NORTHFIELD — After a year and a half of work by the Northfield Board of Trustees of Veterans Memorials and Veterans Services, the Historical Society and Carriage House Designs, the town will unveil its new Civil War memorial during a brief ceremony Sunday at noon.
The memorial, located outside the Town Hall, honors 83 Northfield residents who served during the Civil War.
Though the town already had a Civil War memorial, it is located inside the Northfield Elementary School. Raymond Zukowski, a Veterans Memorials board member, said the board wanted a memorial that was easily accessible to the public.
In order to see the current memorial, visitors need to be buzzed into the building on weekdays. On weekends, when the school is closed, no one could view the memorial.
Therefore, when Massachusetts offered a grant specifically for the construction of Civil War memorials, Zukowski and the board submitted an application.
In all, the town appropriated $12,750, with the money coming from the state grant and the town’s Community Preservation Committee. The project is expected to come in under budget.
“This memorial, to me, is very exciting,” Zukowski said. “Now we have all the memorials in one area instead of being scattered all over the place.”
The memorials already present at Town Hall commemorate veterans from World Wars I and II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War and from the more recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, Zukowski said. In addition to honoring Civil War veterans, the new memorial will also feature a marble bench to honor Northfield residents who served in the French and Indian War and older conflicts, whose names have largely been lost.
Originally, the board came to the Historical Commission with a list of 150 names of possible Civil War veterans. Joel Fowler, chair of the Historical Commission, then narrowed down the list to 83 veterans who actually resided in Northfield.
“I did a lot of research on the veterans themselves to identify them, to try to confirm them,” Fowler said. “Then I tried to find out what happened to them, what became of them … Some of that is more than is required to just put a name on a memorial, but I felt like I wanted to go that distance.”
Fowler’s list is quite similar to that on the Northfield Elementary School’s memorial, with only three or four extra names.
After the list was compiled, Eileen Dowd and Jack Nelson, co-owners of Carriage House Designs in Turners Falls and former Northfield residents, set to work constructing the memorial, uniquely designed to look like six ledgers.
“Part of it was (the Historical Commission) had found many old books,” Dowd said. “We thought that should be how we should present the names … It seemed like a more historical presentation.”
The project, which was installed outside Town Hall Friday, was Dowd and Nelson’s first Civil War memorial.
“It was really an honor to work on that,” Dowd said of the memorial. “It had such historical significance and to create something today to honor such a long-ago war seemed really pretty remarkable … I have a great deal of admiration for the (Veterans Memorials board). They’ve really held to this for a long time and taken care of these memories.”
Memories, Dowd said, that are all the more personal for current Northfield residents.
“It was astonishing to me how many family names I knew whose names were still in Northfield,” she said. “That made (constructing the monument) all the more powerful.”