These Are My Jewels Memorial by atufft
Clearly, the Statehouse grounds memorial statues, the most imposing and thematically complex, if not symbolically complicated, is the "These Are My Jewels" statue located on the northwest corner of the property. See the link below for the complete symbolism according to Ohio statehouse historians, but basically, the female statue on top represents Cornelia, an aristocratic woman unadorned by jewels because her sons, Tiberius and Gaius, successful in politics and military, were her "jewels". Similarly proud of it's contribution of distinguished men in war, the figures on the base of this complex combination of granite and bronze statues include the original six Ohio men memorialized on the statue as it stood at the 1893 World Columbia Exposition in Chicago: Generals Ulysses S. Grant, William T. Sherman, James A. Garfield and Phillip Sheridan as well as Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase and Lincoln's Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. Another Ohio president, the underachiever Ruther B. Hays, was added later by then Governor William McKinley when the statues were reassembled and rededicated at the present site in Columbus. Later, McKinley himself became perhaps Ohio's greatest contribution to its long list of mostly average American presidental contributions, but his even more eleborate and symbolically complex memorial is elsewhere on the statehouse grounds. I would consider the These Are My Jewels a must see memorial at the Ohio Statehouse.
