HistoricSiteMarkers
Progressive & Modern Era

Joseph P. Golden Memorial

Boston, Suffolk County, Massachusetts

Marker Inscription

DEDICATED TO THE HANOVILLE VETERANS OF THE WORLD WAR

The Story

Dedicated to the veterans of "the World War" — the name Americans used for World War I before a second one made numbering necessary — this memorial honors the young men of a Boston neighborhood who answered the call in 1917 and 1918. More than four million Americans served in that war, and cities and parishes across the country raised tablets like this one to their local sons. The singular phrasing dates the memorial to the years before a second world war made "the Great War" one of two.

Why it matters

Neighborhood World War I memorials mark the moment the United States stepped onto the world stage as a global military power, honored one community at a time.

The story behind this marker

AI context

The era

This memorial belongs to the years just after the First World War, when American cities and neighborhoods were reckoning with a conflict unlike any they had known. The United States entered the fighting in 1917, and within a year and a half hundreds of thousands of young men had shipped across the Atlantic to a war being waged on a scale the world had never witnessed.

Boston, like every American city, sent its sons. The war reached into ordinary neighborhoods — into parishes, blocks, and clubs — and when it ended, those same communities looked for ways to hold onto the names and the sacrifice. The impulse to build a local memorial was immediate and widespread.

The very wording here, honoring the veterans of "the World War," dates the memorial to that early moment. It was raised before a second global war forced Americans to start numbering their world wars, back when there had been only one so terrible that no number seemed necessary.

People & events

The memorial is dedicated to local veterans of the World War — the neighborhood's own men who served in 1917 and 1918. Rather than commemorating a general or a battle, it gathers up the service of a community's sons and fixes it in stone close to home.

Memorials like this were often the work of neighbors: veterans' groups, parish committees, and local families who pooled effort and money to make sure their own would not be forgotten. The result is a tribute rooted in a specific place, honoring men who left familiar streets, crossed an ocean, and came home changed — or did not come home at all.

Because the marker speaks for a community rather than a single hero, it carries the weight of many individual stories at once. Every name behind a memorial like this belonged to someone's brother, son, or neighbor, and the monument stands in for all of them together.

Its place in the American story

The First World War marked the moment the United States stepped fully onto the world stage as a global military power. More than four million Americans served, and the country's entry helped tip the balance of a war that had ground on for years. When it was over, Americans carried home both pride and grief on a national scale.

That national experience was memorialized one community at a time. Across the country, cities, towns, and parishes raised tablets, statues, and honor rolls to their local veterans, turning an enormous global event into thousands of intimate acts of remembrance. This memorial is one of those countless local answers to a worldwide catastrophe.

Seen together, these neighborhood monuments form a kind of distributed national memorial. Each one insists that the men who served were not an abstraction but the specific young people of a specific place — and that their community meant to remember them by name.

If you visit

Approach this memorial the way it was meant to be encountered: as a neighborhood landmark rather than a grand national shrine. Its power is in its locality — this is a community speaking to its own, in its own place, about its own sons.

Take a moment to notice the phrasing that calls it a memorial to the veterans of "the World War." That singular language is a small time capsule, marking the years before the world had a second such war to distinguish it from. It quietly tells you how long this tribute has stood.

A stop here fits well into a walking exploration of Boston's neighborhoods, where memorials like this one turn up in parks and squares and beside public buildings. Stand with it briefly, think of the community that raised it, and let it do what it was built to do — keep local sacrifice from slipping out of memory.

Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.

Plan your visit

Nearby

Make a day of it — museums, food, and places to stay near this marker.

Museums & culture

Attractions

Food & drink

Places to stay

Places data © OpenStreetMap contributors. Hours and details change — call ahead.

Own a business near here? Add it to the map.

Related people

  • · Joseph P. Golden

Related events

  • · World War I

Themes & tags

World War IMemorial

Nearby & related markers

Brodette Memorial Circle

Cambridge, MA

David Joseph Brodette served in Company F of the 168th Infantry Regiment, part of the famed 42nd "Rainbow" Division of the American Expeditionary Forces sent to fight in France during World War I. He was killed in action on October 29, 1918 — barely two weeks before the Armistice silenced the guns on November 11 — at just 23 years old. Cambridge answered his loss the way countless American towns did after the Great War: by giving a piece of the community itself, a memorial circle, his name, so that a neighbor who never came home would remain part of the landscape he left behind.

ImmigrationWorld War I

World War I Memorial

Somerville, MA

When the United States entered the Great War in 1917, working-class neighborhoods sent their young men "to the colors" by the thousands. Somerville's Ward 2, like the rest of industrial Massachusetts, felt the losses at the battles named here — Belleau Wood, Château-Thierry, and the Meuse-Argonne — where American troops first bled in large numbers on European soil. Neighbors who came home formed a "Welcome Home Club" and, in 1920, raised this memorial to the friends who did not.

World War I

Jamaica Plain WWI & WWII Memorial

Boston, MA

Jamaica Plain, a leafy streetcar-suburb neighborhood of Boston, sent hundreds of its sons into the two great conflicts of the twentieth century, and this memorial gathers their sacrifice into a single act of civic remembrance. In World War I, American doughboys shipped overseas to the trenches of France in 1917–18; a generation later, World War II drew the neighborhood's young men to battlefields across Europe and the Pacific. Communities like this one across America raised such monuments so that the names and losses of ordinary local families would not be forgotten. It stands as the neighborhood's collective thank-you to those who did not come home.

World War IWorld War II

William Amerena

Boston, MA

This memorial honors William Amerena, a Boston-area soldier of Company A, 50th Infantry, killed in France on November 10, 1918 — a single day before the Armistice that ended the First World War. Dedicated by a local American Legion post and rededicated by an East Boston veterans' council in 1953, it keeps alive the name of one of the neighborhood's fallen doughboys. His death on the war's last full day is a quiet reminder that the fighting continued to the final hours.

World War I