English: As seen at Oneida Square in Utica, New York on an August 2021 afternoon: the Soldiers and Sailors Monument, in the foreground just right of center, and the historic Plymouth Congregational Church in the background at left. Sculpted by stonemason Karl Gerhardt and dedicated on October 13, 1891 to "the men of Utica [who] risked their lives to save the Union" from dissolution in the Civil War, the Soldiers and Sailors Monument consists of a granite shaft 23 feet in height, which stands atop a stepped pedestal and atop which stands a crowned female figure, a personification of the city of Utica, gesturing southward toward the battlefields where hundreds of Utica soldiers were killed or wounded. Below, a bronze relief depicting departing soldiers surrounds the shaft, flanked by four life-size bronze statues representing a soldier, a sailor, Victory, and Peace. Above the relief is carved a passage from Oliver Wendell Homles' Voyage of the Good Ship Union: "One flag, one land, one heart, one hand, one nation evermore." The history of the monument can be traced back to May 30, 1878, when, on the occasion of Decoration Day, Utica's Common Council passed a resolution calling for the erection of a monument to local Civil War casualties and establishing a Soldiers' Monument Association to raise funds, but planning did not really begin in earnest until 1888, when a fundraising fair netted $13,000 and an additional $15,000 came from patriotic Uticans who voted for a municipal tax increase for the explicit purpose of funding the monument. Since its construction, several proposals to move the monument to other locations - mostly because of a perceived danger posed by increased traffic at Oneida Square, which was a much less developed part of the city in the late 19th century - have come and gone to little effect. The most recent of these was in 2010, when the idea was floated to shift it 100 feet to the south to serve as the centerpiece to a newly constructed roundabout; the expense of doing so, given that the monument sits on a seven-foot-thick concrete foundation, precluded the move. For its part, Plymouth Church is a majestic late-period Richardsonian Romanesque structure in gray Medina sandstone, built in 1906.