Cuyahoga County Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument

 Dr. Joe Hannibal and visitors at the Soldiers' & Sailors' Monument.

Curator of Invertebrate Paleontology Joe Hannibal and Curator of Mineralogy Dr. David Saja contributed their expertise to the rehabilitation of the 116-year-old Cuyahoga County Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument, located on Public Square in downtown Cleveland.

Hannibal and Saja have investigated the warping of large marble tablets used in the Monument. These tablets contain the names of soldiers and sailors from the County who served in the American Civil War. They have also aided the Soldiers & Sailors Monument Commission by establishing the provenance of stones used for the monument and by finding key historic documentation establishing the colorization of the large marble tablets inside the monument.

Left: Dr. David Saja (left) discusses the monument's restoration while Joe Hannibal (right) holds up a device used to measure warping of the marble tablets in the monument; right: The exterior of Cleveland's iconic Cuyahoga County Soldiers' & Sailors' Monument in Public Square.

Research presented by Drs. Hannibal and Saja revealed the effects of time, heating and periodic cleaning on the condition and original colorization of the marble inside the monument. To learn more about the curators' research, read the abstracts linked below. For information on the monument's history, click here.

Doming (bowing) of fine-grained marble tables inside an 1894 Civil War monument in downtown Cleveland: Constraining the factors that cause marble to warp

Bowing of marble tablets and limestone panels inside nineteenth-century structures in Northern Ohio shows that marble and limestone can deform inside buildings under variable, but relatively mild conditions

Colorization, cleaning and re-colorization of marble and other stones in a Victorian monument: A case study of the Cuyahoga County Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument in Cleveland, Ohio

Work on the Monument is part of the Museum's longstanding series of investigations of Cultural Geology and a decades-long series of field trips investigating the Cultural Geology of Northeast Ohio. To learn more about the field trips, click here.