New England’s only Confederate memorial to be removed

New England’s only Confederate memorial—a modest granite marker on Boston Harbor’s Georges Island that commemorates 13 rebels who died while imprisoned there during the Civil War—is headed to the Massachusetts Archives.

The state boarded it up four months ago amid nationwide controversy over the appropriateness of such Confederate monuments-slash-memorials.

Now the state will remove it after the upcoming Columbus Day Weekend, when Georges Island is closed. It will then go to the Massachusetts Archives, where it could very well return to the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

It was that group’s now-defunct Boston chapter that installed the memorial in 1963.

Interestingly, the marker missed the boom in Confederate monuments. That came in the early decades of the 20th century, at the height of Jim Crow and as the last Confederate veterans began dying off. The below chart is from the the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The Georges Island memorial might also end up in a museum, according to state officials, and not with the Confederate booster group. Either way, it’s gone and with it the only monument to the Confederacy east of the Hudson River.

• State’s only Confederate memorial will be removed [Globe]
• Massachusetts’ Confederate memorial is the only one in New England [Curbed Boston]