle (as there was no combat here) and night artillery firing. Back in 1913, the United Daughters of the Confederacy proposed a coast-to-coast road through Southern capitals be named the Jefferson Davis Highway. Though never sanctioned by the U.S. Department of Transportation, the thoroughfare stretches 3,417 miles through 13 states. Its zero-mile marker is in Fairview on one of several extensions running from Kentucky to Biloxi, Mississippi, the site of Davis’s final home, “Beauvoir.” For more information, call (270) 886-1765 or go online at www.ky.gov/agencies/parks/wkyframes/jefdav2-body.htm.
Katherine Tandy
Brown is a staff writer for The Lane Report. |
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Copyright 1996-2004, by Kentucky Business Online. All rights reserved. Editorial content
is copyright 2004, Lane Communications Group The Lane Report is a trademark of Lane Communications Group. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. |
On a Brownie Scout troop outing from Hopkinsville in 1955, I believed I could see most of the known world from the top of the Jefferson Davis Monument in Fairview. Turns out, the view is still splendid if not earth-encompassing. 
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