WHAT: Monument to Confederate War Dead.
LOCATION: Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond’s Oregon Hill neighborhood.
ARTIST: Design originated from engineer Charles Henry Dimmock.
DEDICATION: November 8, 1869. (Cornerstone was laid Dec. 3, 1868)
DESCRIPTION: The famed 90-foot pyramid is made with large blocks of James River granite. The blocks were stacked without bonding. Built overlooking the cemetery’s Soldiers’ Section. It is a monument to the 18,000 Confederate enlisted men buried in the cemetery.
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The pyramid took a year to build and there were many accidents during construction. Thomas Stanley, a Lynchburg convict working with the construction crew, made the perilous climb to the top to lower the capstone into place.
The plaque reads: “A memorial to the Confederate women of Virginia, 1861-1865. The legislature of Virginia of 1914, has at the solicitation of Ladies Hollywood Memorial Association and United Daughters of Confederacy of Virginia placed in perpetual care this section where lie buried eighteen thousand confederate soldiers.
A chapter (Oct. 1996) in Harry Kollatz Jr.’s book, True Richmond Stories, retold the tale of the capstone’s placement, and how prisoner Thomas Stanley — assumed to have come from the nearby state penitentiary on Gamble’s Hill — volunteered to perform the dangerous honor:
And thus it was that a horse thief came to be on the work gang for Dimmock’s pyramid. The knots in the hoisting ropes were tied too close to the top and the stone wouldn’t go past them. Stanley poured water on the ropes, causing them to shrink the needed inches. Then, as a breathless crowd watched, the prisoner put himself between the mass of hanging rock and the pyramid and righted the stone to its seat.
Everyone that has heard of this legend assumes that Stanley went free after this accomplishment. Kollatz’s story cleared that up, somewhat:
In the release box of his prison schedule, the simple penciled notation reads “transferred.” There is no mention of when or where. A romantic notion suggests itself: the warden opened a gate and told Stanley to go and never come back…
Seeing this monument is an essential to anyone that visits Richmond. The first time I saw the pyramid, I was shocked by its size and towering presence in the scenic cemetery. It can be seen from many points near Oregon Hill. It is easy to imagine the stones being brought in from either the Kanawha Canal — located just below Hollywood — or Belle Isle — just a bit further below the canal and across the James River.
Richmond On The James 
Posted by Clancy Fraher on January 3, 2024 at 3:03 pm
There is a stone on the back side of the monument engraved with a latin phrase that translates to “In eternal memory of those who stood for God and Country.”
Which country were they standing for if the states they stood for had seceded? Is there a significant difference between this monument and the monument in Arlington Cemetery they recently removed because it presented a revisionist view of the Civil War? Should this pyramid be put back in the river from whence the stones came?
Posted by Supporting the Confederacy Means Fallacious Thinking and Bad History | Student of the American Civil War on October 15, 2017 at 12:11 am
[…] learn later that the horse thief who placed the stone atop Hollywood Cemetery’s pyramid was not pardoned but ‘transferred,’ that the fairy-tale image of Pickett’s soldiers pulling his coach to the railroad has no basis […]
Posted by The Sons of Confederate Veterans are the guardians of white innocence. | Binkily on September 25, 2017 at 6:12 am
[…] learn later that the horse thief who placed the stone atop Hollywood Cemetery’s pyramid was not pardoned but “transferred,” that the fairy-tale image of Pickett’s soldiers pulling his coach to the railroad has no basis in […]
Posted by Memorial Day 2016 – memorialstonewall on May 30, 2016 at 7:58 pm
[…] end. It commemorates the lives of 18,000 Confederate enlisted men who are buried here in Hollywood Cemetery. What an amazing place to visit. These were the losers in one of the greatest wars in American […]
Posted by Traditional Building Magazine Public Monuments- Feature on July 17, 2015 at 2:02 pm
[…] not to mention the comparatively miniscule yet strikingly monumental pyramid of unmortared granite commemorating the Confederate dead in Richmond, VA’s Hollywood Cemetery. Like the pyramid from which it derives, the obelisk is a highly resolved geometric form that […]
Posted by Walter Ring on January 28, 2014 at 12:42 pm
A very impressive tribute to the 18,000 Confederate Soldiers buried in Hollywood Cemetery.
Posted by bladder cancer signs on May 25, 2013 at 11:00 pm
This is actually a very good strategy to what, for some, might be a controversial subject. Really nicely though out post. Man a figment of Gods imagination.