Gettysburg buffs will be happy to know that the “Cannoneer” on top of Smith’s 4th New York Independent Artillery monument has been repaired by the National Park Service and is finally back in place at Devil’s Den where it belongs. This monument was severely vandalized in February 2006. On this same day, two monuments on the Emmitsburg Road, the monument to the 11th Massachusetts and the monument to the 114th Pennsylvania in front of the Sherfy Farm at the Peach Orchard were also vandalized. The damage to the 114th Pennsylvania has been repaired, but the damage to the 11th Massachusetts monument still remains unrepaired.

Sadly this is not the first time this monument, located in a very prominent location on Houck’s Ridge, has been vandalized. Vandals tore down the statue in 1995, but the NPS that time was able to simply remount it on the pedestal. (Vandalism has been an on-going problem since the beginning of the battlefield; the Smithsonian Art inventory notes that many monuments on the southern end of the battlefield were vandalized even going back as far as 1913.)

On November 28, 2011, after six years and extensive restoration work (chronicled by the excellent Gettysburg Daily blog), the statue was replaced on the pedestal. These photographs were taken not long after that, on December 10, 2011.