The statue of a Confederate soldier that once stood in the heart of downtown Winston-Salem has found a new home in a private park near Denton, under the terms of a settlement reached in the lawsuit the United Daughters of the Confederacy filed over the statue's removal here in 2019.
The settlement, signed Thursday for the city by Winston-Salem City Manager Pat Pate, will arrange for the monument to be placed in Valor Memorial Park on N.C. 8 west of Denton. The park, owned by Commemorating Honor Inc., has agreed to accept the monument as long as the city delivers it within 120 days at a maximum cost to the city of $27,000.
The Confederate statue here and ones elsewhere were the center of protests in the years leading up to 2020 and beyond. Winston-Salem officials branded the statue here a public safety hazard and had it dismantled on March 12, 2019.
The United Daughters of the Confederacy, through the state and local chapters, sued the city twice over the removal of the statue.
The first of the lawsuits ended at the North Carolina Supreme Court, which ruled in December 2022 that the UNC state chapter could not go forward with its lawsuit against the city because the group claimed no ownership of the statue and could not prove it suffered any loss of rights or damages because the city had removed it.
The same court ruling left the door open for the suit to be refiled, and the local chapter of the UDC carried forward with that effort.
Thursday's settlement disposes of all the litigation around the monument and has been agreed to by all the parties: the city, the UDC, UDC local chapter president Misha Fulton, Forsyth County and Winston Courthouse LLC, the group that bought the old county courthouse from Forsyth County and converted it into apartments.
The UDC argued in its lawsuits that Forsyth County owned the statue because of its dedication on the county courthouse property, and that the statue was improperly moved because of a state law forbidding the removal of monuments from public property.
The counter argument was that because the county had sold the courthouse to the private developer, the statue was no longer on public property. The courthouse sale excluded the statue, but not the land on which the statue stood.
Winston-Salem Mayor Allen Joines had negotiated with Salem Cemetery to have the statue placed there, in a section of the cemetery devoted to Civil War veterans. But the cemetery backed out because of controversy.
Under the settlement, none of the parties to the suit make any admission of liability, and each party bears its own legal costs.
Valor Memorial Park was established in 2021, and on its web site says its mission is "historic preservation and honoring all veterans."
The operators of the park say their efforts to set up the park began in 2020 to find a new home for the Confederate monument that once stood in Lexington, until the city sued the UDC to force its removal. A couple donated the land for a new private park, and the Davidson County monument was placed in the park on Sept. 18, 2021.
A similar monument from Chatham County was erected in the park last month. The park also has a veterans wall and a metal monument of a kneeling soldier that honors prisoners of war and soldiers missing in action.
The Winston-Salem monument has been in storage since it was taken down. Joe's Tow, a Mocksville company, stated that it will use two flatbed tractor trailers to move the monument, plus a boom and crane to put the monument in place at its new site at the private park.
Photos: More Confederate statue debate at Winston-Salem City Council
Workers place webbing around the top of Winston-Salem’s Confederate monument as they prepare to remove it from the corner of Fourth and Liberty streets in 2019. After five years in storage, the statue has found a new home in a private park in Denton.