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Community Corner

Meet the General of Fowler Square

Shining a spotlight on Gen. Edward Fowler and the public space that bares his name.

Throughout American history, Brooklyn residents have proven themselves to be worthy adversaries on the field of battle.

So it’d be hard to tell the history of New York City's most populated borough without recognizing some local war heroes.

And Fowler Square—located on a "gore," or three-sided segment flanked by the bowtie intersection of Lafayette Avenue and Fulton Street—honors one of the greatest of those heroes, a veteran of some of the fiercest battles in U.S. history, such as Bull Run and Gettysburg. 

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Still many Fort Greene residents pass this statue without giving a second thought to the man for which it was dedicated.

"I'm not really sure who he was," said Josh Andrews of Fort Greene, when asked about Fowler’s statue.

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Passing through the shade of trees that line the periphery of Fowler's Square, Andrews attempted a guess.

"I know he's a general but outside of that I really don't know anything more about him,” he said, adding, "I think there's a plaque around back of him that’ll probably tell you all you’d want to know."

Strikingly, Andrews wasn't the only Fort Greene resident disinterested in the memory of General Edward Fowler.

"I really have no idea. But I'm new to the neighborhood though and still figuring things out," said John Kellum, a recent transplant from Ohio.

Enjoying a leisurely breakfast in front of Saturday morning, Kellum overlooked Fowler's Gore and tried coming up with the answer.

"Was he one of the founders of Fort Greene?" he said, apologetically.

But there to set the record straight was Julie Golia of the Brooklyn Historical Society.

"General Fowler is quite an interesting character in American history because he led the Fourteenth Regiment of the GAR [Grand Army of the Republic] during the second half of the Civil War, through some of its deadliest battles," Golia said.

Painting the portrait of a humble military general who often faced harrowing odds along side the Fourteenth Regiment—a fighting unit that earned the nickname, ‘Red-Legged Devils'—Golia extolled the virtues of these legendary Civil War icons.

“As the story goes they were such great soldiers that President Lincoln would always request they be his personal guards whenever he visited the frontlines,” she said.

A credit of which many Brooklynites are unaware.

“I’ve never really given it much thought I guess, but that's kind of interesting actually,” Andrews said.

According to Golia, by the end of the Civil War Fowler and the ‘Red-Legged Devils’ had fought in 22 Civil War battles and were one of the few battalions to fight from April 1861 to May 1864—almost the entire span of the conflict.

“They’d earned themselves this reputation of being soldiers who refused to stand down on the battlefield... and by the end of the war Fowler was a man the people of Brooklyn loved,” Golia said.

In fact, it wouldn’t be until the mid-20th century that local residents would begin to forget the name Fowler and the legend of the ‘Red Legged Devils.’

“This area was hit very hard by the depression, particularly after the [Brooklyn] Navy Yards closed down and the neighborhood saw this dramatic shift,” she said.

This unfortunate change of neighborhood fortunes would eventually lead the statue of Fowler, which was at the time inside Fort Greene Park, down the road of disrepair.

“It’d be vandalized and the city, which didn’t have the means to protect it from the elements, would eventually put it in storage after someone from the neighborhood tried stealing it,” Golia said.

Eventually however, Fowler’s legacy would again prevail, as it had so many years ago right after the Civil War.

“The great secret behind Fowler Square is that his statue would be both a symbol for the neighborhoods decline throughout the 1960s and its revitalization during the 1970s,” Golia said.

That's because in a race to restore some of the neighborhood's historic value during the era of Historic Districting in Brooklyn, local leaders would dust off Fowler's statue and install it at the triangular gore, which now bares his name.

“So I guess you could say that in the end, just as General Fowler had many times in battle prevailed against overwhelming odds, his legacy would succeed him and claim its place in Brooklyn history,” she said.

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