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Capt. Sally Tompkins statue left out of Voices in the Garden

By Sherry Hamilton on October 12, 2022
mathews womens monument
SHERRY HAMILTON / GAZETTE-JOURNAL The Virginia Women’s Monument: Voices from the Garden in Richmond has been completed, but it’s missing one statue—that of Mathews native Capt. Sally Tompkins. Her statue was built but was not installed because of fears the monument would be damaged if Capt. Sally were included.

In 2017, members of the Virginia Capitol Foundation came to Mathews County to ask local residents to donate funds to create a bronze statue of Captain Sally Tompkins to go on the then-proposed Virginia Women’s Monument: Voices in the Garden.

Donate they did. The little Mathews community raised $200,000 to pay for the life-sized statue, one of 12 to be built by Ivan Schwartz of the prestigious StudioEIS in Brooklyn, New York. One local resident gave a whopping $100,000 toward the statue. Her name is listed as one of the 22 lead donors for the monument statewide.

In May of this year, it was announced that the final two statues had been added to the monument, for a total of 11 statues. Sally Tompkins was not one of them.

Who was Capt. Sally Tompkins?

Capt. Sally Tompkins was a nurse and the only female cavalry officer commissioned in the Confederate Army during the Civil War. She received her commission in 1861 when all private Confederate hospitals were ordered to be closed,...

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