My hometown of Lexington, Virginia holds many monuments to leaders of the Confederacy, most of them to generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. But even beyond statues, you would be hard to find any building, road, or geographic feature in Lexington and the surrounding county that is not named after someone with links to the Confederacy. Even throughout the striking natural beauty of Lexington and Rockbridge County, ghosts of the Confederacy are unavoidable.

Such is the case with Goshen Pass and its monument to astronomer and oceanographer, Matthew Fontaine Maury. Maury is honored not only by a plaque that stands near the roadside view below, but also by the river that runs the length of Rockbridge from its northwest corner to the southeast, which bears Maury’s name.

Maury, like Lee and nearly every other Confederate personnel who is revered by neo-Confederates in the present, has a legacy that can be described as “complicated.” At once, he was a gifted scientist and a tenacious conservationist who held a special love for Goshen Pass, a tight river gorge in Rockbridge County’s northwest corner revered today for its scenic beauty, but overlooked in Maury’s day for its hinderance on transportation. Maury also fought for the Confederacy, and was part of a niche group of slavery-supporters called “pro-slavery internationalists,” who advocated for the mass re-location of Southern slaves to Brazil, creating slave-run American agricultural outposts in the Amazon.

Maury’s plaque does not reveal his pro-slavery idea’s to its audience. However, the monument does not reveal much at all to anyone, given that its location is quite far away from the roadside vista where people can park cars and get out.

In this way, the monument to Maury in Goshen Pass is quite passive in its attraction to passers-by, with the scenic beauty of the pass itself taking centerstage over Maury. Perhaps though, this is the narrative that Maury would have wanted to portray, with himself out of the way in favor of the land he revered, Maury distances himself from being recognized for anything other than the river that bears his name and the Pass that river runs through.