The Union County Veterans Wall was the project of former Mayor Mike Williams. It was completed in 2014 and dedicated on Flag Day in 2015.

After a few years, the wall started to crumble and needed repair. There are many causes of these cracks, but the primary one appears to have been pressure buildup behind the wall due to poor drainage. Some of these cracks were quite large, and a few were located behind several of the installed plaques. There were 422 Veterans represented on the wall to be reinstalled. Each Veteran has a personal plaque engraved by Veteran Martin Shafer. Forty-five new plaques are ready and will also be installed once the wall is repaired.

There was a French drain originally in the ground behind the wall, but apparently it had been put in “upside down“, with insufficient rock for proper drainage. The solution involved digging a deeper trench behind the wall and installing a thick moisture barrier.

Stacy George and his crew from George Brothers Excavation were hard at work in the mud on one of our days where it rained really hard, stopped for a while, drizzled for a while, and then poured again. When the skies opened and the rain pounded down, the crew climbed into their trucks and waited. Once the rain let up, they were back at work, wallowing in the mud again, constructing the foundation drain. Soon, all 467 individual plaques will be reinstalled on the crack-free Union County Veterans Wall. As a bonus, once all the plaques are installed, an index system will be available to help locate a specific Veterans’ plaque.

The Union County American Legion New Liberty Post 212 is very grateful to Mayor Bailey for allocating the funding to repair this wall.

For an application for a Veteran plaque, please contact Veteran Service Officer Mark Cook at 865-661-7243 or mark.cook@unioncountytn.gov, or the office of Mayor Jason Bailey at 865-992-3061 or
jason.bailey@unioncountytn.gov