Mayor Levar Stoney arrived to watch the work, and after the statue came down said removing the city’s final Confederate statue would “turn the page and start a new chapter for our city of Richmond.”
More than a dozen other Confederate monuments around this historic city have been removed since 2020, when social-justice protests triggered by the murder of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis finally forced Richmond to confront its memorial landscape.
While the titanic, state-owned statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee on Monument Avenue became an international symbol of that year of protests, it is the Hill statue that has proved to have the most staying power. That’s because of one unique feature: Hill’s remains are buried beneath it.
A law passed by the General Assembly in 2020 allowed localities to take down Confederate statues, which up until then had been protected. But the Hill monument’s status as a grave caused the city to go through a lengthy process to get legal permission to clear the site and then arrange for the remains to be relocated.
Traffic-control barriers were ready early, but workers had waited for the morning rush to clear and for classes to get underway at a nearby elementary school before closing off the crossroads of Hermitage Road and West Laburnum Avenue on Richmond’s Northside.
Once the stone base is fully opened up by workers for Team Henry, the Black-owned contractor that has overseen demolition of almost all the city’s monuments, a crew will extract Hill’s coffin. A funeral home will transport the remains to a burial plot in Hill’s hometown of Culpeper that the city of Richmond purchased for $1,000.
The delicate work could stretch the removal across two days, officials said. But when it’s done, the former capital of the Confederacy will be almost free of Lost Cause iconography in public spaces — an outcome that seemed unthinkable only a few years ago.
“This is the last stand for the Lost Cause in our city,” Stoney said last week after a judge swept aside an effort to claim the statue by a group of people who said they were Hill’s indirect descendants.
John Hill, 33, said he shares an ancestor with the general, who had no children of his own. Hill said he drove eight hours from his home in Ohio to watch the statue come down and was part of the group of family members who had challenged the monument’s removal in court.
“We just don’t want to see it destroyed because that’s a headstone with our family name on it,” said Hill, who wore a sweatshirt with a dramatic Confederate battle scene and the phrase, “Don’t make me open up my can of Robert E. Lee.”
What Richmond loses in divisive symbolism it gains in traffic safety, as the need to navigate around the Hill monument has made the intersection one of the city’s most dangerous.
Liz Turner, 60, a nanny who lives a block from the statue, had come out with a small group from the local civic association with coffee and doughnuts. Turner said she was glad to see the Confederate symbols come down, but she had an equally urgent mission: to remove the statue so the intersection would be safer for traffic.
“I don’t care who’s buried there — Mickey Mouse, General MacArthur, Saint Peter himself — I don’t care,” she said. “I want people to be safe at this intersection.”
A few prominent Confederate symbols remain in Richmond — most notably a trio of statues on Capitol Square outside the state Capitol. The administration of then-Gov. Ralph Northam (D) has said it was too focused on getting the Lee statue down to take on the Capitol Square statues, which would probably require action by the General Assembly. Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) has shown no interest in picking up the baton, with a spokeswoman saying via text that the governor believes “we must resist the movement to cleanse our history. The decision to remove the statues were decisions made by previous administrations/politicians.”
The Hill site is in a different area than most of the Confederate memorials that once stood around Richmond’s downtown and older inner neighborhoods. It was a rural part of Henrico County when developer Lewis Ginter created the memorial in 1891 to promote his new suburban neighborhood, later annexed by the city.
Hill, who was killed by Union troops outside Petersburg in the waning days of the war in 1865, had been buried in two other spots before being dug up and reinterred here. He had once said he did not wish to live to see the Confederacy fall, and he didn’t. But his statue saw its symbols disappear.
It has long been rumored that Hill was buried standing up inside the base of the monument. But news accounts from the time suggest that while he might have been vertical in one of the earlier burials, by the time he got to this spot the remains were little more than bones and tattered cloth.
This story is developing and will be updated.