(Photo credit: War Correspondents Memorial Arch, courtesy LostBob, Flickr Creative Commons)

Near Harpers Ferry is a large piece of masonry that represents something quite rare: a memorial specifically dedicated to the war correspondents and artists who covered the Civil War.

The monument, constructed in 1896, is not small: it stands fifty feet high and looks a bit like the façade of a building that has collapsed behind it. But it is a proper monument. It’s located in a place called Crampton’s Gap at South Mountain. The site is part of Maryland’s Gathland State Park, though it’s administered by the National Park Service. (The Appalachian Trail also traverses this park, on its way to Harpers Ferry.)

I don’t know much about this site—the memorial was supposedly constructed by a somewhat eccentric former Civil War reporter called George Alfred Townsend, whose land eventually became the state park. Gathland placed on the structure the following inscription, apparently a paean to wartime journalists everywhere:

Whose toils cheered the fireside
Educated provinces of rustics into
a bright nation of readers
and gave incentive to narrate
distant wars and explore dark lands.

Memorials and monuments journalists are pretty thin on the ground. There was one inside the Newseum in Washington, DC, but I don’t know what happened to that. There’s another in London, at the top of BBC Broadcasting House. But these are not in a fully public setting, as the War Correspondents Memorial is. There is a public Mémorial des Reporters in Bayreux, France (erected by Reporters Without Borders). Back in DC, there’s an effort underway to create a Fallen Journalists Memorial, and there’s even an architect supposedly signed on to the project and an intended location, at 3rd Street and Independence Avenue SW (between the VOA building and the National Museum of the American Indian).

The memorials mentioned above are all younger than the century. I’m not sure if there are any out there as old as the one in Gathland State Park.

Why is this? The answer’s pretty obvious, I suppose. Public sentiment is rarely on the side of journalists at the best of times, never mind wartime. Even WWII did not, as far as I know, produce a major public memorial to fallen journalists.