The Siverd Monument

Winfield Daily Courier - November 27, 1893

EDITOR COURIER:

I can heartily endorse all the eulogies I have seen in print or have heard orally of the brave and true Captain H. H. Siverd. I fully appreciate the purity and nobility of the motive that inspired so many of our representative men to subscribe so liberally towards the erection of a granite monument to perpetuate his memory. And as a humble citizen of Winfield and one who was intimately acquainted with Siverd for the last thirteen yers, and have so often heard him express with his own peculiar emphasis, what seemed to be the strongest desires of his soul, that I cannot but think that the $1,500 proposed to be put in a stone monument could be used in other ways that would do greater honor to his memory, and would be far more in accordance with his own most cherished and strongest wishes, than the monument would be.

In the first place, as a loving father, one of his highest ambitions was to give his children a collegiate education. He seemed really to mourn because he was financially unable to do it. His next highest ambition, and the one which cost him his life, was the full enforcement of all our laws, especially the prohibition law, and the just punishment of all law-breakers. The third one was the providing for the needs of soldiers' widows and their children, who from any cause were unable to provide for themselves. I fully believe that the appropriation of the $1,500 for any one, or for all of the three objects named above, as the monument committee in their wisdom might determine, would be a greater honor to his memory, and one more in accord with his own wishes, and that would in the long run do a thousand times more good than a granite monument. In a little while the monument would lose its power for good, while these others would go on with accumulating force to be seen in his children and in the redemption of Winfield from the curse of law breakers, and the blessing that would come to the soldier's widow and his children. I am in for the monument to our heroic, noble dead, in the ways I have indicated, instead of the stone monument. What say our citizens?

Yours for the best.

S. S. HOLLOWAY,
Winfield, Kansas,
November 23, 1893