General Milan R. Stefanik helped fight for Czechoslovak independence in World War I, serving as both a General of the French Army and Czechoslovak Minister of War. After his sudden death in a plane crash in 1919, Cleveland's Slovak community raised funds to commission a memorial to him. The memorial was erected in Wade Park near East 105th Street in the mid-1920s, just south of the space that would later become the Cleveland Cultural Gardens. Today, the statue sits in the traffic circle at the intersection of Martin Luther King Boulevard and Jeptha Drive.
