A bronze statue of Capt. Sally Tompkins, the Mathews County native who operated Robertson Hospital in Richmond during the Civil War, was delivered to Mathews last Wednesday and will soon be installed at the Mathews Museum. It will be available for public display beginning Saturday, Nov. 15.
The statue was created by sculptor Ivan Schwartz of StudioEIS in Brooklyn, New York, for inclusion in the 12-statue “Voices from the Garden” Virginia Women’s Monument, which is located just 400 steps from the Virginia Capitol on Capitol Square. Commissioned by the Virginia Women’s Monument Commission, which was established by the General Assembly in 2010, it was never intended to land in the small town of Mathews.
But circumstances were such that the statue was left out of the monument, and two local residents—Marilyn Iglesias, president of the Captain Sally Tompkins Chapter United Daughters of the Confederacy, and Tom Robinson, president of the Mathews Museum—decided if the statue wasn’t going to b...