Roxbury Soldier by Sculptor Martin Milmore Displayed at Old City Hall in Boston in February 1868

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Roxbury Soldier at Forest Hills Cemetery

A notice in the Boston Evening Transcript, dated February 18, 1869, reported that Martin Milmore's Roxbury Soldier bronze statue was on temporary display at Boston City Hall on School Street, across from the statue of Ben Franklin. The piece had just been cast at Ames Works in Chicopee, MA and had been commissioned by the Town of Roxbury for placement in Forest Hills Cemetery.

"It deservedly attracts much attention from the throngs of people who are constantly passing through that thoroughfare," BET reported. 

Clay Model of Roxbury Soldier in Milmore's Studio on Tremont Street
Image Courtesy of Library of Congress

The Town of Roxbury commissioned the statue which it "purchased a lot in the Forest Hills Cemetery upon recovering the bodies of 8 local soldiers from the Antietam Battlefield in 1862," according to a National Portrait Galley exhibit in 2006. 

"We have spoken heretofore of this fine work when in the clay model," wrote BET. "For attitude, expression, correctness of manipulation, as well as for fitness and feeling in conception, it impresses us as one of the best of American efforts of its kind, and every way creditable to the young artist who designed it. Those who examine it must remember its destination; and then the meaning of its thoughtful, serious, sad and yet earnest air of contemplation will be impressive.

Close up of Roxbury Soldier

"The young soldier is in a reverie, such could only be his, over the graves of his comrades, who have met that fate which he feels may at any moment be the price he too must par for his devotion to his country," wrote BET. "There is a lesson in the statue which ought to be learned by all who gaze upon it, even whilst they are admiring or criticizing its artistic merits. In its very silence it speaks, what many are too indifferent to hear. It tells the story of what it cost to preserve for us our Union, our justice, our freedom and our humanity."

Quote by Abraham Lincoln on the back of the Roxbury Soldier Memorial


The Roxbury Soldier was Milmore's first Civil War statue, and its success led Milmore on a career building dozens of other Civil War memorials, many of them modeled after the Roxbury statue.  Milmore's most acclaimed Civl War pieces include the Soldiers and Sailor's Monument on Boston Common, and the American Sphinx at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge. 


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