To The Editor:
Open letter to the Waitsfield Select Board:
Since appearing before the board on July 14, when it was determined that the select board is the town party responsible for maintenance of the Civil War monument, I have been awaiting information about a decision regarding professional cleaning of the plaque itself and its granite background.
I've now learned that board members, agreeing that leaving this monument "with an older appearance" is appropriate, have decided that no cleaning will be done. It's difficult to convey how disappointed I am at this decision. It would have been a credit to our town to have the monument cleaned, given that the nation is well into the four-year Sesquicentennial commemoration of the 1861-1865 Civil War. As I noted to the board on July 14, Waitsfield is not doing anything to observe the Sesquicentennial, making it an outlier among the hundreds of Vermont communities that are commemorating their towns' Union soldiers in many different ways.
Apart from that "civic pride" argument, the plaque is just plain dirty! There is no record that Waitsfield's monument has been cleaned since its dedication, although the much more recently erected war memorials next to Joslin Memorial Library have undergone professional cleaning.
I find the board's rationale for failing to act inexplicable, and I ask others who agree to contact one or more board members to ask them to reverse this decision.
Alice M. Evans, Ph.D.
Waitsfield
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