2 minute read
Circling the Hill: Solving a History Mystery
For more than 75 years, a 45-inch French bronze statue titled "Gloria Victis" (1873), meaning "Glory to the Vanquished," resided in Allan Building. Its arrival at McDonogh is a mystery—one that Upper School history teacher Ane Lintvedt has been trying to solve for the past year.
At the April Archives Speaker Series talk hosted by the Wilson | Young Archives & Special Collections, Lintvedt shared the fascinating detective work as she and her students attempted to uncover the statue's origins. Their investigation began with deceptively simple questions: When did "Gloria Victis" come to McDonogh? Who brought it here? What did it represent? Their search down one path and up another—rabbit holes, as Lintvedt calls them—soon revealed broader themes, touching on U.S. and European history, art history, the post-Civil War "Lost Cause" ideology, and the complex politics of monuments.
Lintvedt's journey led her through generations of inquiry. She followed a trail from founding archivist Frayda Salkin, who, three decades earlier, had asked art teacher Colonel E. Carey Kenney about the statue. His response? It was here when he arrived in 1946, and for much of his tenure, it was tucked away in a closet.
Sculpted in 1874, the original Gloria Victis was intended to be both a monument to the heroic, humiliated, defeated French in the Franco-Prussian War and a gesture of defiance and resurrection. Suspecting the statue may have been a gift to Colonel William Allan, the School's founding principal, Lintvedt explored yet another lead: the handwritten minutes of board meetings from 1875 to 1900. But again, the trail ran cold—no mention of "Gloria Victis" was found—yet. Next, Lintvedt plans to read the rest of the board minutes to see whether the statue was gifted to the School rather than to Allan himself.
As Lintvedt and her students have shown, the search itself offers its own revelations about history, memory, and the stories hidden in plain sight. The mystery still endures!
