Charlottesville’s Lee statue meets its end, in a 2,250-degree furnace

Melted down in secret, the divisive Confederate monument will be turned into a new piece of public art

By Teo Armus and
Hadley Green
Oct. 26 at 3:00 p.m.

SOMEWHERE IN THE U.S. SOUTH — It was a choice to melt down Robert E. Lee. But it would have been a choice to keep him intact, too.

So the statue of the Confederate general that once stood in Charlottesville — the one that prompted the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in 2017 — was now being cut into fragments and dropped into a furnace, dissolving into a sludge of glowing bronze.

Six years ago, groups with ties to the Confederacy had sued to stop the monument from being taken down. Torch-bearing white nationalists descended on the Virginia college town to protest its removal, and one man drove his car through a crowd of counterprotesters, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer and injuring 35 others.

The statue’s defenders more recently sought to block the city from handing over Lee to the Charlottesville’s Black history museum, which had proposed a plan to repurpose the metal. In a lawsuit, those plaintiffs suggested the monument should remain intact or be turned into Civil War cannons. But on Saturday the museum went ahead with its plan in secret at this small Southern foundry, in a town and state The Washington Post agreed not to name because of participants’ fears of violence.

-----snip-----