Thaddeus Kosciuszko died in exile in Solura on 15 October 1817 and his remains were deposited after embalming in the Jesuit church there. In 1818. were exhumed and transported to Krakow, but before that they were divided according to the old custom concerning great personalities: the heart was given, in accordance with the deceased's will, to his friend Emilia Zeltner (she took it to the Lugano area, where she settled after her marriage, from where it went in 1895 to the Polish museum in Rapperswil and eventually to Warsaw), while her father Franz Xavier Zeltner (Kościuszko lived with this family in Solura) received the entrails, which he buried on 17 October in the cemetery in nearby Zuchwil, next to the Catholic church of St. Martin. Martin. Zeltner also erected an original monument there, of unknown design, referring to the Classical model of the composition of elementary solids that was widespread in the 18th century (cf. e.g. J.W. Goethe's conception of the Good Fortune monument in his park in Weimar, the monuments in the Danish Jaegerspris park).

The site soon became a destination of pilgrimage for Polish émigrés, and in the Romantic era a legend arose according to which the author of the concept for the monument would be Andrzej Towiański. While this is excluded for chronological reasons, he may indeed have had a hand in adding a bronze medallion of Kościuszko to the front of the pedestal in 1844, a replica of a work by the famous French portraitist Pierre-Jean David d'Angers. The medallion is surrounded by the inscription in Latin: "Fratres patri suo. Die XV Octobris MDCCCXXXXIV" / Brothers-brothers to their father on 15 October 1844). The pyramidal composition of the steps and the four-part pedestal is crowned by a sphere with a cross and a radiant gold star. Beneath the medallion a carved inscription in Latin reads: "Viscera Thaddae Kościuszko deposita die XVII Octobris MDCCCXVII". The original condition of the monument and its surroundings is shown in a lithograph by Zygmunt Vogel from 1824. Polish patriots gathered at the monument on various occasions, not only those connected with the Commander himself, but also made donations and funded the furnishings of the adjacent chapel (e.g. the Olizar family in 1832). A colourful aquatint by Franz Graff from 1839 shows the tribute of "Polish emigrants at the Kościuszko gob in Zuchwil". In the year of the January Uprising, 23 September 1863, Henryk Merzbach wrote down his patriotic elation in his poem "On Kosciuszko's grave". The monument remained in its place even after the liquidation of the church cemetery. The area around it came to be known locally as the "Polenanlage".

Next to the monument is a stone bench carved in 1941 by a Polish soldier, Pakuła, to a design by Tadeusz Tomaszewski, a Krakow artist and soldier of the 2nd Infantry Rifle Division. The inscription on it specifies the day on which Polish soldiers were interned in Switzerland: "18.VI.1940". The place of national veneration was enriched by a monument to Tadeusz Reytan erected next to it (inaugurated in 1880, on the centenary of his death, and abolished around 1950), and then, in 1942, by Polish artists-soldiers rebuilding and transforming the nearby cemetery chapel into a so-called "Polenkapelle". The ledgers kept in the Birchi tavern in the 19th century to record visitors to the monument were transferred to the Kosciuszko Museum in Solura after 1936. Locally, however, the tradition of laying wreaths at the monument on the first Sunday of November by the Polish ambassador to Switzerland, representatives of the Polish community and local authorities continues. One of the streets in Zuchwil has been named Kosciuszkoweg. Maintenance of the monument and the entire surroundings was carried out in 2010. The entire establishment is looked after by the Kosciuszko-Gesellschaft of Solura.