BGuthrie Photos: DC -- Downtown -- McPherson Square and James B. McPherson Equestrian Memorial

DC -- Downtown -- McPherson Square and James B. McPherson Equestrian Memorial:

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Copyrights: All pictures were taken by amateur photographer Bruce Guthrie (me!) who retains copyright on them. Free for non-commercial use with attribution. See the [Creative Commons] definition of what this means. "Photos (c) Bruce Guthrie" is fine for attribution. (Commercial use folks can of course contact me.) Feel free to use in publications and pages with attribution but you don't have permission to sell the photos themselves. A free copy of any printed publication using any photographs is requested. Descriptive text, if any, is from a mixture of sources, quite frequently from signs at the location or from official web sites; copyrights, if any, are retained by their original owners.

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[1] MCPHER_970415_01.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[2] MCPHER_970415_02.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[3] MCPHER_970415_04.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)
[4] MCPHER_970415_08.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[5] MCPHER_970415_10.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)	[6] MCPHER_970415_13.JPG Medium (Email) (Bigger?)

Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
1. MCPHER_970415_01.JPG: McPherson Square; frontal This is a front-on view of the statue that centers McPherson Square, located at the intersection of Vermont Avenue and K Street. It's about two blocks northeast of the White House. Who's it named after? James Birdseye McPherson commanded the (Union) Army of Tennessee during Sherman's Atlanta Campaign. He was killed in battle before ever reaching the battle of Atlanta in 1864.
2. MCPHER_970415_02.JPG: McPherson Square; further Another picture of McPherson Square. The street behind the statue is K Street. Originally, K Street was the dividing line in the city between the lower and the upper classes, with the upper classes taking the areas closest to the White House (on the south side of K Street). Old mansions and townhouses lined the street until development in the area started replacing them with glass box buildings. President Kennedy instituted a preservation program in 1963 to protect the older buildings in the area but all of the area around this statue is just concrete now. The spires behind and to the right of the statue are the churches that circle Thomas Circle, on the corner of Vermont Avenue and Massachusetts Avenue. The one on the left is the National City Christian Church and the one on the right is the Luther Place Memorial Church. Also along Thomas Circle is the Vista Hotel International where DC's Mayor Marion Barry was, in 1990, lured by an old girlfriend and filmed smoking crack amid his attempts to bed the woman. This led to his jailing and divorce but, amazingly enough, the city re-elected him as mayor after he got out of jail, something which whites saw as an act of black arrogance and blacks saw as an act of black independence. None of this helped the city of course which increasingly came under Federal receivershop afterward.
Multi Column: Number of columns of thumbnails to appear per page (normally defaults to 3): [1 col] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10]
Wikipedia Description: Major General James B. McPherson
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Major General James B. McPherson is a public artwork by American artist Louis Rebisso, located at McPherson Square in Washington, D.C., United States. Major General James B. McPherson was originally surveyed as part of the Smithsonian's Save Outdoor Sculpture! survey in 1993. The monument is a bronze equestrian statue of Civil War hero James B. McPherson. The statue is a contributing monument to the Civil War Monuments in Washington, DC, of the National Register of Historic Places.

Description

The memorial shows General McPherson sitting upon a horse, turned slightly to the proper right as if surveying a battlefield. He is holding the horses reins in his proper left hand and a pair of field glasses in his proper right hand. His horse, caught in mid-stride, walks with its proper right foot raised and its head turned down. The statue sits upon a rectangular granite base (H. 12 ft (4 m)., D. 6 ft (2 m).). The base is adorned with a ring of small wreaths around the top and a ring of stars around the bottom, along with a ring of cannonballs.

The west side of the base is inscribed with:

MAJ. GEN. JAMES B. McPHERSON
ATLANTA
JULY 22, 1864

The east side of the base is inscribed with:

ERECTED BY HIS COMRADES
OF THE SOCIETY OF
THE ARMY OF THE TENNESSEE

Information

Confederate cannons that were captured at the Battle of Atlanta were used in the casting of the piece. The base was designed by Smithmeyer & Pelz and Westham Granite Works provided the stone work.

The sculpture was authorized by the United States Congress on March 3, 1875, and was paid for by the Society of the Army of the Tennessee. Major General James B. McPherson was installed in Scott Square (now McPherson Square) on October 18, 1876, on the 11th annual reunion of the Army of the Tennessee.
Bigger photos? To save server space, the full-sized versions of these images have either not been loaded to the server or have been removed from the server. (Only some pages are loaded with full-sized images and those usually get removed after three months.) I still have them though. If you want me to email them to you, please send an email to guthrie.bruce@gmail.com and I can email them to you, or, depending on the number of images, just repost the page again will the full-sized images.
Directly Related Pages: Other pages with content (DC -- Downtown -- McPherson Square and James B. McPherson Equestrian Memorial) directly related to this one: [Display ALL photos on one page]:
- 2021_DC_McPherson: DC -- Downtown -- McPherson Square and James B. McPherson Equestrian Memorial (21 photos from 2021)
- 2020_DC_McPherson: DC -- Downtown -- McPherson Square and James B. McPherson Equestrian Memorial (7 photos from 2020)
- 2016_DC_McPherson: DC -- Downtown -- McPherson Square and James B. McPherson Equestrian Memorial (18 photos from 2016)
- 2009_DC_McPherson: DC -- Downtown -- McPherson Square and James B. McPherson Equestrian Memorial (7 photos from 2009)
- 2007_DC_McPherson: DC -- Downtown -- McPherson Square and James B. McPherson Equestrian Memorial (3 photos from 2007)
- 2005_DC_McPherson: DC -- Downtown -- McPherson Square and James B. McPherson Equestrian Memorial (4 photos from 2005)
Same Subject: Click on this link to see coverage of items having the same subject: [Memorials]
1997 photos: Since 1984, I've lived in Silver Spring, Maryland. From 1981 to 2002, photos were taken using a Pentax ME Super camera. From 1989 to 2002, I was doing all pictures as prints (instead of slides which I had grown up on). In 1997, at the age of 40, my photo obsession began and I started taking thousands of photos per year. In September, 2002, I switched to digital cameras and the number of photos exploded. Image quality is going to be variable because these are scans of slides and/or prints. The images shown here were scanned in two phases. In the early years of the website, I rescanned a selection of pre-digital images, all at fairly low quality settings. During the COVID pandemic, I launched the Great Rescanning Effort, rescanning ALL of my pre-digital images from various media (prints, slides, negatives, etc) at higher resolution and quality settings. Mutilple versions of images -- some from the initial scannning phase, some from prints, some from slides/negatives -- were posted so there are frequently duplicate images on the same page. At some point, I hope to have time to do a final review and get rid of the duplicates but that'll have to wait until all of the pre-digital images are finally posted. Trips this year: North Carolina (Dad), Florida (Mom), using a time share in Arkansas to visit Civil War sites in Missouri, Georgia, Arkansas, Mississippi and Tennessee. The Civil War became my excuse to see places I'd never been to in my life and it was a great motivator for 20 years or so.
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Photo Contact: [Email Bruce Guthrie].