The People Honored Most by Statues in America

The famous Lemhi Shoshone woman who guided Lewis and Clarke in their expedition across America is honored by a number of monuments, but most extensively by this center owned by the city of Salmon. The institution’s goal is to honor not only Sacagawea, but also “to foster the knowledge and appreciation of the Agai’dika Shoshone-Bannock Tribes, the Lewis & Clark Expedition, Western frontier life, and the natural environment.”

This Mallorcan-born priest founded the first Spanish mission in present-day California, in San Diego in 1769, and went on to establish eight more up the California coastline. He has a complicated legacy, as some revere him for spreading Christianity while many indigenous groups view him as a colonizer and a figurehead for the brutal Spanish occupation of California. A statue honoring him in Golden Gate Park was toppled in 2020.

Alexander Hamilton was a Founding Father of the United States. One of the most famous statues of him is located outside the Treasury Building in the nation’s capital, home of a government department he founded in 1789.

The Shawnee chief Tecumseh sought to reunite all Native American tribes and lead an autonomous Indian state. He fought hard for his cause and was eventually killed in the Battle of the Thames in Ontario, Canada. He is still remembered as a hero by many Native Americans.

One of the most famous of the many tributes to abolitionist and Underground Railroad leader Harriet Tubman around the country is this one in Harlem, also called “Swing Low” – the work of Los Angeles-based African-American artist Alison Saar.

This is the “Clark” from Lewis and Clark. When the original monument (also called “Naming of Mount Jefferson”) was installed on the University of Portland campus, it depicted three figures: Clark, an unnamed Native American, and a man known only as York, who was enslaved by Clark. In 2020, during campus unrest ignited by the murder of George Floyd in Minnesota, York was removed from the monument.

Thaddeus Kosciuszko was a Polish-born military engineer who helped the U.S. win the Revolutionary War. Without him and his efforts at fortifying key locations, important battles would have been lost, which could have completely changed the war’s outcome. He is honored in many places with significant Polish populations, Chicago included.

José Martí­ was a highly political Cuban-born poet who played a crucial role in the Cuban War of Independence against Spain. The most notable monument dedicated to him is in Miami, Dedicated in 1986, just over 90 years after his death at the age of 42.

The first recorded performance of a Shakespeare play on American soil was an amateur production of “Romeo and Juliet” in New York City in 1730, and the first U.S. edition of the famed English poet and playwright’s work appeared in 1795. By the early 19th century, his plays had become extremely popular around the country, and in 1864, sculptor John Quincy Adams Ward was commissioned to create a statue of the Bard to commemorate the tricentennial of his birth. Eight years later, the finished work was installed in Central Park. It was moved to its present location there in 1873.

Nathan Hale, considered a war hero for his spying operations on the British army in the Revolutionary War, was hanged at the age of 21 in 1776. In 1985 he was designated the State Hero of Connecticut, which is home to one of the most famous statues of him in Coventry, where he was born in 1755.

Joan of Arc, born Jeanne La Pucelle, is considered one of the greatest women in military history, and despite the fact that she was a French heroine who died almost 350 years before America was born, she is the woman with the most monuments on this list. The most famous one is this commanding equestrian statue in Riverside Park.

William McKinley was the 25th president of the United States and one of the four presidents to be assassinated. He is known for his promoting and supporting U.S. industry through a series of tariffs as well as leading the nation during the Spanish-American War. One of the most famous tributes to him is this statue of him in front of the Ohio Statehouse.

After the assassination of William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt was elected as the 26th president of the United States. Roosevelt is most famous for his conservation efforts, including creating the United States Forest Service and establishing five National Parks. One of the most popular monuments dedicated to him Theodore Roosevelt Island in the Potomac River, with 169,444 recorded visits in 2021. Congress authorized the memorial in 1932, but it wasn’t funded for almost 30 years and its centerpiece – a 17-foot-tall statue of Roosevelt – wasn’t dedicated until 1967.

Andrew Jackson was the seventh president of the United States, and is the face on the $20 bill. Jackson was also a slave owner who supported slavery’s expansion – and his federal policies contributed to what is known as the Trail of Tears, the forced removal of about 60,000 Native Americans from the Southeast to west of the Mississippi. Due to his problematic legacy, many statues bearing his name have been removed across the country including one in Jackson, Mississippi, a city named in his honor.

