Projects
1. Tracking down the activities of the 2nd Regiment of the New York Volunteers, Companies E and F. They mustered in to federal service in May 1898 and mustered out in November 1898. The regiment made it as far as Tampa Florida but never made it to Cuba. The mystery I'm trying to solve. Some day I'll write a book.
2. Finding Spanish-American War monuments specifically looking for the bronze Hiker statues sculpted by Kitson, Newman, Lithgow. When I get enough background information on the Lithgow sculpture I'll create a page. There are two statues that have been mistaken for Kitson Hiker statues, one in Marlborough Massachusetts and the other in Clinton Massachusetts. The Marlborough MA statue is called "The Volunteer" and the Clinton MA statue is unknown. These will become pages once I get some details pulled together.
- I got curious when I researched Newman's Hiker, and our conversion, and ended up curious about these two as well. I hope you don't mind me cluttering up your talk page with what I found.
- Clinton's monument was sculpted by Melzar Hunt Mosman. Apparently, it is titled simply Spanish American War Monument/Memorial. One possible explanation for it being referred to as The Hiker, at least in the Clinton monument's case, is from their centennial publication where they give a bit of history about its dedication on November 4, 1923. There are several of these sculptures in Massachusetts: Clinton, Gardner, Lawrence, Leominster, Lowell, Revere, Springfield and Winthrop. Outside of Massachusetts, there is one in Dover, New Hampshire and one in Ebensburg, Pennsylvania. To my untrained eye, his Civil War monument titled Massachusetts (or Massachusetts Soldier's Monument) looks exactly like these, except in period uniform.
- I'm afraid I can't shed any more light on the Marlborough statue, except that its sculptor was Co. Crawford, or C. O. Crawford, depending on your source. The Library of Congress entry identifies a Co. Crawford. My research found a sculptor from Boston doing similar work, in the same period, by the name C. O. Crawford. Regardless, the base of the Marlborough sculpture is well marked with "The Volunteer," so referring to it as "The Hiker" might simply be from the collective term used for Spanish-American War veterans.
- ~ KMJKWhite (talk) 21:32, 22 November 2016 (UTC)