Instead of doubling down and catching the vandals, a Maryland county has erected a wooden box around a Confederate memorial that has been spray painted with “Black Lives Matter.”

Photos show an 8-foot square box, approximately 12 feet high, has been built around a statue of a Confederate soldier on the grounds of the Old Courthouse in Rockville.

The statue’s inscription reads:

To our heroes of Montgomery Co. Maryland

That we through life may not forget to love the thin gray line.

It includes the dates 1861-1865 and CSA — for Confederate States of America.

Now, only the top half of the soldier is visible.

David Dise, general services director of Montgomery County, tells Montgomery Community Media the box was installed Friday “to protect it from vandalism until it is relocated.”

“We removed the graffiti and have applied to the HPC [sic] to move it,” Dise says.

The statue, which is about 102 years old, was vandalized some time around July 27th. It was sprayed with red and black paint and included the slogan “Black Lives Matter.”

Montgomery County had already been making moves to move the statue from county property. One idea floated is to “melt it down to create a new statue dedicated to unity,” WUSA reports.

“Our goal should not be to erase history but to gain a better and deeper understanding that reflects a variety of perspectives,” County Council President George Leventhal said, according to NBC 4.

The Council is seeking to place the statue in an “appropriate location with new interpretive information that fully tells, from all perspectives, what happened in Montgomery County during the Civil War,” according to Leventhal.

The county is required to apply to the Rockville Historic District Commission and be approved to move the statue, The county executive “is in charge of protecting the statue from further vandalism,” the news station reports.