McMinnville Buildings and Grounds and Parks and Recreation committees jointly approved a proposal to install a new monument honoring former Mayor Benjamin Hill at the Old City Cemetery.
Warren County’s Lucas Holt said the project will be privately funded and requires no financial contribution from the city.
“I want to say before I get started, I’m not trying to push any kind of political agenda or anything,” Holt said. “I’m honoring history, a former mayor, and a son of Warren County.”
Holt said the monument will be situated within 20 feet of the Hill family plot where the former mayor is buried alongside his wife and child. The request includes a 10 by 12 space to accommodate a modest memorial garden and a small bench for visitors.
Holt said the memorial will feature a granite stone measuring six feet in height and four and a half feet in width placed on a concrete pad.
“I was raised in Irving College, and that’s where Benjamin Hill was raised, and I’d like to see an Irving College boy get some recognition,” Holt said. “His wife put up a headstone.”
Holt said the monument also honors the 35th Tennessee Infantry, a regiment that included soldiers now buried in various cemeteries across the region. Hill served as a member of the state senate before the Civil War and later served as mayor around 1870.
“The Southern Cross of Honor, which is a lot of, which will be on a lot of the old Confederate soldiers’ markers, which was designed after the war by the United Daughters of the Confederacy to honor these soldiers that served,” Holt said. “That would be at the top.”
Officials noted that a sign honoring Hill already exists along the cemetery sidewalk, but Holt said that marker is dedicated to the entire regiment rather than Hill specifically. The committee discussed an image in the proposal packet that featured a Confederate flag, which Holt said was an artificial intelligence generation and would not be part of the physical monument.
