page_title: David Owen Dodd
section_title: Legacy
hierarchical_section_title: David Owen Dodd / Legacy
caption_attribution_description: English: Portrait of David Owen Dodd by William Besser, 1912. Arkansas History Commission Date: 1912 Type: Painting Medium: Oil on canvas Dimensions: Sight: 101cm x 75.4cm (39 3/4" x 29 11/16"), Accurate Current Owner: Arkansas History Commission Object number: AR010016 Data Source: Smithsonian Catalog of American Portraits
context_page_description: David Owen Dodd, also known as David O. Dodd, was an Arkansas youth executed for spying in the American Civil War.
  In December 1863 Dodd carried some letters to business associates of his father in Union-held Little Rock, Arkansas. While traveling to rejoin his family at Camden, Arkansas, he mistakenly re-entered Federally-held territory. Discovering that he did not have a pass, U.S. soldiers questioned him and found that he was carrying a notebook with the locations of Federal troops in the area. He was arrested and tried by a military tribunal, with little defense offered for his actions. It found him guilty of spying and sentenced him to death. He was hanged on January 8, 1864. Though he did not reveal the source of the information, a young girl named Mary Dodge and her father were summarily escorted back to their home in Vermont. These events have led to him being called the "Arkansas Boy Martyr of the Confederacy".
context_section_description: Dodd's story has been told in the poem The Long, Long Thoughts of Youth by Marie Erwin Ward, a full-length play Boy Hero: The Story of David O. Dodd by Dr. Nancy Hendricks, and a 1915 silent Hollywood movie of which no prints are known to exist.
  A monument memorializes Dodd's hanging in MacArthur Park next to the former Arsenal. Dodd's grave is marked by an eight-foot marble monument, engraved "Here lies the remains of David O. Dodd. Born in Lavaca County, Texas, Nov. 10, 1846, died Jan. 8, 1864." Nearby is a marble scroll with the words "Boy Martyr of the Confederacy." David O. Dodd Elementary School in southwest Little Rock is located on land that was once a part of Washington Dodd's farm. A stone marker on school grounds, believed to be the place where he was captured, was erected by the David O. Dodd Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, Pine Bluff, Arkansas, and is dedicated to "Arkansas' Boy Hero of the War Between the States."
  In 1908 the Arkansas Division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy started raising funds for a stained-glass window in Dodd's honor. The window was made by the Charles F. Hogeman Co. in New York City and depicts Dodd as a Southern saint and martyr with curly blond hair, even though the only known photograph of him shows him with straight black hair. The David O. Dodd window was unveiled at the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond, Virginia, on November 7, 1911, where it was displayed for several years. In 1988 it was found in storage and moved back to Arkansas. The window debuted at the Arkansas Museum of Science and Industry in January 1990, and was returned to Richmond in 1998. In January 2004 the Museum of the Confederacy again loaned the Dodd window to Arkansas to commemorate the 140th anniversary of Dodd's trial at the renamed MacArthur Museum of Arkansas Military History (formerly the Little Rock Arsenal).
  Each January the Sons of Confederate Veterans honors Dodd in a ceremony at his gravesite. The organization awarded their 22nd Confederate Medal of Honor, created in 1977,  to Dodd in 1984.
caption: Portrait of David Dodd by William Vincent Besser (1912)[8]
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