File:World War Memorial Shaft, Wright Park, Niagara Falls, New York - 20220809.jpg

English: As seen in August 2022, the largest of a cluster of military memorials situated within Wright Park - the half-acre green space in downtown Niagara Falls, New York that's bounded by Main Street, Park Place, and Pine Avenue - is the so-called World War Shaft, which was unveiled "in honor of the soldiers, sailors & marines who made the supreme sacrifice in the World War, 1917-1919" at the grand finale of the Armistice Day celebration held by the city on November 14, 1920, which also included a parade, dedication prayers by Rev. A. S. Bacon of First Presbyterian Church, speeches by State Court of Claims judge Fred M. Ackerson and Niagara Falls mayor Maxwell Thompson, and musical performances by the Shredded Wheat Pipers, the Carborundum Band, and the local Boy Scout troop's drum and bugle corps. Standing 25 feet 4 inches in height and measuring about five and a half square feet at its base, this obelisk of smooth-textured gray Barre granite was financed and planned by the Dudley Donnelly Women's Relief Corps of the local chapter of the Grand Army of the Republic, with the stone furnished and installed by the monumental works of Gray & Trigg, who, notably, carved the lettering on the sides of its base free of charge as their donation to the cause. The process from inception to construction to dedication was remarkably rapid: it was only in April of the same year that the monument was proposed. At first the intention was to situate it in the veterans' section of Oakwood Cemetery and to inscribe the names of local war dead on its pedestal, the latter of which was abandoned after it proved impossible to assemble a complete list of such casualties in time for its intended unveiling. Instead, the G.A.R. chose a list of patriotic but non-specific lemmas for the monument: "Sleep, heroes, sleep - your deeds shall never die"; "The high ideals for which they died shall ever be maintained"; "They've climbed the heights, they're over the top and safe in the arms of God". Additional plaques added to the sides of the monument in later years similarly honor local veterans of the Second World, Korean, and Vietnam Wars.