RICHMOND — A bronze statue of Confederate Gen. A.P. Hill — this city’s last major icon of the Lost Cause — rode away Monday strapped to a cushion of old tires in the back of a flatbed truck. But the remains of the general himself remained embedded somewhere in the base of the statue’s stone plinth, and workers continued to search into the chilly afternoon.
The statue had surrendered easily. Workers cut a bolt holding it in place and a crane hoisted the figure into the air by 9:45 a.m., less than an hour after trucks had assembled in the busy intersection where the monument stood.
Then it was a matter of disassembling thousands of pounds of granite blocks and digging out concrete and stone filler from inside the base to look for a crypt. Workers from a local funeral home stood by to take over once the remains were located.
The presence of Hill’s grave had complicated the removal of the monument, for which planning began more than two years ago. Since 2020, more than a dozen other Confederate monuments around this historic city have been removed, as social-justice protests triggered by the murder of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis finally forced Richmond to confront its memorial landscape.
Mayor Levar Stoney arrived Monday morning to watch the work, and after the statue came down said removing the final city-owned Confederate statue would “turn the page and start a new chapter for our city of Richmond.”
The former capital of the Confederacy is now 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.
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.