After the Battle of White Mountain and the subsequent Thirty-year War, the situation of the rural peasants in Czech lands significantly worsened, leading to widespread peasant uprisings in 1680. From April on, the epicentre of one such uprising was in Litomyšl, with most of the rebels (historians put their numbers at between 800 and 2000) hailing from Horní Újezd and Osík. However, the uprising was rapidly quelled and on the 13th of August that year, four of the ringleaders were cruelly executed on Šibeničný (Gallows) Hill near Litomyšl. One of the victims was the Horní Újezd miller Lukáš Pakosta, famous up to the present day.
In 1905, the idea of erecting a permanent monument to the peasant rebels was proposed. At that time it was erroneously presumed that Pakosta was a Dolní Újezd reeve, therefore, two years later, an association known as “Lukáš Pakosta” for the erection of a monument in Dolní Újezd was set up. The society raised the necessary capital – 6000 Crowns, secured a plot in the centre of the village – to the left in front of the so-called new school (V-10), decided on the form of the monument (it was unilaterally agreed that “cairns are not as impressive as figural monuments”) and commenced the search for a sculptor. Several unwanted design projects were rejected and a design competition that was announced in 1912 failed, although an artist from Choceň, Cyril Jureček did receive an Honourable Mention. Jureček had been working on a five-metre statue of Jan Hus for the village of Dobříkov near Choceň at the time and later settled in the USA.
In the end Jan Štursa was approached with a request to design the monument, a task he accepted gladly. During his visit to the village in 1912, he decided that the monument would stand in front of the school, albeit to the right, which did not go down too well with the local inhabitants and, on the 11th of July 1913, he signed the contract. Concerning issues of cooperation with Štursa, the managing director of the society remarked: “He created several designs and then broke them up, as he did not like them. When he had one of his good moments, he came up with three designs, threw two of them away and kept one which he sent to us.” The work in stone commenced in the quarry in Hořice sometime in April 1914 and was carried out by the sculptor Otakar Velínský. The sandstone monument was composed of the figure of a muscular man wearing a short kilt and leaning against a plough, and a diamond-shaped plinth bearing the relief portraits of the executed peasants. Štursa thus fulfilled his promise to the society, which initially favoured a peasant in Litomyšl folk costume, that the figure would not be naked. The ceremonial unveiling of the monument took place on the 19th of July, 1914, featured themed parade floats and was watched by a crowd of up to 15,000 people.
At the time, Štursa was seeking a contract for a grand monument, as evidenced by his participation in a design competition for a monument to Jan Žižka in Prague, Vítkov. In references and literature Štursa's monument in Dolní Újezd is labelled as: a monument to martyrs of the peasant uprising, a monument to the victims of the peasant uprising, a monument to the peasant rebellion, a monument to Lukáš Pakosta, or the statue of a peasant. Štursa himself describes his allegorical work in the following fashion: “I created the main figure of a peasant (…). Leaning against a plough, and wiping the perspiration from his brow with a confident gesture, he gazes towards Litomyšl. It seems that a new, free man is growing from the severed heads of the revolutionaries crafted onto the pedestal below.” “It is the figure that is the symbol of that great, defiant force (…).” The art-historian Jiří Mašín can see signs of the results of the sculptor's extensive search for “a new, formal order (…) leading to an exaggeration of form”.
In September 1927, Karel Jozef, a teacher from the College of Stonecutting and Sculpture in Hořice, apparently removed moss and deposits from the monument. Several times in subsequent years, the surroundings of the monument were modified.