Town & Gown

“The Aviator” also, perhaps consciously, ties the university in with the city and even the entire state. Paul Goodloe McIntire, an alumnus and donor to Charlottesville, had commissioned a stature of Robert E. Lee to stand in a new city park, which he also donated.¹ The General Lee statue, dedicated in 1924, would take the longest to finish, but it was part of a series of four statues that McIntire installed, starting in 1919, the same year Borglum completed the McConnell statue. Along with the Civil War generals, Lee and Stonewall Jackson, Lewis and Clark, as well as George Rogers Clark, the “Conqueror of the Old Northwest,” were immortalized. President Alderman spoke at all four dedications for the city and involved the students in these events as much as he could. All five men had connections to the region, but the story that the statues told centered on the importance of these individuals to national history, and particularly Virginia’s role in it. It is probably that Alderman involved himself in the design of these statues just as much as he had worked with Borglum. Certainly the program of the figures fits in with Alderman’s view that history had tied Virginia and the nation together. Louis P. Nelson writes that in thinking about these four images in bronze it is important to understand how they fit into the layout of the Charlottesville.² George Rogers Clark, with his kneeling, subjugate Native Americans, for example, sits on the easternmost property of the university, near the popular restaurants of a neighborhood known as the Corner. Looking up Main Street, the figure of Clark, and its message of American Empire, ties UVA to the city’s downtown where the other statues were built on or near sites of demolished African American neighborhoods.³ If the earliest historical figure has links to the university, then the McConnell monument works to illustrate how the education of the students taking place on grounds connects with, and soars above, that Virginia history symbolized by all of the Charlottesville statues constructed in this period. “The erection of the Lee monument was the culminating act in the remaking of a city as the new Old South, with all the attendant political, racial, educational, and cultural implications,” says Nelson.⁴