New veterans memorial statues near installation
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FAIRMONT - As Veterans Day approaches, the last major step for the Martin County Veterans Memorial in Fairmont nears completion.
Volunteers began planning for the memorial back in 2016 and it was dedicated in a ceremony in May of 2024.
Chuck Mixson, a key part of the Veterans Memorial effort, said the Compassion and Valor statues, a nurse tending to a wounded soldier, should be here by Veterans Day, Nov. 11.
"The female one is done," he said. "It’s all the detail stuff, the little stuff they got to put on the statues and stuff. But he’s hoping to be here by next week."
Martin County Veterans Memorial Chairman Chuck Maday said the Memorial Committee wanted to feature a female nurse as a statue from the very beginning.
"We put it on the back burner until other things were done," he said. "Then we started talking about the nurse again. Chuck Mixson had talked to Brodin Studios there of what we all had in mind then. Emailed some pictures of the wounded soldier there with the nurse."
Originally, Maday said they believed that they would need to do multiple fundraisers for the statue's cost, over $100,000. Thankfully, Maday said enough funding from donations has come in to cover the statue's cost, including from the Anderson Sneed Foundation. To have reached this point, Maday said, means a great deal to them.
"Everybody is a bit amazed at the money that has come in," he said. "This will kind of be the end of what we planned to do. We'll take a break once this is here and installed. There's always going to be maintenance and stuff."
Another Chuck Mixson idea that recently went in was a series of 11 plane and four boat silhouettes, placed on the rear side of the Veterans Memorial wall.
"It was an idea that he had come up with and thought that, instead of it just being a blank wall, it would add to it a little bit."
The plane silhouettes were arranged from a WWII-era fighter plane all the way to the current forms of military aviation technology. It was a relatively new idea Mixson pitched a couple months ago, according to Maday.
Local company Wiederhoeft Welding was chosen to make the silhouettes. When the committee went to pay them for their work, they found out Wiederhoeft Welding had chosen to donate the materials and machining of the silhouettes.
October also saw the addition of 24 veterans’ names to the memorial. Maday said that while it has slowed down, they continue to accept new veterans to the wall, and have already collected five new names to be placed when a new addition can be done next spring.
"There won’t be another cut until next spring because it’s getting cold out," he said. "There could be 20-some names by next spring again to go on."
Other activities that have been going on include maintaining the grounds and getting the raised pad the Compassion and Valor statue will sit on ready for the statue's installation. Maday said there is also an additional pad currently empty that will be another donor wall. He said hopefully that will be here in a couple of weeks as well, and new donor names will be added when nicer weather prevails in the spring.
Moving forward, Maday said the priority of the committee will be maintaining the memorial.
"Keep it looking beautiful like it is," he said. "A priority for us is to make sure we have flags we can put up that aren't going to be tattered when somebody happens to stop down here or drive by and see that."