Town officials last week approved an approximately $4,000 contract with a Port Chester, N.Y.-based landscape lighting company to install uplighting on all sides of a prominent World War I memorial at the foot of God’s Acre.
The Board of Selectmen voted unanimously during its Oct. 20 meeting to approve the $3,956 contract with Summer Rain to do the work around the Wayside Cross, among other agreements.
A plaque at the foot of the Wayside Cross at God’s Acre. Credit: Michael Dinan
Asked about the contract by Selectman Kathleen Corbet, Public Works Director Tiger Mann said that plans to improve the lighting came together prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We met out there with Keith Simpson Associates and some members from the DAR [Daughters of the American Revolution] and Preservation Alliance and determined that it would be a nice thing to have,” Mann said during the selectmen’s regular meeting, held via videoconference. “We had uplighting that was failing on one side so to make uplighting on all four sides, to shine on the monument. To make it a little more prominent.”
Corbet asked for confirmation that the maintenance is a town cost. Mann said yes, the town has been maintaining that area for as long as he’s been in public works (more than two decades).
Veterans salute the Wayside Cross, a World War I monument at the bottom of God’s Acre. Scenes from the May 29, 2017 Memorial Day parade and ceremony in New Canaan. Credit: Michael Dinan
The Wayside Cross is an important site to locals. It forms the backdrop for speakers during the annual Veterans Day ceremony, and veterans marching in the Memorial Day parade each year stop to salute the cross along the route.
It was unveiled Sept. 9, 1923, nearly five years after the Allies of World War I signed an armistice with Germany to cease hostilities on the Western Front.
For New Canaanites, the end of the war signaled not only the return of fighting men but also the end of deliberate austerity to support the Allies’ efforts. Food shortages had led to the launch of a Canning Club out of Center School’s kitchen. Local Red Cross volunteers had taken over the assessor’s office at Town Hall to sew, knit and create comfort bags for servicemen. To conserve coal, New Canaan Library had closed for two months and Center School merged classes in order to shut some rooms. The Congregational Church’s meeting house grew so cold that its pipes burst, forcing Sunday services upstairs, and the town in early 1918 launched “heatless and lightless Mondays” and, later, “gasoline-less Sundays.”
The unveiling ceremony for the Wayside Cross, on Sept. 9, 1923.
Yet it would take about four years for New Canaan to settle on a memorial to its World War I soldiers. Some early plans were scuttled—such as for a plaque affixed to a boulder, a wing added to Town Hall or a granite shaft installed in front of the municipal building on Main Street.
Eventually, a sculptor who had been a student of Gutzon Borglum, Frances Adams Kent, designed a stone cross to honor New Canaan veterans of four wars.