After about 17 years in the making, a Village of Hazel Green (VOHG) project that will give thanks to locals who have served in the military is now nearly complete.
Soon a roll call stone monument in the village’s Veteran’s Memorial Park will display the names of more than 600 individuals with ties to the community who have stepped up to help keep the country safe.
The stones are now in Boscobel. They are getting engraved with images related to local veterans’ service, said Chris Lisk, Memorial Park Committee Chairman. Lisk has been working with the project to help get it to this point for about eight years.
The plan is to include a photo collage of area veterans, along with scenes from conflicts the U.S. has served in, added Lisk.
The stones already took a trip to South Dakota, where the list of names got etched into them, he said.
“It took a long, long time” to get to this stage, said Lisk.
The payment for the stones went through nearly three years ago, he added, “But then COVID hit,” which led to numerous delays.
Locking in the details for the project has also taken a while. Lisk spent around a year getting the list of names for the stones finalized alone, he said.
Some of the names were on the list multiple times, while others were missing or out of order. Then more names came in later to add. “It was a tough process,” said Lisk, and it was one that consumed many of his hours. He spent a lot of time researching information about those on the lists for the stones on Ancestry.com and in obituaries.
But now, “we’re moving right along,” and are thinking installation of the monument will likely be able to take place this spring, with a dedication of the site to follow this summer, said Lisk. “We’re right there.”
“I think it should go really quick” once construction starts, he added, estimating the set-up will likely only take around a week.
Volunteers involved with the efforts are still looking for donations to help pay for the concrete work. That price tag may tally to around $15,000.
A chili cook-off this month raised about $900 toward the project. The cookoff is just one of numerous regular fundraising events the park committee has held to help support it.
They may host a Super Bowl/March Madness-centric fundraiser again this year, as they have in the past.
And the annual Street Dance, which has for a long time raised money for the roll call monument, will likely continue even after all fundraising has wrapped up for the stones, said Lisk.
The committee is at this point thinking they will keep the community-building event on the books and raise money for other causes in the future through it, he added.
Work to make further improvements to the park will likely continue, as well, even after the roll call stones are in, said Lisk.
For now, park committee members are looking at the option of adding marble benches and additional lighting to the site and plan to put in a time capsule on install of the roll call stones. They have learned that there is already a time capsule in the monument in place.
When they dedicate the new monument, they plan to unearth the time capsule currently there from the early 1980s and dissect it, possibly with the help of local students, said Lisk.
They may document its contents and put it back in with a new time capsule, or they may possibly display it in a location such as the public library.
“It’s going to be fun,” said Lisk, and it will be a way for the future VOHG community to better understand the hard work it took to make it to this long-awaited point.
