EDENTON — Town officials answered questions about the future of Chowan County’s Confederate Memorial in an exclusive interview with the Albemarle Observer, the first media outlet to report the move. The Confederate statue was removed from its longtime location on South Broad Street the night of Aug. 30-31.
Town of Edenton reported that the statue is being stored in an undisclosed location. Several media outlets have published that the statue was taken to the old Chowan County Jail, located behind the 1767 Chowan County Courthouse, and placed in an enclosure for storage.
That said, Move the Monument Coalition spokesperson Rod Phillips shared a photo taken by a Virginia-based TV station’s drone in an emailed weekly anti-statue missive. The image shows the deconstructed statue in a wall-enclosed courtyard at the current Chowan County Jail at the intersection East Church and Court streets. The space is usually used to exercise inmates.
Taxpayers — get this — the initial expense for the relocation was $35,000 according to Town Hall. Also, remember to add to that total $52,000 for legal expenses.
Meanwhile, the Move the Monument Coalition — the group that for years pushed for the statue’s removal — has said it is winding down its public awareness campaign as long as the statue is removed from South Broad Street. Phillips told the Albemarle Observer in an email sent to folks near and far that the group asked Lamar Advertising to remove billboards located just outside town and pulled their newspaper ads, with the final ad scheduled to run Sept. 6. His statement is published at the end of this story in its entirety.
With the monument out of public view and questions remaining about its future, the Town of Edenton Attorney Hood Ellis and Town Manager Corey Gooden responded to several inquiries regarding possible court rulings, storage, costs, and planning for relocation. The responses have been lightly edited to include the explanations of acronyms for those unfamiliar with past coverage of the monument. Our readers probably saw these questions posted to a recent story — questions intended to guide the drive-by media outlets who have been helicoptering into this story.
Question: What happens if the litigants successfully appeal the statue’s fate so that it is returned to South Broad Street, or even imagine this scenario – the memorial is reinstalled at Veterans Park, only to have the courts say that’s not a good spot either.
Ellis: The Town obeys the court. If the Court orders the Town to return it to its location on South Broad Street, the Town will do so. If the Court says Veterans Park is not appropriate and orders the Town to relocate it, the Town will find a location that meets the terms of the Monument Protection Act and relocate same.
Question: If pending or potential future litigation remains unresolved, will the statue remain in storage, perhaps indefinitely?
Ellis: The Town is going to proceed with the plan outlined in the MOU (Memorandum of Understanding) with the County until a Court orders the Town to do otherwise.
Question: How much has Town Hall set aside to reconstitute the monument at Veterans Park?
Gooden: The initial expenses (from 2023) for the relocation was $35,000. This value is still applicable today.
Question: Have engineering studies been conducted to determine whether Veterans Park’s land can support a multi-ton statue that’s going to tower over other war monuments?
Gooden: Some initial engineering review has begun (internally with the Town and County), this review is based on the weight of the structure, the foundation design based on its weight, and the soil type(s). This data will be used as part of the preparations for the site.
Per the author of this story (Miles) — another knowledgeable source with a strong engineering background have said that the ground would be suitable for the statue.
Question: Can Town Hall reassure the public that this piece of history is not stored in some unlocked broom closet?
Ellis: Yes. The Monument Protection Act requires its relocation to a place of similar prominence, etc.
Question: Did (Edenton) public works personnel who had to remove the statue at midnight on Labor Day weekend receive overtime wages?
Gooden: Any staff on-site during the removal of the statue was paid appropriately according to the Town’s personnel policy.
Back to Rod Phillips:
Question: Now that the memorial to Chowan County’s war dead has been removed from South Broad, will the billboards declaring Edenton racist be removed?
Yes. The commitment was to keep the billboards up until the statue came down. The statue is down, and we have an order in with Lamar Advertising to have have the message removed from both as soon as possible — even though we still have some time to run on both billboards under nonrefundable contracts. As of Tuesday, the word from Lamar was, “It should take a few days.”
We have one more Saturday to run under our current ad contract with the Chowan Herald, this coming Saturday, Sept. 6. We emailed Beverly on Tuesday to pull that ad if possible. The deadline for changes was last Friday, and Beverly has been on vacation, so that might not happen. But, at any rate, we will not be continuing these ads beyond this Saturday as long as the statue remains out of public view.
The billboards do not declare Edenton to be racist, only that for thinking, compassionate, progressive people, this town is not a place for white supremacy.
Early in 2022, near the end of one of our Saturday protests, a woman walked up to where I and Andrean Heath were standing. She identified herself as living “nearby.” This woman looked directly at Andrean and said, “We let you have Martin Luther King, Jr. Avenue! Why do you have to have our monument, too?!”
