As I’ve watched the controversy unfurl across the country over the removal of Confederate monuments and other tributes, I’ve had cause to be happy.
Not necessarily because those changes are being made, though I think the relocations and renamings taking place are long overdue.
No, I can take a little extra pleasure in the moment because I know that these conflicts and traumas will not unfold in Calhoun County, my old stomping grounds.
This is not because Calhoun Countians are extraordinarily enlightened and agree amongst themselves that these monuments need to be relocated.
Nor is it because Calhoun Countians are uniformly supportive of such monuments and have decided they will remain.
No, Calhoun County will not have this discussion about itself because there are, rather amazingly, no Confederate monuments in Calhoun County. None of any prominence, certainly.
I cannot say I’ve been down every single road and surveyed every possible site, but in the usual positions of honor, there are no such things as Confederate monuments in Calhoun County.
The new Calhoun County courthouse in Pittsboro, completed within the past decade, has no room for such a monument. Its predecessor — a 1938 building built under the Works Progress Administration of the New Deal, connected to a somewhat newer annex and a 1972 courtroom addition — had but a small lawn enclosed by the three arms of the building that had no monuments of any kind.
The 1938 courthouse replaced the original courthouse, which burned down in 1922. If there was a Confederate monument at the original courthouse, I’ve never heard tell of it, though I suppose one could have been there and been destroyed by the fire or the efforts to put it out.
Highway 9 now runs diagonally across the square where the courthouse used to stand,
The heyday of erecting Confederate memorials was the 1890s and early 1900s, and most of Calhoun County’s towns were just being founded about that time. The town founders and settlers were likely too preoccupied with building their homes, businesses and other infrastructure to worry about putting up any kind of monuments.
Vardaman — perhaps the likeliest place to have erected a monument at the time, given the town was named for white supremacist politican James Kimball Vardaman — was founded in 1900, and has nothing other than its name to commemorate the Rebel statuary period.
Derma was founded in 1904; Calhoun City in 1906; Bruce, not until 1927, two decades or more after most of the Confederate monuments were erected. None of them have a Confederate monument on public property.
Calhoun County has never been very populous or particularly prosperous. It’s likely that there just weren’t enough people with enough money and enough interest to use it for a monument instead of a living.
Those ingredients of little population, money and interest can sometimes be detrimental — Calhoun County voted down a bond issue to create a career and technical education center in 1986 because of the reported effect on local taxes, and it was almost 25 years before the school district found a way to make it happen.
But in the case of Confederate monuments, an apparent disinterest in using money for that kind of symbolism is saving Calhoun County a lot of grief today.
