Texas veteran memorial takes in Confederate statue once in San Antonio park

It was a warm Thursday night in August 2017 when crews rolled into San Antonio’s Travis Park to remove the Confederate Soldier statue that had stood there since 1899. Earlier that day, the San Antonio City Council voted 10-1 in favor of its removal, and by the early hours of Friday morning, it was taken from its pedestal and put into storage, where it would stay for the next eight years.

However, the ordinance that authorized the removal also allowed for the statue’s eventual donation to a nonprofit that could communicate its historical significance “in an instructive and not divisive way,” a memo from Center City Development and Operations states. The SS American Memorial Foundation, a Seguin nonprofit founded and headed by Navy veteran Craig Russell, is the new owner, after a donation deal with the City of San Antonio went through in August 2025. It was two years in the making, and the nonprofit (the SS in its name standing for “ship submersible,” Russell said) will receive the statue in October. 

The nonprofit is located on the Lazy U Ranch Settlement, where Russell and the board of directors run what they call a “living war memorial.” Russell told MySA that since 2000, the property has welcomed tens of thousands of wounded veterans through its gates, providing free respite, annual nature retreats, spiritual guidance and time outdoors along the Guadalupe River. It’s also home to the SS American Memorial building, where the nonprofit has collected military memorabilia and photos of service members gifted by their families.

The ranch is undergoing a 68-acre expansion, which has kept it closed to the public since early this year until its completion in March 2026. Among many additions, the “master plan” envisions a nature therapy park with a four-and-a-half-mile walking trail, aimed at lowering veteran suicide rates.

That’s where the Confederate Soldier and other monuments will be placed. Russell said the statue will be accompanied by a plaque developed by a planning committee of “experts” to explain its historical context, though details haven’t been finalized. Russell said the statues “just became a component, because we believe that teaching history and sacrifice is part of the healing process for everybody — good, bad or indifferent.”

Other monuments along the trail will be a 14-foot replica of the 567-foot San Jacinto Monument — located roughly 23 miles east of Houston in La Porte, Texas — commemorating the end of the Texas Revolution, and a granite marker for the Jefferson Davis Memorial Highway, which came from New Braunfels. The nonprofit is “interested in possible additional monuments in storage” in Dallas and Houston. Russell reached out to the Daughters of the Confederacy (the organization responsible for the vast majority of Confederate monuments erected after the war) for a list of monuments and their locations, though his nonprofit doesn’t “work with them jointly,” he said.

When it stood in Travis Park, the statue was the subject of protests (and counter-protests). Despite a past of public outcry, Russell said he doesn’t believe that its presence in a space made for “healing” detracts from that mission. On the contrary, he said the education the statue provides “is healing for the soul, period. You have to know the history before you can heal, and those that deny it will always have problems … understanding it and healing. They’ll always be mad. I’m not mad about anything.”

“We do believe that the outdoors opens up your mind to whatever might be, kind of gives you a clear thinking,” Russell said. “And they will hopefully look into the history and make their own decisions in a clearer conscience, let’s say, instead of an angry one. The majority of the people, I think, that find these divisive or whatever, again, I would venture to say that most of them really don’t understand the history and how it all [came] about — and they don’t want to understand.”

Alex Svehla, head organizer for San Antonio’s branch of the nationwide protest group, 50501, sees it differently. Svehla told MySA via email that they hope that “true American history” will be taught “instead of glorifying or downplaying the Confederacy’s goal of preserving slavery.”

“America has a long-complicated history we must not erase – it is better to face the truth about our past rather than hiding behind falsehoods,” Svehla said. “Ultimately, the Confederacy should only be remembered as racist losers who tried to destroy the union of the United States of America.”

Meanwhile, Catherine Clinton, chair of American History at the University of Texas at San Antonio, told MySA she believes preserving the statues is “important historically, to explain why it was commissioned, what the reception was at the time and how transformations of attitudes toward the Civil War were key,” adding the removal of such statues is “as much as an act of stating current philosophies and current political issues as much as the statues were.”

But Deborah Omawale Jarmon, CEO of the San Antonio African American Community Archive and Museum, said in a phone call with MySA that statues like these are art, not history. As “visual storytelling,” the question becomes what story they tell. Jarmon explained, “In an era where our country seems to be divided even more, I don’t think that the display of art celebrating that division is the same as telling the story of the division in a classroom setting, or at home, or in college or anything like that.”

With some contending that the statue is a piece of history and others denouncing it as a reminder of a painful past, the debate is far from over. The donation comes during a time when many previously removed monuments across the country are being reinstalled — such as the controversial bronze statue in the Arlington National Cemetery — following an executive order issued by President Donald Trump in March.