Lincolns For Rosecrans campaign wraps up

By LENNY C. LEPOLA

News Assis­tant Man­ag­ing Editor

On Pres­i­dent Abra­ham Lincoln’s birth­day, Feb­ru­ary 12, Big Wal­nut Local School Dis­trict stu­dents com­pleted the Lin­colns for Rose­crans penny cam­paign to help pay for a bronze eques­trian statue to honor Major Gen­eral William Starke Rosecrans.

William Starke Rose­crans was born in Kingston Town­ship Sep­tem­ber 6, 1819, attended West Point, and became one of the Civil War’s least under­stood gen­er­als. So mis­un­der­stood that he is the only Civil War gen­eral not hon­ored with an eques­trian statue.

That all started to change about two years ago when mem­bers of the Rose­crans’ Com­mand Head­quar­ters Unit based at the Myers Inn Museum in Sun­bury started fundrais­ing activ­i­ties for the $175,000 statue.

Over the past five-and-a-half weeks stu­dents in all three school dis­trict ele­men­tary build­ings and Big Wal­nut Mid­dle School col­lected $2,267.21 towards the bronze statue being made by sculp­tor Alan Cottrill.
The top school in the Lin­colns for Rose­crans cam­paign was Gen­eral Rose­crans Ele­men­tary where stu­dents col­lected $1,237.51; and Jes­sica Amodio’s sec­ond grade class led the school by col­lect­ing $177.07.

Stu­dents in Vir­ginia Crawford’s third grade class col­lected $167.09, while Kari Thomas’ first graders gath­ered $101.28. One Big Wal­nut Ele­men­tary stu­dent brought in a bucket con­tain­ing $108.05.
Big Wal­nut Mid­dle School stu­dents counted and rolled over $100 in pen­nies; and vol­un­teers Damon and Janet Bower, Alice Cha­pan, Suzanne Allen, Liz Golowen­ski and Polly Horn counted $350 before decid­ing to use a machine to count the coins.

“We are very pleased with the enthu­si­as­tic par­tic­i­pa­tion of all the stu­dents and staff in the schools,” said penny-drive chair Sue Com­is­ford. “The pur­pose of the cam­paign was to give teach­ers the oppor­tu­nity to share facts about Gen­eral Rose­crans with stu­dents so they could learn about our local hero in an inter­est­ing man­ner. As they grow into adults today’s stu­dents will remem­ber how they col­lected pen­nies to help build the statue, and will pass their knowl­edge of Gen­eral Rose­crans on to their children.”


Lin­colns for Rose­crans was the last planned cam­paign for rais­ing funds for the statue, but Myers Inn Museum Cura­tor Polly Horn said $10,586 still needs to be col­lected for the project.

“Many peo­ple and com­pa­nies have said they want to be a part of the project, but have not yet sent in their checks,” Horn said.

Brochures with infor­ma­tion about pur­chas­ing com­mem­o­ra­tive bricks paving the Trail to the Gen­eral are avail­able at the statue site, at the Myers Inn, and at < BigWalnutHistory.org >.

Fes­tiv­i­ties for the ded­i­ca­tion of the statue will begin at 2 p.m. Sat­ur­day, Sep­tem­ber 28.

Posted by Gary Henery on Feb 20 2013. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.