At a small park along the Muskingum River in Zanesville, half a dozen stony sculptures strike stationary poses.
Astronaut John Glenn raises an arm to the sky. Wild West writer Zane Grey pensively puts pen to paper. A uniformed soldier steps forward, in memory of his comrades who died in Vietnam.
Only one recognizes a Black man: Noah Norris, who enlisted in Ohio’s first Black regiment during the Civil War.
Nationwide, that ratio is pretty typical. The National Monument Audit analyzed nearly 50,000 monuments across the country a few years ago, and found many feature the same historical figures. Abraham Lincoln, George Washington and Christopher Columbus top a list that’s overwhelmingly male and white.
But soon, the Zanesville community will memorialize another person of color with a less familiar story: local entrepreneur Nelson T. Gant.
The story of Nelson T. Gant
Gant was born into slavery in Virginia in 1821, and was freed when he was 24 years old. Instead of fleeing to the North, he stayed and fought for years to buy his wife’s freedom too.
“[Gant] came here with a wagon and his wife and a baby and 50 cents in his pocket,” said Todd Ware, president of the Nelson T. Gant Foundation’s board.
Eventually, they landed in Zanesville — a key stop along the Underground Railroad.
“The Stone Academy, which is in Zanesville, was the first meeting of the anti-slavery movement in the state of Ohio,” Ware said.
Once there, Gant saved enough money to buy about 30 acres of land.
“This was outside of Zanesville,” Ware said. “[It was] a heavily wooded, bad area. No sane white guy would really want this area because it flooded.”
But the plot was located along the National Road, so it was easy for Gant and his wife to sell their homegrown vegetables and fresh strawberries and cream right from their front porch.
They made a fortune, and then Gant started other business ventures. He built an insulated ice house, collected blocks of ice from the river in the winter and then sold them during warmer months.
“He had a coal mine that sold the largest amount of coal ever sold in Muskingum County,” Ware said.
He also bought and sold land. Ten years after moving to Ohio he owned over 100 acres. By the time he died in 1905, his estate was worth more than $100,000 — equivalent to several million today.
“Folklore is he's the first black millionaire in Zanesville,” Ware said. “I don’t think it’s folklore. I think it’s true.”
Memorializing Gant
As a Zanesville native and first generation high school graduate, local sculptor Alan Cottrill related to Gant.
“I love the story,” he said, “the rags-to-riches stories of people that didn't have advantages, yet through determination, hard work, intelligence, perseverance and honorableness, advanced themselves.”
So, he started to sculpt Gant in bronze.
“Especially for a lot of the African Americans in the community, they don't have some of those local heroes,” he said.
Now, the Nelson T. Gant Foundation is raising money to purchase a seven-foot replica of the statue from Cottrill and install it outside Gant’s old home.
Ware hopes the work of art shows kids they have a monumental figure to look up to from their own backyard.
“The whole community of Zanesville and Muskingum County helped Nelson achieve what he needed to achieve,” Ware said. “But knowing that he achieved it right here — these kids need those types of role models to look up to. This is a man that came from nothing and look at what he became.”
