Virginia begins removing three Confederate statues from Richmond's Capitol Square

Statues honored Stonewall Jackson, Extra Billy Smith, and Hunter Holmes McGuire

Virginia crews on Friday began removing three Confederate statues from Capitol Square, a public park and civic campus near the state Capitol in Richmond. The statues had stood in the square for more than a century before workers began taking them down, according to The Associated Press.

The three statues honored figures from the Confederacy: Gen. Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson, a Confederate general; William “Extra Billy” Smith, a Confederate-era governor of Virginia; and Dr. Hunter Holmes McGuire, a Confederate doctor.

Capitol Square sits in Richmond, the former capital of the Confederacy during the Civil War, and is among the most prominent civic locations in Virginia.

The Virginia General Assembly authorized the removals during its 2026 legislative session. Former Democratic state Sen. Adam Ebbin sponsored the legislation, according to the AP.

“This doesn’t change the history of the Civil War,” Ebbin said, according to the AP. “It changes who we choose to venerate on the Capitol lawn.”

Democratic state Sen. Mike Jones estimated that efforts to remove Confederate statues from prominent places of honor in Richmond began in 2018, the AP reported.

Jones’s estimate places Friday’s removals within a years-long push in Richmond to take Confederate statues off prominent public land. The AP article did not detail the full scope of earlier removal efforts in the city.

The AP article did not specify where the removed statues would be relocated or stored, or whether the removal work was completed on Friday.