Monument to Civil War Soldiers and Sailors of Perrysburg and Perrysburg Township
Perrysburg, Wood County, Ohio
Marker Inscription
A TRIBUTE TO THE SOLDIERS AND SAILORS OF PERRYSBURG TOWNSHIP
The Story
After the Civil War, communities across the North raised monuments to the local men who had marched off to preserve the Union. This tribute remembers the soldiers and sailors of Perrysburg Township, a northwest Ohio community on the Maumee River that sent its sons into federal service. Like thousands of such memorials, it turned a village common into a permanent place of mourning and civic memory.
Why it matters
Hometown Civil War monuments like this one anchored a generation's grief and helped define how Americans publicly honor military sacrifice.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
When the Civil War ended in 1865, the North counted its cost not in the abstract but in empty chairs at supper tables. Perrysburg Township sits in northwest Ohio on the Maumee River, a corner of the state shaped by shipping, milling, and the slow settling of the old Northwest frontier. Like countless communities of its size, it had sent a meaningful share of its young men into the federal armies and navies over four years of fighting.
In the decades after the war, a wave of memorial-building swept the Northern states. Veterans' organizations, especially the Grand Army of the Republic, joined with town leaders and grieving families to raise monuments on courthouse lawns, village greens, and cemetery grounds. This tribute to the soldiers and sailors of Perrysburg Township belongs to that broad movement.
These were deeply local acts of memory. A monument like this one was paid for by the very neighbors whose sons and brothers it honored, and it was meant to be walked past every day — a fixed point of remembrance in the rhythm of ordinary town life.
People & events
The story here is less about a single famous name and more about a whole community's experience of war. Perrysburg Township, like its neighbors across Ohio, watched men leave for training camps and distant fronts, followed the news of campaigns through letters and newspapers, and marked the return — or the absence — of each one.
The monument speaks of both soldiers and sailors, a reminder that Ohio's contribution to the Union cause was not only in the marching regiments but also on the water. Men from river and lake communities sometimes found their way into naval service, and the memorial gathers all of them under a single tribute.
What gives such a monument its power is that it does not rank or single out. It honors the township's service as a collective, folding every enlistment and every loss into one shared act of gratitude — the way a small community naturally remembers its own.
Its place in the American story
Multiply this one monument by the thousands of towns that raised similar tributes, and you have one of the great civic phenomena of American history. In the generation after the Civil War, the North built memory into its landscape on a scale it had never attempted before, and much of the vocabulary we still use to honor military sacrifice was worked out in these town squares.
These hometown monuments helped transform private grief into public commemoration. They established the idea that a community owes its war dead a permanent, visible place of honor — a principle that would carry forward into how the nation memorialized every later conflict.
A tribute in a northwest Ohio township, then, is a small piece of a national story: the moment when Americans decided, town by town, that the men who served must not be allowed to fade quietly from memory.
If you visit
Come to a monument like this expecting quiet rather than spectacle. Its meaning is in its permanence and its placement — a fixed marker of remembrance set where the community could gather and pass by.
Take a moment to read the tribute slowly and to notice the pairing of soldiers and sailors, a small detail that widens the story beyond the battlefield. Look, too, at the setting around it: the character of the surrounding town tells you something about the people who chose to build here.
Perrysburg sits along the Maumee River in a part of Ohio rich with early American and frontier history, so a stop here pairs naturally with a broader road trip through the region. Give it a few unhurried minutes; monuments like this reward attention more than they demand it.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Civil War
Toledo, OH
This memorial gathers the names of local men who marched off to the Civil War between the firing on Fort Sumter in April 1861 and the war's close in 1865. Toledo and the surrounding Lucas County sent thousands of Ohioans into Union regiments during those four years, and rolls like this one — Abbott, James, and the rest — were a community's way of fixing each volunteer's name in stone. It is less a battlefield monument than a hometown honor roll of service and loss.
Civil War Monument
Detroit, MI
This monument keeps faith with the Grand Army of the Republic, the fraternal order of Union veterans of the Civil War, its inscription counting a reason to remember for each of the reunited states. In the decades after 1865, GAR posts became powerful civic institutions, shaping Memorial Day, pensions, and the public memory of the war. Detroit's monument reflects that long campaign of remembrance.
General O.M. Poe Post No. 443, Grand Army of the Republic
Detroit, MI
The Grand Army of the Republic was the great fraternal order of Union veterans who had fought to preserve the nation and end slavery, and by the late nineteenth century its local Posts anchored civic life in cities across the North. This Detroit Post carried the name of General Orlando M. Poe, a Michigan-born engineer who served with distinction in the Union Army. The lofty inscription — honoring men who acted 'not for selfish gain or applause, but for honor and the glory of the cause' — captures the reverent, memorializing spirit the GAR brought to the decades after Appomattox.
Major General Alpheus Starkey Williams
Detroit, MI
This Detroit monument honors Alpheus Starkey Williams, called a 'hero of two wars' for his service in the Mexican-American War and as a Union general in the Civil War, where he led troops from Antietam to Gettysburg and through the Georgia and Carolinas campaigns. Beyond the battlefield he was a judge, newspaper editor, postmaster, diplomat, and member of Congress. The equestrian statue on Belle Isle marks him as one of the city's most distinguished public servants.