LYNNFIELD — The long-anticipated Lynnfield War Memorial project is moving ahead with the goal of a 2024 completion.
“We’ve already essentially broken ground,” Thomas Bogart, secretary of the nine-person War Memorial Committee, said. “This has been a legislative priority by every Select Board for the past several years.”
Bogart said work began in summer 2022 to raise the ground for the memorial in June 2022.
Select Board Chair Joe Connell, who also serves as chair of the War Memorial Committee and served in the Army for 30 years, has been spearheading the project since its inception more than five years ago. Connell said ideally, the memorial will be ready for Veterans Day 2024.
“This was approved by the Select Board before I was a selectman,” Connell said. “I have put in probably thousands of hours into this.”
Moving the project toward completion was one of the top goals for 2023-24 laid out by Connell as Select Board chair in early June. He said funding has been a hurdle for the project, and the War Memorial Committee is attempting to raise $50,000 to advance it. The project also secured grants from the Massachusetts Department of Veterans Services.
A spokesperson for state Rep. Bradley Jones (R-Lynnfield) said the town has received a total of $100,000 from two previous $50,000 rounds of state funding, with another $50,000 for the project proposed in the House’s fiscal year 2024 state budget.
Connell said that after three months of fundraising, the committee has raised more than $13,000.
He said funding is needed to order granite plates for the 90-foot-long memorial, which will commemorate 1,032 Lynnfield veterans from all of the major wars the U.S. has fought, from the Revolutionary War to the more recent Global War on Terror.
“If you go through the state, you will never find any site that will take you from the Revolutionary War all the way to the Global War on Terrorism, with every person from the town that served there,” Connell said.
Bogart, a Navy veteran, said land use and space availability was a factor in the choice of the site for the memorial, which will sit across from Lynnfield Common next to the Old Burying Ground cemetery on South Common Street.
“They determined that the footprint of the town common was too small to support anything else there,” Bogart said. “There’s competing interest for that small amount of space there.”
The current memorial on Lynnfield Common — honoring veterans from World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War — will stay in place, according to Bogart, who added that the War Memorial Committee determined that expansion of that memorial was not a prudent option.
Some Lynnfielders, including Melanie Lovell, said the reduction of green space is an unfortunate downside of the project, though she stressed that she supported veterans and was happy to see the project receive funding.
“I’m a little concerned that this project is redundant and is reducing Lynnfield’s dwindling green space,” Lovell said.
Bogart pointed out that the committee has walked a fine line in an attempt to try to keep the space accessible to as many people as possible, including by making adjustments to the size and location of the memorial on the plot of land.
Both Bogart and Connell noted how important it was to the committee that the memorial be both a place for recognition and education.
“Unlike any other memorial, this will have a narrative of each war and maps of where it took place,” Connell said. “We wanted this to be some type of educational piece.”
Bogart said the committee has all but finalized the names that will appear on the memorial, after a process that he said took months to ensure every deserving veteran was included.
However, Bogart said the committee has anticipated the possibility of making a mistake such as omitting a name. He said that the memorial will include extra space in case names need to be added after its completion.
“We like to think that we have done our due diligence to make sure that we don’t omit anyone’s name,” Bogart said. “We’re trying to get this right.”
Connell said the War Memorial Committee has not yet scheduled its next meeting.
