I once heard that history is best understood not as a straight line but as an ever-churning river—its current carrying forward the past, shaping the present, and eroding some things while depositing others. If that’s true, then visiting Washington and Lee University’s University Chapel & Galleries is akin to standing at a bend in the river, where the water still circles back on itself, reluctant to move on.
I arrived expecting a chapel—stained glass, solemn pews, the smell of old wood and worn hymnals. What I found was something different: a space that was both shrine and stage, a place of reverence but also revision, where history was not merely remembered but actively reinterpreted.
The chapel itself is striking in its simplicity—brick walls, wooden beams, an unadorned pulpit—but the real weight of the place lies beneath it. There, in the lower level, is where Robert E. Lee is entombed, resting in what feels like a cross between a crypt and a museum. It’s an architectural choice that reveals much. Lee does not dominate the space above, where students and visitors gather, but he is still present, lingering just below the surface.
For many years, the chapel was Lee Chapel, and the larger-than-life recumbent statue of Lee, carved in marble, gave the space an unmistakable aura of veneration. The pose—Lee lying in rest, almost saintly—embodied the old Lost Cause mythology, the idea of the Confederate general as a noble, tragic figure rather than a man who led a rebellion to preserve slavery. That mythology was long upheld in this place, woven into its very walls.
But history is never truly static, and in recent years, the university has sought to reframe its relationship with its namesake. The recumbent Lee remains, but the narrative around him has changed. Gone are the overt tributes to the Confederacy, replaced with exhibitions that contextualize Lee within the complexities of his time—and ours. The chapel itself has been renamed University Chapel, an attempt to separate the institution from the man, to allow the space to serve all who walk through its doors rather than just those who once saw Lee as a hero.
Standing there, I wondered: Can a place truly divorce itself from its past? The river of history may change course, but its waters still hold the sediment of what came before. To visit the chapel is to step into that murky confluence, where history is not just remembered but wrestled with.
I left with no simple answers—only the sense that places like this are necessary. Not as shrines, not as celebrations, but as reminders of the work still left to do.