A letter was referenced at Monday’s F.C. City Council meeting from the F.C. Historical Commission requesting the removal of the “Hangman’s Tree” plaque from the W. Broad at N. Virginia Ave. location where a tree once stood allegedly used by Confederate Col. Mosby to hang captured Union soldiers and their supporters during the Civil War.

City Manager Wyatt Shields reported that granting the request would not require a formal Council vote since it was the Historical Commission that put it there in the first place when the then-dead tree was removed in 1968. In an editorial last summer, the News-Press called the tree’s legacy a Jim Crow era racist taunt, a “veritable noose.”