A group of civic minded volunteers celebrated International Women’s Week by cleaning and partially restoring the Greene Street monument to Augusta trailblazer Emily Tubman.
The monument, installed in 1994 on the 200th anniversary of Tubman’s birth, featured stately columns framing a giant urn. It was struck by a car and partially destroyed in August 2022.
The streetlights on Greene Street were not in operation at the time of the accident and have only been recently repaired.
Downtown community activist Kevin de l’Aigle has been a vocal advocate for having the monument completely restored and says the city has shown no movement so far in even filing an insurance claim against the driver who lost control and caused the damage.
“I hate to say it, but the city hasn’t done anything about it. I have sent emails to Risk Management, Parks and Rec and the city attorney, and I can never get a response. It is just not that far up on their list,” de l’Aigle said.
The statute of limitations for an insurance claim for property damage is two years, and de l’Aigle says that he has little faith that a claim will ever be filed, so he organized the Coalition for Action in Downtown Augusta.
The group met up with work gloves on March 11 and cleaned what remained of the monument to Emily Tubman and cleared out the underbrush that has been allowed to grow wild.
Brian Mallory, of Beaufort, S. C., donated plants and pots, and the volunteers placed them around and on the bases that once supported the columns.
“The whole monument looked bad, honestly, just terrible, and there was dead foliage everywhere; but we cleaned out the mud and used a special cleaner on the marble so that it wouldn’t be damaged, and now instead of mud, the urn will have a fern,” de l’Aigle said.
A few weeks back, the group also cleaned the Washington memorial monument at 6th Street and Greene Street, and de l’Aigle says the group will keep getting together to do the community’s part in maintaining public treasures, but he still is keeping up the call for the government to do its part.
“It doesn’t take much. They don’t need consultants to tell them how to rebuild a monument. Just do it, rebuild it,” de l’Aigle said.
While de l’Aigle, who traces his ancestry nearly back to Augusta’s founding, is an advocate for maintaining all of the monuments and cemeteries in Augusta, the Emily Tubman monument is particularly dear to his heart.
“Emily Tubman is responsible for both educational and religious institutions in Augusta; she was forward-thinking and progressive in the 1830s. She was really amazing, for a woman of her stature to go to such great lengths to free her slaves should mean something to all of us. We should always honor her name and memory,” de l’Aigle said.
