PARK AND CILME-TILRY 
13 
and the directors and teachers’ forces be increased, 
more apparatus installed, and if certain promised as- 
sistance arrives in time a bath house and swimming 
tank will be built in one of the grounds. 
Due to private munificence one playground has been 
established and equipped under an elevated railroad 
and turned over to the Special Park Commission to 
control, and other similar grounds are expected. Sev- 
eral grounds are to be established in the crowded river 
wards by the regular park boards on sites selected by 
the Special Park Commission. 
NATIONAL MILITARY PARKS. 
For the past few years the Government of the 
United States has been doing an important work in 
the South about which, except very indefinitely and 
incompletely, the public at large knows little, says the 
Boston Transcript. This is the acquisition and im- 
provement of the five national military parks at Get- 
tysburg, Pa. ; Chickamauga, Ga. ; Chattanooga, 
Tenn. ; Antietam, Md. ; Shiloh, Tenn., and Vicks- 
burg, Miss. By special act of Congress, each national 
military park is under the direct charge of the Secre- 
tary of War at Washington, who appoints special 
commissioners under whose care the appropriations 
by the Government are expended, and the work of 
each field carried out. Careful and minute inquiry is 
made by the commissioners regarding the lines of bat- 
tle of both armies ; the positions occupied by each 
command, preceding and during the battle ; the subse- 
quent movement of regiments, batteries, brigades and 
divisions, and everything pertaining to the rosters of 
the armies ; the number of men engaged in each com- 
mand, and their casualties. Large sums of money 
have been, and are now being expended, in purchasing 
the land and approaches over which the battles were 
fought. In the aggregate, nearly $2,000,000 have been 
voted by Congress, and a large part of this sum had 
been expended on these five national military parks. 
Various States, North and South, having troops en- 
gaged on these fields are now vieing with each other 
in marking permanently the locations and movements 
of these regiments and commands. Without visiting 
one of these military parks, it is hard to get an idea 
of the interest and instruction the battlefield memorials 
furnish, with their interesting emblems and statuary 
in bronze and granite ; their numerous and appro- 
priate details of accoutrements, military symbols and 
suggestions. One is hardly prepared to see there fine 
works of art, executed by many of our noted sculptors, 
and much work of merit by artists and artisans, whose 
names are becoming well known along these new 
lines of industry, battlefield memorials. On the field 
of Gettysburg alone may be found some 250 memo- 
rials, or markers, of different design and size, each 
locating some Union command that participated in 
that battle. The Government, moreover, has accurate- 
ly located every Confederate command — and wherever 
a battery was engaged, whether Union or Confeder- 
ate, mounted cannon have been placed, facing in the 
direction in which the old death-dealing guns were 
served. 
These regimental memorials have been generously 
provided by each State, through State appropriations, 
Massachusetts being the first of the states to take 
such action. In fact, the idea of marking each regi- 
mental position was first thought of and decided upon 
by a party of Massachusetts veterans during a visit 
to Gettysburg, and the scenes they had taken so active 
a part in twenty years before. Massachusetts having 
led off on the battlefield memorial idea at Gettysburg, 
by appropriating the modest sum (all asked for) of 
$500 each, for her twenty-five commands, other States 
followed her example, and from that small beginning 
in 1884 has grown the enormous expenditure to date 
for battlefield memorials alone of about $1,480,500, 
and the work has seemingly just been begun. Get- 
tysburg has approximately $625,000 in memorials ; 
Chickamauga and Chattanooga have $494,000 ; Antie- 
tam has $59,000; Shiloh has $87,000, and Vicksburg 
has $215,000. Of the foregoing national parks only 
Gettysburg has been furnished with its full quota of 
memorials, nearly all marking the position of Union 
troops, while the other four fields are only feeling the 
first wave of interest, but are rapidly filling out their 
full number of Confederate and Union memorials, 
which in time will render these battlefield maps inval- 
uable for historians. New England has furnished 
nearly all of the granite that has entered into these 
battlefield memorials. 
ENTRANCE GATES TO A PARK, 
The new memorial gates illustrated here are to be 
erected at Roger Williams Park, Providence, R. I., as 
a memorial to the late Eliza Man, a generous benefac- 
tor of the parks of that city. The gates are to be of 
bronze, highly ornamental in character, and are now 
being cast by the Gorham Company, of New York. 
They are to be located at the main carriage entrance 
to the park at Elmwood avenue, with a frontage of 84 
feet on that street. 
The center gates, for carriages, will be of orna- 
mental scroll work, and will have a width of 32 feet. 
The two side gates, for pedestrians, will each be 8 
feet 6 inches wide. 
The four granite posts supporting the gates will 
each be three feet nine inches square at the base, and 
are to have ball tops, arranged for electric lights. Me- 
dallion heads of Roger Williams and an Indian will be 
ornamental features of the main gate. In the small 
