Purple Heart monument fully funded

Fund-raising for the placement of a monument in Holton’s Linscott Park to honor Jackson County’s Purple Heart recipients is complete, but project organizers noted the monument won’t be ready for its planned Memorial Day unveiling.

Mike McManigal, director of American Legion Riders Post 44 in Holton, said the fund-raising goal of $25,000 for construction of the monument has been met and exceeded. But with the steady flow of information about military veterans from Jackson County who have received the Purple Heart Medal, it will take longer to build the memorial than originally expected.

“It does not appear that we’re going to meet the Memorial Day deadline,” McManigal said. “But it’s because we’ve had such overwhelming response to the project, and names are still coming in.”

In early November of last year, the Legion Riders, in conjunction with Holton American Legion Post 44, the Sons of the American Legion and Holton VFW Post 1367, announced the fund-raising drive to build a monument that lists and honors residents of Jackson County who have received the Purple Heart Medal. The medal is given to military personnel who are wounded or killed in the line of active military duty. 

Both Holton and Jackson County received Purple Heart Community designations in 2014. It was reported that many who come into Holton after seeing the Purple Heart Community sign want to know where they can go to learn more, but no such memorial exists here at the present time.

The local veterans’ organizations got together to see what they could do and came up with a plan to build such a monument in Linscott Park facing north toward Fourth Street, near the World War II monument in that area. Plans for the monument include a replica of the Purple Heart on the front and a list of the medal’s recipients on the back.

“We want to make sure that we do the project right, so if that means taking a little bit longer, we're willing to see that it's done correctly,” McManigal said. “It’s a good situation to be in, but at this point, we don’t know when it will be ready.”

It had been reported that the monument would be built in such a way that names not yet received for the monument could be added at some point in the future.