Residents of a small North Carolina town are at odds over whether to replace a damaged statue that honors Confederate war veterans. WSJ's Cameron McWhirter reports from Reidsville, North Carolina.

By CAMERON MCWHIRTER

REIDSVILLE, N.C.—Mark Anthony Vincent says he was tired and distracted as he drove his van through this city early one morning last May to deliver auto parts, and dozed off. Mr. Vincent says he looked at his GPS just before 4:47 a.m., when the 1999 Chevrolet ran off the road and slammed into a 101-year-old Confederate veterans monument in Reidsville's central roundabout.

The van struck the 32-foot-tall granite pillar, jostling a 6-foot marble statue of a Confederate soldier, which toppled onto the van and broke into at least 10 pieces. The soldier's head slammed through the van's hood, crushing the engine.

"He still had some fight in him," a shaken Mr. Vincent told a television news crew at the time.

The monument's destruction shocked this factory town of 15,000, once called "Lucky City" because it was a major producer of Lucky Strike cigarettes, owned by the former American Tobacco Co.

It also has ignited a civil war of sorts.

Read more at the Wall Street Journal