Landmarks with Leon is now also known as Lehigh Valley Landmarks. I'm your host, Rachel Leon, and president of the City Council in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Each week, I'll share a short feature with a big story commemorated with a historical marker that explores a person, place, or an event important to the Lehigh Valley.
At the top of College Hill, in Easton, Pennsylvania stands a monument whose inscription does not name a famous general. It names sixteen students. In bold letters, the memorial reads: “These Died For The Union.”
No statue of a soldier stands atop it. No sword, no cannon. Just a nineteen-foot shaft of granite and a list of names — proof that the Civil War was not distant history for the Lehigh Valley. It reached directly into the life of a college.
The monument was completed on October 16, 1872, to honor Lafayette College students who died during the Civil War. The idea began during Commencement in 1868, when a landscape project on the College Hill grounds prompted the College to consider a permanent memorial. Fundraising followed, led by the Lafayette College Alumni Association. Four years later, the monument stood complete.
Its design is deliberately simple. A granite shaft rises from the hillside above the historic steps connecting the campus to the city below. That position matters. The monument isn’t tucked away in a cemetery — it stands in a daily path between College Hill and Easton, passed by generations of students, faculty, and residents on their way up and down the hill.
The names begin with the Classes of 1836 and 1837 and run through the Class of 1864. Richard A. Oakford and Sidney M. Layton represent the Class of 1836. Daniel J. Carey came from the Class of 1837. Horatio S. Howell was a member of the Class of 1840. The list continues with Walter Scott Briggs, Robert M. McCormick, Joseph Castles, John R. Hilton, William H. Alexander, Edward S. Carrell, Luther Davis, Roswell S. Parker, John M. Annan, Robert M. Mann, John H. Buckley, and Henry B. Howell.
These were not abstract symbols. They were students whose education was interrupted by a national conflict and whose deaths became part of Lafayette’s institutional memory.
College records show that hundreds of Lafayette men served during the war altogether, from officers to enlisted soldiers, while the college itself struggled through the disruption of the 1860s, losing students and normalcy alike to a war that touched nearly every American family.
It’s worth being precise about what this monument is — and isn’t. It should not be confused with the much larger statue of the Marquis de Lafayette that also stands on campus. That statue was created in the twentieth century and tells a different story entirely, honoring the college’s namesake rather than its wartime dead.
The Civil War monument predates it by decades. Its purpose has always been specific: to remember the sixteen Lafayette students who died fighting for the Union.
The monument’s meaning has continued evolving well into the present. In 2022, Lafayette marked its 150th anniversary and launched a restoration and plaza project around the memorial.
By 2023, the college had completed the restoration while also opening a new gateway and trail connection between the campus and downtown Easton — bringing an old memorial into a genuinely contemporary public landscape, one that connects historical memory to the daily rhythms of campus life today.
In the years following the Civil War, monuments across the country became a way for communities to define sacrifice and loyalty. At Lafayette, the names were tied directly to the college itself, transforming a simple list of deaths into a permanent part of the campus landscape — and a lasting reminder that this quiet stretch of ground once carried sixteen futures cut short by a war none of them lived to see the end of.
Today, a visitor can reach the monument from the historic College Hill steps and take in the city below — the same Delaware and Lehigh Valley landscape that made Easton a crossroads of education, industry, and military service.
The names on the stone are quiet, but specific: sixteen students, sixteen lives, one war.
So when you pass the monument on College Hill, don’t look only at the stone. Read the names. More than 150 years later, the monument still asks Easton to remember them.
Information for this episode was provided by Lafayette College Advancement, Lafayette College News, and the Historical Marker Database.