Marquis de Lafayette was a French aristocrat who fought against the British in the American Revolutionary War, and later was a major figure in the French Revolution as well. One of the most famous monuments dedicated to him is this one on the campus of Lafayette College in the Lehigh Valley, founded in 1896 and named in honor of the French hero.

Jefferson Davis was the only president of the Confederate States of America. Many statues and memorials honoring him have been removed in recent years, but one that remains is the towering obelisk dedicated to his memory – one of the tallest monuments of any kind in this country – located in the Kentucky town where he was born.

Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson was one of the best-known Confederate generals during the Civil War. Born in 1824, he died due to wounds sustained in the Battle of Chancellorsville on May 10, 1863, which was one of the largest battles of the war. Many statues of him have been taken down, including the most famous one, on Monument Avenue in the Virginia capital.

Ulysses S. Grant was the 18th president of the United States and the general that famously led the Union Armies to victory in the Civil War. During his presidency, he tried to ensure civil rights for former enslaved people as well as to dismantle the Klu Klux Klan. Nonetheless, there have been calls to remove this prominent memorial to him in Chicago due to his policies towards Native Americans.

Thomas Jefferson was one of the Founding Fathers of the United States and played a key role in the writing of the Declaration of Independence. He was elected as the third president of the U.S. in 1801 and served until 1809. The neoclassical memorial to him, in Washington’s West Potomac Park, drew close to two million visitors in 2021.

John F. Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States, was famously assassinated on November 22, 1963, as his motorcade drove through Dealey Plaza in Dallas. This cenotaph, constructed in his honor near that site, was the first memorial ever designed by the celebrated architect Philip Johnson, who was a Kennedy family friend.

Benjamin Franklin was one of the Founding Fathers and an author of the Declaration of Independence, as well as the first U.S. postmaster general and the first U.S. Ambassador to France and a dedicated amateur scientist known for his experiments with electricity. Sculptor James Earle Fraser began work on the 20-foot-tall statue honoring him in 1906, completing it in 1911, but it wasn’t installed at Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute science museum until 1938. In 1972, Congress designated it as the official national monument to Franklin.

Casimir Pulaski was a Polish-born soldier who fought alongside George Washington in the Revolutionary War. He was known as the “Father of the American Cavalry” due to his immense skill in the field. He was killed by British fire while leading a cavalry charge in the Battle of Savannah in 1779, and is remembered today by this monument, inscribed with a bronze bas relief of Pulaski on horseback, in the city’s Monterey Square.

After serving heroically in the Mexican-American War and as the superintendent of West Point, Lee became the leading military figure in the Confederacy, fighting in the pivotal battles of Gettysburg and Antietam as leader of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia. He surrendered to Union forces in 1865. Because he was a slave owner and fought for the Confederacy, many statues of him have been removed in recent years.

Saint Francis of Assisi, born Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone, was a friar, the founder of the Franciscan Order, and the namesake of the city of San Francisco. He is recognized as one of the patron saints of Italy, along with Catherine of Siena, and is one of the most revered figures in Christianity. Saint Leonard is a lay community with a close association with the Franciscans.

Martin Luther King Jr. is one of the most famous civil rights leaders in American history, which would explain why his monument – centered on a large-scale granite statue of the man called the Stone of Hope, carved by Chinese artist Lei Yixin – welcomed over two million visitors in 2021.

Christopher Columbus was the Italian explorer traditionally credited with being the first European to “discover” the Americas. His legacy is controversial, as many, especially Italian-Americans, revere him as a hero but indigenous communities view him very differently due to his brutal treatment of Native Americans. (There is also considerable evidence that the Norse explorer Leif Erikson was actually the first European to set foot in North America.) Over the last few years there has been much debate over whether or not we should still honor Columbus, and many statues of him have been taken down. The most famous one still standing rises above the busy traffic circle named for Columbus on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

One of the Founding Fathers and the first president of the United States, Washington is honored across the country by the name of our nation’s capital and a state on the West Coast as well as by countless cities and counties all over America – and of course his likeness adorns the $1 bill. The Washington Monument is a 555-foot-tall obelisk on the National Mall. Construction began in 1848, but after a hiatus due to financial issues and the advent of the Civil War, it wasn’t completed until 1884, and dedicated a year later.

The most honored figure in America, based on the number of monuments dedicated to him, is Abraham Lincoln, revered for his leadership of the nation during the Civil War and for ending slavery in the United States through the Emancipation Proclamation. The neoclassical Lincoln Memorial on Washington’s National Mall, was visited by almost six million people last year.