Sept. 1 (UPI) — A Confederate monument was quietly taken out in a small downtown North Carolina community in order to make room for a new multi-milion dollar waterfront business project.
It took around two hours Saturday night for public workers in Edenton to remove a statue that stood for decades next to South Broad Street on the water’s edge. The process ended around 1:30 a.m. along Albemarle Sound in North Carolina’s Inner Banks region.
“To those who claim we are ‘erasing history’: that is a misinformed view,” Edenton Mayor W. Hackney High said Aug. 19 in a statement posted to the town website.
Workers transported the statue to the old Chowan County Jail and temporarily put in a walled enclosure.
The mayor wrote that in doing so, Edenton was “not erasing history; we are preserving and protecting it.”
According to local officials, it’s to be relocated to Court Street at Edenton’s Veterans Memorial Park. However, no official preparations have otherwise begun at its new home.
It was first installed in 1909 outside Edenton’s 1767 court house and later moved more than 50 years later to its long-held South Broad location.
For a few years now the statue had been center of nearly weekly protests against its historic significance and place in the small North Carolina town of less than 5,000 inhabitants.
High, the town’s mayor, characterized it as a compromise choice, saying both sides that wanted it removed and others who didn’t want it to be destroyed had won.
The Market Street Park statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee was removed in 2021 in Charlottesville, Va., then later melted down to be turned into a new art installation.
An Aug. 18 court ruling by Superior Court Judge Wayland J. Sermons vacated an injunction permitting since 1961 the Sons of Confederate Veterans to keep the monument in its place on South Broad.
Workers the next day began the process to remove the statue and is several facets.
Edenton’s Bell Battery Chapter of the Sons of Confederate Veterans was reportedly considering an appeal of Sermons’ ruling.
But the town said it’s currently “investigating the steps required to relocate the monument.”
Edenton’s Harbortown waterfront project was the main driver of the issue.
The project approved by Edenton’s elected town council August 2024 is to included a $25 million upgrade to its port facilities in the small coastal community with around a 60% Black population.
According to a study published this year by the Southern Poverty Law Center, no town in the United States in the past 10 years has added a Confederate statue to courthouse property.
“We are relieved that this blight on the town’s landscape has been removed,” said the local “Move the Monument Coalition” group.
It also reiterated opposition to the monument placed on public property.
Meanwhile, it faces likely legal action.
A separate lawsuit was filed by five local plaintiffs in objection to the statue’s courthouse relocation in a date-to-be-determined hearing.
