The resolute face of Newburgh’s Minuteman at Washington’s Headquarters.

This year, the area around the Orange County Veterans Memorial is disrupted by construction of new underground infrastructure. Water and sewer lines are being upgraded, blacktop has been excavated and the hillside behind the memorial is full of heavy equipment. So, local veterans have decided to hold their traditional Veterans Day remembrance ceremony not at the Leroy Place memorial but at the Civil War monument along Robinson Avenue at the western edge of Downing Park. It will be held right at 11 a.m. on November 11 as it is every year.

Before there was a county Veterans Memorial centered in Newburgh or even a Civil War monument, Newburgh had an appropriate spot to remember veterans. On the lawn of Washington’s Headquarters, a beautiful statue of “The Minuteman” was placed in 1924. It, too, was dedicated with formal honors on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month. America didn’t yet have a formal day to honor veterans. Armistice Day as a national day of commemoration would be proclaimed two years later in 1926. But, in Newburgh, planners knew that November 11 was when the guns fell silent at the close of World War I and declared that would be a perfect time to place and dedicate a statue honoring the early defenders of liberty, the militia members who stepped forward to fight for their rights and their national identity.

“The Minuteman,” by sculptor Henry H. Kitson, was created to remember the cost of defending freedom. A life-sized bronze statue of a typical citizen soldier was erected on the grounds of Washington’s Headquarters, where volunteer citizen soldiers would have stood when George Washington kept his headquarters there as Commander-In-Chief during the War for Independence. Newburgh’s Minuteman has been standing guard at Washington’s Headquarters through all seasons for 98 years – nearly a century of vigilance.

In 1951, The Minuteman at Washington’s Headquarters made a singular impact on my husband’s family. His father, Louis McTamaney, an amateur photographer, took a photo of the statue and superimposed another photo of a burst of fireworks from a local event to imagine the young soldier depicted by Kitson standing in the face of an artillery barrage. Louis won that year’s Valley Forge Freedom’s Foundation award for an artistic work that brought about “a better understanding of the American way of life.” My husband still has and treasures that award – a bronze disc bearing the raised profile of George Washington kneeling in prayer during the darkest days of the Revolution. It was that bravery that Henry Hudson Kitson also sought to depict in the stance and the face of Newburgh’s minuteman.

Many don’t know that Henry Kitson sculpted another Minuteman, similar but distinct, that was placed in Lexington, Massachusetts. I visited it when I took trips east. The Lexington statue marks the beginning of the Revolution and the Newburgh statue marks the end of that war. Both are sentinels to figuratively guard us through times of trouble. This is a particularly good month to walk over to the old headquarters on Liberty Street and visit our minuteman to say “thank you.”