Confederate Monument in Danville

The Confederate Monument in Danville, located between Centre College and the First Presbyterian Church at the corner of Main and College Streets in Danville, Kentucky's McDowell Park, is a monument dedicated to the Confederate States of America that is on the National Register of Historic Places. The monument was dedicated in 1910 by the surviving veterans of the Confederacy of Boyle County, Kentucky and the Kate Morrison Breckinridge Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. The monument consists of a granite pedestal and a marble statue resting thereon. The marble figure depicts Captain Robert D. Logan, who actually came from Lincoln County, Kentucky, but lived after the War in Boyle County. Captain Logan served under John Hunt Morgan in the 6th Kentucky Cavalry's Company A, and was captured after Morgan's Raid in Cheshire, Ohio on July 20, 1863, and spent much of the War afterwards in prison camps, particularly the Ohio State Penitentiary. He died on June 25, 1896, fourteen years before the construction of the monument. The granite pedestal is twelve feet tall, and uses pairs of Doric columns to decorate it. The main inscription reads: C. S. A. 1861 - 1865 What They Were the Whole World Knows.

Danville's participation in the War was limited. The courthouse served as a hospital for Union forces after the Battle of Perryville. On October 11, Confederate forces retreated through the city with a Union force behind them. Danville was also the birthplace of Theodore O'Hara, whose Bivouac of the Dead would be a popular poem placed in various cemeteries for the War's dead.

It was after the War that the citizens of Danville showed their level of respect for the Confederacy. Many of the citizens of Danville gave up their eventual burial spots in 1868 to form a Confederate cemetery, with 66 fallen Confederate soldiers reinterred in the cemetery. Danville National Cemetery would eventually be built next to the Confederate cemetery, but would be a place to inter former Union troops.

On July 17, 1997, the Confederate Monument in Danville was one of sixty different monuments related to the Civil War in Kentucky placed on the National Register of Historic Places, as part of the Civil War Monuments of Kentucky Multiple Property Submission. Three other monuments on the MPS are also in Boyle County, all of which commemorate the Battle of Perryville. These are the Confederate Monument in Perryville and Union Monument in Perryville, both by the visitor center at Perryville Battlefield State Historic Site, and the Unknown Confederate Dead Monument in Perryville, located in a nearby private cemetery.