It fell to the women then.
It falls to the women now.
On May 25, 1872, The Fayetteville Weekly Democrat published a long article titled, “The Dead,” noting that while Union soldiers were preparing to decorate the graves of their dead for Memorial, Day, “we have been thinking what a shame it is to the Southern people here that the Confederate dead lie around and about us in weed-covered and forgotten graves.”
“There was a long discussion of what was owed to these soldiers,” local historian Abby Burnett recounted, “noting that the government provided money only for preservation of Union graves and asking Southerners to take steps to contribute money ‘to collect the scattered remains… and place them in a common cemetery.’”
The story ended with:
“Will the ladies of Fayetteville take the lead in this matter? We look to them for the successful consummation of this just and noble work.”
The women succeeded. The result was the Confederate Cemetery on East Rock Street in Fayetteville, where the 140th Confederate memorial service will take place Saturday. Women, as they did all those decades ago, still tend the memory of those who fell wearing rebel gray. The Southern Memorial Association is the same group that established the cemetery, bringing more than 600 Confederate soldiers from Arkansas, Missouri, Texas and Louisiana to be laid to rest on East Mountain.
At a Memorial Day in 1893, Lizzie Pollard, then president of the SMA, told the audience how they searched the bodies for their identities.
“We found in their decayed and mouldering pockets acorns, and the dust of parched corn. You … cannot comprehend the hunger and heroism that represents.”
What concerns Linda Doede, one of the current members, is what happens to the memories of those men and their final resting place.
“Many of us are in our 60s, and who is going to pick it up and keep it after we’re gone,” she said.
Doede said she started genealogical research into her family when she was in her 30s. “When you’re young, you don’t care.” She discovered four out of eight of her grandfathers served in the Confederate army, but that’s not what piqued her interest in the cemetery.
“I live here,” she said simply when asked how she got involved. “When I go for a walk, behind my house is the southern slope of Mount Sequoyah, and less than three blocks away is the Confederate Cemetery.”
Doede also worries that the cemetery isn’t the only thing that will be forgotten. She recalled explaining to a troop of 8-year-old Boy Scouts why the Civil War was fought.
“They had no clue,” she said. “I had to explain how the South was agricultural, and the North was industrial,and they were fighting to preserve their way of life.
“We have to take these little minds and put the right stuft in there to where they can make their own judgments and not color it South or North,” she said. “Just give them the facts.”
Destiny Dawn Gregory, who lives in Vernon, Fla., became a lifetime member of the Southern Memorial Association when she was 5. Her father, originally from Charleston, S.C., bought the membership for her to keep her rooted in her Southern ancestry.
“Everybody in my family was in the Civil War,” all on the side of the Confederacy, Carl Gregory said, explaining that his ancestry in America goes clear back to about 40 years after the Mayflower landed. “We bought land from Daniel Boone’s family.
“People need to know where they’re from,” said Gregory. “I wanted to make something solid for my daughter to connect to,” even though the other half of her heritage is Burmese. “This way, she’ll always have a real connection to America.
I’vetraveled around the world, but I’ve always known I was from the South.”
C.L. “Cassy” Gray, who publishes the e-zine The Stainless Banner, will speak on that Southern heritage at Saturday’s memorial ceremony. Although not available for an interview on Tuesday, Gray referred NWA Media to a speech she gave in April at Stone Mountain, Ga.
“The first book I read about the war was ‘Gone With the Wind,’” she said. “In the opening chapter, Gerald O’Hara tells his daughter Scarlett that land was the only thing in this world worth working for, worth fighting for, worth dying for. But Gerald was not talking about red clay fields filled with cotton.
“Land meant much more than that to him. It was the birthright that was passed from father to son and then from father to son again. It was the place you courted your sweetheart, won her hand, raised a family, and grew old together. It was the place where you visited g raves of mothers and fathers on quiet Sunday afternoons and realized that the ties that bound you to the land were thrust deep into the soil and that soil was well able to sustain generations. The land was filled with familiar voices, scents, and sights. It was the incarnation of all they were.”
After the war, Gray said, Southern soldiers “had one final task to accomplish. They, along with their wives and widows of the fallen,built monuments to their generals, placed memorial markers on battlefields to bear silent witness to their gallantry, and raised up organizations … to guard their history.”
Doede and the other women of the Southern Memorial Association are seeking those willing to “take the lead in this matter,” as their foremothers did.
“We’d like to pique some new interest,” she said. “A lot of people have grown up here their whole lives and don’t know the cemetery exists.”
Life, Pages 9 on 05/29/2013