Quitman House marker will be replaced
The sign on Route 9 honors a local native who was an advocate for slavery and the South’s secession.
RHINEBECK, N.Y. » The Town Board has voted to replace the historical marker on U.S. Route 9 that honors slavery advocate John A. Quitman.
Quitman was born in Rhinebeck but later moved to Mississippi, married into the family of the state’s largest slaveholder married and led a campaign that ultimately resulted in the Confederacy.
The Rhinebeck marker, in front of the Quitman House at 7015 Route 9, where Quitman was born in 1798, identifies him as “Hero of Mexican War” and governor of Mississippi. It does not mention that he resigned as governor after being arrested for violating U.S. neutrality laws, nor does it cite his ties to the secession movement.
The maker was erected by New York state in 1932. The Rhinebeck resolution for its removal, approved by the Town Board on Monday, says the town has the state’s permission to remove the marker.
A new marker, honoring Quitman’s father, Rev. Frederick Quitman, will be erected in its place.
Rhinebeck Historical Society member Michael Frazier said previously that the elder Quitman came to Rhinebeck in the 1790s and served as a Lutheran minister in the community for about 30 years.
Town Supervisor Elizabeth Spinzia noted Frederick Quitman was the first to live in the Route 9 residence — which was built for him by the Palatine congregation — and she said Quitman House supporters and the historians for both Rhinebeck and Dutchess County “have asked us to remove” the existing marker.
Frazier said during a presentation last month that when John Quitman died in 1858, he was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Mississippi but also one of the leaders of the yet-to-be-named Confederate
States of America.
“Because he was an articulate person, because he had this reputation as a solider ... he very likely, rather than Jefferson Davis, would have been chosen as the leader of the Confederacy,” Frazier said.
The decision to remove the John Quitman marker comes amid growing opposition in the U.S. to Confederate symbols and statues of Confederate figures, and also on the heels of a controversy over a mural on the side of a building in the Northern Dutchess village of Red Hook that some said appeared to depict slavery.
The owner of the Red Hook building had the mural painted over last month and said a different work will replace it.