Spoken passionately and plaintively as my exclamation marks indicate. “We let you have…”
This kind of thinking comes from a white supremacy mindset and is probably more pernicious even than the use of the N-word (which we’ve also heard). And I saw this same thought expressed and forwarded by others in very much the same words on social media at that time. It was a meme for a while, apparently. That woman was not a one-off and not an outlier.
Note: This story was edited at 5:47 a.m. Sept. 5, 2025, to provide the full question posed by our staff member to Rod Phillips.
3 responses to “What’s Next for Edenton’s Confederate Monument? Town Officials Answer Questions”
Excellent follow up on this sad, sad, story by the Albemarle Observer. Unnecessary expenses incurred by the taxpayers because the Town was in such a hurry to remove a memorial to local war heroes as quickly as a court would no longer actually prevent it, I.E. the Court is not saying it should be removed, it simply is refusing to stop it from being removed.
Mr. Phillips sees “White Supremacy” everywhere, including on this Monument. While the woman he quoted clearly shows her describing a racial divide, this does NOT automatically equate to a description of supremacy. For example, you will frequently hear the terms “Black community” or “People of Color” and these are terms describing racial differences. Heck, PBS NC has a program entitled “Black Issues Forum” yet no one would say they are touting “Black Supremacy”. Recognizing there are differences is not the same as advocating supremacy.
For the record, in the early days, three years ago when the protests began, I sat down with the folks on both sides. I spoke with several people on the Move The Monument team and I said that I did not see any racism written anywhere on the Monument but that I DID actually see a Memorial to soldiers. A VERY influential black woman on the Move The Monument team told me point blank “Of course you can’t see it, you are a white man.” She was calm and composed as it was a civil discussion, but she had lived and WORKED for government in Chowan and it clearly highlighted her dismissing my opinion based solely on my gender and race. She did to me, the very same thing Mr. Phillips is describing was done above, and though she obviously was willing to make exceptions (Mr. Phillips) for those that do not agree, Race and Gender were the reasons she cited for failure to see things her way, yet never did I believe she was advocating “Black Supremacy”.
For those that are now denied the opportunity (by Town’s actions) to see for themselves, this is what is actually written on the Monument, and the reader can decide:
“OUR CONFEDERATE DEAD 1861-1865”
“Gashed with honorable scars Low in Glorys lap they lie Though they fell, they fell like stars Streaming splendour through the sky”
Ironically, many of those who want to sound off with false claims of “white supremacy” or “Jim Crow” are registered to vote in the very political party that brought both to North Carolina and the South as a brazen and evil political power move. Yet they accuse Confederate memorials, which had absolutely nothing to do with either with the things their own political party did.
HERE is how white supremacy and Jim Crow came about in North Carolina:
In the 1890s, white small farmers largely abandoned the Democrat Party and formed the Populist Party. The Populist Party entered into a “Fusion” agreement with the Republican Party for the 1894 election, where only one of the two parties contested each legislative race and the members of both parties voted for that candidate against the Democrat. The Republican Party at the time was multi-racial, but most black voters were Republican. The fusion ticket took control of both houses of the legislature away from the Democrats. They passed a home rule bill for counties that allowed local voters to finally be able to elect their own county commissioners.
In the 1896 election, the Fusion parties expanded their control of the state legislature and won every statewide office. North Carolina even sent two Fusion senators to Washington, one a Populist and one a Republican. In the legislature, Democrats only won 54 seats out of 170, the other 116 going to the Fusion parties. Thanks to the new home rule at the county level, black candidates won hundreds of seats across the state from county commission to Congress.
The Democrats responded in the 1898 election with a vicious campaign of white supremacy, designed to intimidate the blacks who were voting Republican and shame the white small farmers into voting race over their economic interests. The Democrats even used goon squads known as Red Shirts to intimidate voters. Unfortunately, it worked. Democrats regained control of the legislature.
With political power back in their hands, the Democrats moved to entrench it, passing a raft of Jim Crow laws in the 1899 legislative session to do so. They added some additional Jim Crow laws in the 1901 session. White supremacy was all about the Democrat Party regaining political control of North Carolina, and Jim Crow was all about their working to keep it. Neither had anything to do with Confederate war dead or memorials. It was all a shameful political power play, and those who protest Confederate monuments are mostly members of the political party that was responsible for it.
FYI: Lamar Advertising was one of 2 or 3 outdoor advertising companies that I personally contacted when Pitt County illegally removed our Confederate Memorial in 2020. The memorial was privately funded and erected and stood proudly and firm from 1914 until 2020. ALL these outdoor advertising companies – including Lamar – flatly DENIED our request to erect a billboard message for our commissioners to put our memorial back. Different Groups – Different Rules ? ? ?
By the way . . . the Monument Protection Acts provision for relocation to a location of “equal prominence” is still to this day being flagrantly violated. Our Pitt County Memorial is lying horizontally on the ground in a memorial park north of Lexington, VA. Yes, that’s right, VIRGINIA!
J. McRoy
Pitt County