As controversy swirls around Confederate monuments nationwide another one has fallen, this time on the West Shore.
The casualty is a small, probably little-noticed monument that for nearly 15 years stood outside the historic Rupp House along East Trindle Road in Hampden Township.
Only the concrete base remains of the pillar that once commemorated the troops of Confederate Brigadier General Albert Gallatin Jenkins, who came within a few miles of Harrisburg during a sideshow to the climactic July 1863 Battle of Gettysburg.
The Camp Curtin Historical Society, which installed the monument in 2005 at the privately-owned Rupp House, confirmed its removal Friday morning. The society said in an email that the Jenkins monument was taken down by the building’s owner.
Attempts to get comment on the removal from James O. Bower Jr., whose insurance agency occupies the Rupp House, were unsuccessful. Mechanicsburg-area resident John Quist told Pennlive he visited the agency and was told the monument was removed last week.
The Rupp House is where Jenkins stayed briefly while his troops threatened to invade Harrisburg during the Gettysburg campaign. A companion marker the society installed at the same time in Lemoyne commemorates the Union troops of his opponent, Major General Darius Nash Couch.
Couch commanded a scratch force of regular troops and militia that occupied two hastily-built forts constructed by local civilian and African-American railroad crews on the west bank of the Susquehanna River to keep the Confederates from seizing Harrisburg.
The Couch monument, an impressive dark granite slab, is much larger than the one commemorating Jenkins and his men. Camp Curtin officials said both monuments were intended as educational tools to show how close the battle lines came to Pennsylvania’s capitol. Both markers included etched images of the generals and brief biographies.
Yet controversy has dogged the Jenkins monument, one of the few dedicated to Confederates north of the Mason-Dixon Line, from the start. Multiple letters criticizing the Jenkins pillar were sent to The Patriot-News soon after its dedication.
Quist isn’t a fan, either.
“Aside from Jenkins’s act of treason in embracing armed rebellion against the very government he had sworn to uphold as a member of the U.S. Congress, Jenkins’s cavalrymen became notorious for kidnapping every African American in Pennsylvania they could overtake--all of whom were free--and forcibly removing them to the Confederacy where they became enslaved,” he wrote in an email to PennLive this week. “Contemporary estimates numbered the Confederates’ newly made slaves at 250, which have been further documented by historians.”
In an August 2017 story, former PennLive reporter Wesley Robinson noted the 10-foot-tall Jenkins monument had apparently been overlooked when the Southern Poverty Law Center, a prominent civil rights group, compiled a list of Confederate monuments nationwide.
The removal of the Jenkins pillar came on the eve of the 157th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg, one of the Civil War’s bloodiest battles and a key Union victory that thwarted the slave-holding South’s hope for independence.
While other Confederate monuments across the U.S have come under attack as perceived icons to racism, officials at Gettysburg National Military Park have said they have no intention of removing the numerous statues and markers throughout the battlefield that commemorate the Confederate troops and commanders who fought and often died there.
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July 03, 2020 at 09:24PM
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Another Confederate monument falls, this time on the West Shore - PennLive
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