Fayetteville has a rich War-time history. One familiar story
regards the US Armory which the
Confederates appropriated and used to manufacture weapons. Fayetteville was
visited by Sherman in 1865, who destroyed the army building. Fayetteville is
also the site of North Carolina's first Confederate monument.
Sherman’s forces were barely
out of Fayetteville when a group of ladies, led by Ann Kyle, the wife of a
Confederate captain, obtained from the mayor a plot of land in Cross Creek
Cemetery. Kyle raised the money to purchase coffins and have graves dug. Soon
thereafter, the remains of thirty Confederate soldiers who had died in various
places around town were reinterred in the new Confederate section. After coordinating the movement of Confederate soldiers in
Fayetteville, the ladies determined to raise a monument. They pieced together a
quilt and began to sell raffle tickets not only in Fayetteville but also in
Chapel Hill, Tarboro, and Wilmington. Their goal was to raise $1,000. In a
war-ravaged economy, they only managed to raise one-third of that sum. Martha
Lewis won the quilt in May 1868 and then sent the prize to former Confederate president
Jefferson Davis. The ladies next employed a local stonemason to construct and
install the monument. On December 30, 1868, the monument to the Confederate
dead at Cross Creek Cemetery in Fayetteville, the first in North Carolina, was
dedicated. This was the fifth Confederate monument raised in the South
following the end of the war.
I've
visited Fayetteville on several occasions. This photo was taken in October
2009.
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