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 be displayed at the capitol, the next best place for it was in Sally’s hometown. Their advocacy won the day.
Flash back to the 2010s, and many Mathews County residents were excited about the inclusion of one of their own in the historic statuary exhibit, which would include statues of just a dozen Virginia women. When asked by the Virginia Capitol Foundation in 2017 to raise funds to support the monument’s creation, the residents worked hard and ended up contributing the $200,000 they were asked for.
Capt. Sally’s statue was the first one to be cast, and in 2019 seven of the completed statues were installed at Virginia’s Capitol Square and the monument was dedicated, but Capt. Sally’s statue was not among them. The residents who worked on the project were told it was because it was being used as a sample for burnishing the bronze on the remaining statues and would be installed later.
But the statue was never installed, and the monument stands today with just 11 statues in it.
Susan Schaar, chief administrative officer for the Virginia Senate and member of the Commission to Commemorate 400 Years of Women’s Contributions to the Commonwealth, said in a 2022 interview that the unrest that occurred in Richmond and around the nation in 2020 in the wake of the highly-publicized death of George Floyd at the hands of a Minnesota police officer had caused concerns that there would be damage to the monument if Capt. Sally were in it.
At that time, Mathews County was considered the logical place for the statue, she said, “But then we picked up the paper, and lo and behold…” Schaar was referring to the Mathews County Board of Supervisors’ discussion in 2022 of deeding the Confederate monument on the Mathews Court Green to the Sons of Confederate Veterans in order to ensure its protection. The discussion made national news, and Mathews suddenly didn’t seem like the safest place for Sally.
Schaar said she hoped that the statue would someday take its rightful place, but that for the time being it would continue to sit in a box “in a safe place” with “no timeframe for installation.”
Iglesias, who was at the museum for the statue’s delivery, referred to “the desecration and removal” of all Confederate statues on Richmond’s Monument Avenue in 2022, and understood the need to store Sally Tompkins until “she would no longer be a target for destruction.”
However, she said, “as time went on and 11 other statues were installed, it became clear that Sally would need some advocating on her behalf lest she remain in storage forever.”
Efforts were made over time to find Sally a suitable home, said Iglesias, and several sites were explored, but none was viable for one reason or another.
“Finally, it was decided that perhaps she should return home to Mathews,” she said.
The museum, under Robinson’s guidance, “volunteered to provide her with a safe and welcoming accommodation,” said Iglesias, “and she happily arrived on October 29, 2025 to her final perfect home.”
A special private reception for the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Sons of Confederate Veterans will be held at the museum on Nov. 9, Sally Tompkins’s birthday. This will be followed on Nov. 13 with a museum-members-only reception.
The statue will be available for public viewing beginning on Saturday, Nov. 15. Hours that day are 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.
Additional exhibits that will be on display include the carriage house, the Campeche chair, Tom Hunley’s Country Store, and others.
About Captain Sally
Tompkins used her own funds to staff and equip a hospital for Confederate soldiers in Richmond in 1861. She served as supervisor of the hospital, which gained a reputation for having one of the highest recovery rates of Confederate hospitals, due to her emphasis on cleanliness and diet.
When the Confederate government consolidated private hospitals into larger military hospitals run by commissioned officers, the Confederate Army granted Tompkins a special military commission as a captain so that she could continue to operate Robertson Hospital, which had the lowest death rate of any hospital, Union or Confederate, during the war. She has been remembered as the “Angel of the Confederacy.”