Silver Springs Veterans Memorial
2009 Competition Entry - Silver Springs, Pennsylvania
The township of Silver Springs, rich with Revolutionary War and Civil War history, was looking to honor its war veterans with a memorial sculpture, to be built in a park adjacent to the town’s original grist mill. A circular path rings the memorial to give it a definite boundary. A pedestrian pathway extends through the center of the circle and passes between two giant buried millstones which gently emerge from the earth, ascending towards each other. Inscribed on the exposed grey granite panels of the two stones are the names of fallen soldiers and the insignias of the respective branches of the Armed Services to which they belonged.
The dynamic space between the two stones standing side-by-side, almost touching – but not quite – is a compression meant to heighten awareness of the sacrifice made by fallen soldiers in service to our country. The path is bent as it passes between the stones, representing the lives changed by the fight for the United States as well as the change experienced by visitors to the memorial.
