Location: Duck Creek Cemetery, 2660 US-6, Wellfleet
Coordinates: 41°56’09.7″N 70°01’14.9″W
Date dedicated: July 24, 1866
Architect/design: Unknown
Wellfleet’s monument was among the first in the Commonwealth, dedicated on July 24, 1866—which places it sixth among municipal monuments dedicated to all those who served from a given town. Like many of the early monuments, it was funded by the Ladies Aid Society of the town using surplus donations for the soldiers’ benefit left over at the end of the war.[1] It is also typical in its funereal form, similar to other early monuments resembling ornate grave-markers and placed in consecrated ground. It would be more than a decade before the town square soldiers monument became commonplace.
The primary inscription reads, “Erected to the memory of Wellfleet’s heroes by the Ladies Soldiers Aid Society assisted by the subscribers to the War Fund.” It lists seven of Wellfleet’s war dead with the date and place of death. There are three additional men listed in the Adjutant General’s records as residents Wellfleet who died in the war but their names do not appear on the monument. Discrepancies naturally happen in record-keeping and it is difficult to say why they weren’t included—perhaps they were from other towns but simply credited to Wellfleet’s quota in state records. Overall, Wellfleet had 221 men on Massachusetts rolls credited to that town.[2]
As Wellfleet was a small, remote town on the outer Cape, and this was a very early phase in monument building before such events became grand and momentous occasions, the dedication of the Wellfleet monument was a simple affair that attracted very little attention in papers. According to a brief blurb in a New Bedford paper, John W. Davis, Esq. gave the dedication address.[3] He was a prominent local lawyer and justice of the peace. Dr. Thomas Newcomb Stone of Wellfleet gave some brief remarks on behalf on the donors in presenting the monument to the town. Stone later became a state senator and gained notoriety for being the designee to welcome President Ulyssess Grant to Wellfleet on the first presidential visit to that town (and the Cape as well) in 1874. As for the themes and tone of Davis’s and Stone’s remarks at the Wellfleet soldiers’ monument dedication, the brief mentions in papers do not elaborate.
[1] William Schouler, A History of Massachusetts in the Civil War (Boston: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1868), v. 2, 55.
[2] Schouler, v. 2, 55.
[3] Evening Standard (New Bedford), August 11, 1866, 2.