One winter morning Will and Sissy Akers inspected a statue recently repaired by her brother-in-law, sculptor Alan LeQuire, at Sissy’s family burial plots at Mount Olivet Cemetery, on Lebanon Pike, Nashville, January 2018. LeQuire is a sculptor of some of Nashville’s most famous statues such as Music Row’s “Musica.” Sissy said her brother-in-law volunteered to repair the statue–sculpted for the family just after World War I by Italian sculptor Giuseppe Moretti, sculptor of “The Battle of Nashville” monument–after vandals damaged it. LeQuire retrofitted a nose and toe onto the sculpture but did not restore a missing right hand.

Sissy says her family are relative newcomers to Nashville, having only “arrived in Nashville in 1866.” But that her family became proud participants in the life and character of Nashville. Her grandmother was one of those responsible for having the Battle of Nashville monument made for the city as a way of commemorating not a war but a working together for peace.

Her family’s current interest in caring for monuments, she says, is to preserve the character of the city they love and which they hope new generations appreciate and can learn from.