Cornelius S. Bushnell Monument

 

By Jason W. Smith

My country, ‘tis of Thee,

Sweet Land of Liberty

Of thee I sing

The words floated in the air, its melody carried by a school band over the newly-christened Monitor Square on the morning of May 30, 1906—Memorial Day.

Land where my fathers died,

Land of the pilgrims' pride,

From every mountain side

Let Freedom ring.

The assembled crowd must have found those words telling as they recalled Cornelius Scranton Bushnell, a New Haven shipbuilder and—apropos of this occasion—financier of the revolutionary ironclad warship USS Monitor. The ship, designed by Swedish inventor John Ericsson with a rotating turret atop an iron-plated hull, met the Confederate ironclad CSS Virginia on March 9, 1863 at Hampton Roads, Virginia. Though the battle was a draw, the Monitor had protected the Union blockade. If not for the Monitor, the Morning Journal and Courier observed in 1901, “there is a question whether our arms might have been successful in achieving the entire results in which we as a nation now rejoice.”

Born in nearby Madison, Bushnell was a New Haven industrialist and Fair Haven shipbuilder. In Washington, D.C. when the Civil War broke out in April 1861, Bushnell immediately volunteered for service to protect the capital. While there, he discovered the revolutionary plans for Ericsson’s ironclad. Immediately seeing its merits, he put his influence behind raising funds and contributed a substantial portion of his own. The Monitor was constructed in Brooklyn.

In 1899, three years after his death, a group of New Haveners led by veteran William S. Wells, organized the Cornelius S. Bushnell National Memorial Association, intending to rehabilitate Bushnell, who members believed was not fully appreciated. “He should have been the ward of the nation,” Wells wrote in a book published in New Haven in 1899 and reprinted again in 1906. The book compiled a biography, the story of the Monitor, and Bushnell’s letters to the secretary of the Navy and Ericsson, making the case for Bushnell’s significance and raising money for a monument. The association grew to constitute “our foremost citizens,” Wells noted. These included not only George Dudley Seymour and John Ferguson Weir who led civic improvement efforts in New Haven, but also city business leaders like Max Adler, and national figures such as President Theodore Roosevelt. This was part of a broad commemorative trend in this era that sought to “celebrate [New Haven’s] contributions to the Industrial Revolution and the growth of American commerce,” writes historian Laura Macaluso.

With $5,000 secured from the state and the support of Connecticut’s Grand Army of the Republic, the Association raised $25,000 and commissioned sculptor Herbert Adams and architect Charles Platt to collaborate on a memorial. The monument was unveiled on Memorial Day 1906 in a triangular greenspace where Chapel Street and Derby Avenue diverge on the edge of the Edgewood neighborhood, one of the city’s most desirable late-nineteenth-century residential sections. As Macaluso notes, the choice of location—far from Bushnell’s own Fair Haven shipyard—likely had to do with beautifying those sections of the city farthest from the growing blight, poverty, and pollution of the industrialized waterfront.

The monument features a bronze eagle, wings and talon extended atop a globe fronted by a national shield of arms and four dolphins. Beneath these is a granite plinth fronted by a bas-relief of Bushnell and Ericsson and an image of the Monitor. It remains, “one of New Haven’s best examples of American Renaissance public art of the Gilded Age,” Macaluso writes. It was “a public adornment” and “an ornament to the city’s appreciation of patriotic service,” New Haven historian Everett Hill observed in 1918.

After more than a century, the monument and square has undergone changes both physical and cultural. Enough of Ericsson and Bushnell’s reputation remained in the public consciousness that in 1926 the Swedish crown prince and princess on an automobile tour of New Haven stopped by the monument to remember the Swedish-born Ericsson and Bushnell his collaborator. By the twenty-first century, however, the area had experienced difficult economic fortunes. Like nearby Edgewood Park, Monitor Square suffered neglect. Its wrought-iron fence remains fractured and trash litters its gardens. “I thought it was a doggie park,” David Player, who lives in an adjacent apartment building, told the New Haven Independent in 2020.

Nevertheless, a group called Friends of Monitor Square has planted new trees and keeps weeds at bay. Neighbors enjoy dog-walking and a bag station exists to clean up afterward. Player notes that a band once again sets up to encourage bicyclists and runners during the city’s annual marathons and races. There is a small farmers’ market.

Finally, there is Bushnell whose monument continues to mitigate against the amnesia that animated its construction in the first place. At the 1906 unveiling, before a crowd that included Bushnell’s six-year-old grandson whose father’s name was Ericsson, Wells, the organizer, concluded his address by observing that Bushnell would be “preserved in granite and bronze to be read by future generations, and as the years roll on.” So it remains.

Figure 1: Ornamental cartouche of the Cornelius S. Bushnell National Memorial Association from William S. Wells’ The Original United States Warship “Monitor,” 1899

Figure 2: The Bushnell Monument in Monitor Square as it appeared circa 1918 from Everett Hill’s A Modern History of New Haven, 1918

Figure 3: View of Bushnell Monument across Monitor Square, 2020 courtesy of the author\

Bibliography

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            Cornelius S. Bushnell National Memorial Association, 1899.