ABOVE: Martin County Veterans Memorial Committee Treasurer Verlus Burkhart, left, and Board Member and County Veterans Service Officer Douglas Landsteiner stand on the recently placed base for the upcoming Compassion and Valor statue, which will honor military medical workers and wounded soldiers.

FAIRMONT – As Memorial Day approaches, the Martin County Veterans Memorial Committee is still hard at work keeping things in tip-top shape with the Veterans Memorial in Fairmont.

The big project they are working on now is a new statue entitled Compassion and Valor. Board Member and County Veterans Service Officer Douglas Landsteiner said the statue has evolved from its original planned iteration.

“The committee has always intended to honor the military medical field, especially nurses in the field that take care of combat,” he said. “We had intentionally planned a future bronze statue of the nurse, but this particular statue is kind of covering two birds with one stone. There is going to be a military nurse standing over a wounded soldier. It’s being placed near the Purple Heart stone and flag.”

Through the compassion of military medical personnel and the valor of soldiers wounded in battle, this piece gets its name. Working on this project is now bittersweet as Terry Anderson, the lead on the design team for the statue, one of the original board members, and the second chairman, died in December of 2025 before it could be completed.

“Terry’s concept was what we more or less went with, with some minor modifications as we went along,” Landsteiner said.

It was around August of last year that Compassion and Valor was announced, with the hope it would be placed in by Veterans Day 2026. With $90,000 raised, $50,000 more needed for completion and the base for the statue recently placed, Treasurer Verlus Burkhart said that is still the plan.

“We have made the initial payment,” he said. “Now we’re waiting for the final plans that the board will approve. There’s three major payments left to make on that statute, but all these phases are going to take some time. The goal is to have it done by Veterans Day, and that’s still the plan.”

Maintaining the park is done through help from the Sentence to Serve crew, who do tasks like mowing and shoveling snow when necessary. There are also several volunteers, such as former Board Member Chuck Mixson.

“We oversee the whole property,” Burkhart said. “Do everything it takes to improve the property, like landscaping, find low spots they need to fill and maintain the helicopter. The helicopter has cables that need to be replaced every once in a while; it’s just general maintenance.”

Outside of all of this, the committee is still hard at work, as it plans to be for the foreseeable future, finding people who need to be recognized so they can be added to the memorial wall.

“We continue to gather names of veterans that should appear on the wall here,” Burkhart said. “We send them up to our engraver on a semi-yearly basis, three, four times a year.”

One problem they are running into, according to Landsteiner, is they are running out of room for donor recognition. Plans are already being made to address this.

“We’re working out a plan to resolve that with another granite panel that we’re going to continue with donations,” he said. “We added some concrete around the stone down by the helicopter so we can go all the way around it. Some of the smaller donor plaques that assisted with the dedication ceremony will be mounted on the backside of that rock.”

To have made it to this point, Landsteiner said it could not have been done without the donors and citizens of Martin County.

“I think they’re all very, very proud of our memorial park,” he said. “We have one of the most beautiful designs and setups anywhere. I hear positive comments from veterans and their family members all the time.”

Moving forward, Landsteiner said they will also have their attention on a third critical mission to the committee, which is making sure other cities in Martin County get their own places for memorials.

“Hopefully we can continue with some fundraising, not just to maintain this facility, but have some funding available for other communities that want to do something similar on a smaller scale to recognize their veterans,” he said.

There are plans for the Veterans Memorial to be used by the VFW and American Legion in their Memorial and Veterans Day programs moving forward, according to Landsteiner. For more information on the Veterans Memorial and its committee, visit mcvm.org.