The Bennington Battle Monument

Lizzie McCullough's grandfather, Hiland Hall , was an important Vermont historian. Although he died in 1885, six years before the dedication of the Bennington Battle Monument, he strongly influenced the design of the monument we know today. After the Bennington Battle Monument Association (BBMA) rejected an ornate 1877 design for the monument, the committee suggested instead "a 60-foot high granite memorial with a heroic statue on top and four smaller statues at the corners of the base." Hiland Hall thought this was a terrible idea and called the new proposed design "a monstrosity." He preferred a design by a Boston architect named J. Philip Rinn. Rinn proposed "a big tower" 300 feet high that had a museum building attached to its base. The BBMA persuaded Rinn to make the tower stand alone without the museum.

Hiland Hall never lived to see the monument finished. He died two years before the five-ton cornerstone was laid. The monument itself took two and one half years to build. In November of 1889 the capstone, which weighed two tons, was put in place, making the tower 301 feet 10 ½ inches high . The total cost of building the monument was $112,000. Hiland Hall would have been pleased to see his vision of a simple monument carried out in such a way that today, more than a century later, it still commands the view of the surrounding valley .