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(Photo Essay, from the introduction to our eBook )
 

Why We Should Care About Bronze Plaques & Memorials

 

“...there should be, in every life a place...where you could come and visit your past and the past of your people and know that whatever happened outside, here timelessness lived.”
                                         -Anne Rivers Siddons, Novelist

The thousands of bronze plaques and memorials that dot the countryside were meant to provide such a place.

They are a type of community scrapbook, providing an important way to keep history alive. 

Those who pause to notice them are enriched by doing so.

Our links to the past build a foundation for our future.

Our historical roots give us a clearer idea of what our present is and what our future should be.

For millennia, bronze has been chosen to create plaques and memorials because it is such a durable metal. 

Unfortunately, the environment causes the bronze to darken and corrode,  

especially in the presence of water.

This makes the plaques and memorials hard to read. 

A weathered look implies neglect and neglect implies a lack of importance. 

 What originally was meant to keep an important memory alive, gradually becomes just a dilapidated old relic that people bypass and ignore.

Considerable time, creativity, as well as expense, is invested in each of these bronze tributes.  To see them lapse into neglect is a shame, but the worse tragedy to befall them, is to simply be forgotten.

That fate is inevitable, unless someone takes action.