Amid the rolling farmland of central North Carolina, near the small town of Denton, three nearly identical Confederate statues stand on a 1.5-acre patch of manicured grass.
All three statues depict unnamed soldiers — men with mustaches, clutching rifles, atop pedestals affixed to sturdy concrete bases. And all three previously stood in communities around the state, until social justice protests swept the country in recent years, and demonstrators demanded the statues’ removal because they saw them as memorializing historical racism.
Now they stand in a private park, Valor Memorial, that is dedicated to resurrecting Confederate statues that municipalities removed from public view.
One of the park’s creators, Toni London, said she believed that Confederate soldiers deserved the same honor as any other veterans.
“It’s been an obsession to make it succeed, to make it better,” Ms. London, 52, said of the park, “and to save more.”
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Ms. London began envisioning Valor Memorial in 2020, as the nationwide push to remove Confederate imagery from the public square took root. Her efforts align with a more recent push by President Trump, whose administration moved to restore Confederate memorials soon after he returned to office. In March, he ordered the return of any monument that was removed since 2020 in what he called “a false reconstruction of American history.”
But Mr. Trump’s order applies only to memorials under federal jurisdiction, and the nearly 150 Confederate statues and monuments taken down after the murder of George Floyd, which incited the 2020 protests, are almost entirely the domain of state and local officials. They have often had a hard time figuring out what to do with them.
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The idea for Valor Memorial came to Ms. London in 2020, after a flatbed truck hauled a Confederate statue away from Main Street in Lexington, N.C. It was determined that the local Daughters of the Confederacy chapter owned the monument, and could have it. But the group needed a plan.
Ms. London, then a member of the organization, found a patch of land outside Denton, a predominantly white community between Charlotte and Greensboro. The owners donated the property after hearing about her quest, and volunteers helped clear the pines.
In 2021, the statue from Lexington was rededicated at Valor Memorial before about 600 people, Ms. London said.
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