Visiting Lee Park in Charlottesville, Virginia

This post isn’t about Baltimore, but I wanted to write about Lee Park in Charlottesville, Virginia. I visited there recently and I just liked it. We cut through the park to get to a bookstore and the first thing I saw was some guerrilla knitting on a tree. I was tickled, as I usually am when I find knitting on trees. But, I am not familiar with the Charlottesville knitting scene so I didn’t turn up any information about that. Instead I will write about this interesting statue of Robert E. Lee and his horse Traveler, which is also in the park.

In 1917, a prominent local citizen, Paul Goodloe McIntire, bought this property. He had a house removed from the lot and tuned it into a formally landscaped park. Eventually gave it to the city of Charlottesville, intending it as a memorial to his parents and also as a place for an equestrian statue of Robert E. Lee and his horse Traveler. For McIntire, getting this statue in place was a long and worrisome adventure. He commissioned Henry Shrady, who at the time was engrossed in his most famous work, an elaborate equestrian statue of Ulysses S. Grant.

Between finishing that project and his poor health, Shrady made little progress on the Lee statue over the next few years. On his deathbed in 1922, Shrady begged his doctors to keep the cloths covering his wet clay model wet. They didn’t know what he was talking about and so the model was ruined when the canvas dried and stuck to the fine details of the sculpture. Another artist, Leo Lentelli, worked diligently to research the details and to finish the sculpture. The Roman Bronze Works finally cast it in New York during the winter of 1924. On May 3rd, 1924, it was unveiled as Lee’s great granddaughter (aged 3) Mary Walker Lee pulled away a Confederate flag.


Resources

A Guide to the History and Gardens of Lee Park

Lee Park