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This article is not an argument for restoring the former name or returning the monument. Reasonable people may still disagree about symbols in public space. But we should all agree that history must be based on what we can prove — not on what we “find fair to assume.”

I find myself trapped in 1898, not by choice but by some strange force, as if the year itself were a lucid dream from which I cannot—or perhaps do not wish to—wake. Every path of research leads back to this temporal crossroads, this pivot point where centuries collide in the most unlikely symphony of events.

At the heart of that story stands Lucy Ann Sutton, cousin to Nathaniel Hawthorne. Her recollections, published in the New York Observer on August 4, 1887, constitute one of the few intimate, emotionally textured accounts of Hawthorne’s formative years.

The monument to King George III on Bowling Green downed by a group of New Yorkers following a reading of the newly adopted Declaration of In