Small Town War Memorials

To mark Memorial Day, here are a few photos from around New England of military monuments in quieter moments, when nobody is placing wreaths before them and nobody gets a day off.

Some towns have very large monuments to the Civil War, often the archetypical figure of a solider on picket duty. Some towns have a cannon or even a tank on the park. Some have a separate monument of varying sizes for the fallen of each war, and list the individual names of the servicemen from their towns. Some towns, with smaller populations, honor their fallen with a single marker on which all the names from all the wars are carved.


These are the humble monuments, not always in the center of the common but squeezed into a convenient place by the sidewalk, flanked by “no parking” signs or a bus stop. We don’t pay enough attention to them, usually.


But here they are. Take a look, at the moment of this photo when no one else is looking.