Thursday, July 19, 2012

Looking for NC's Civil War - Cross Creek Cemetery


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.

No comments:

Post a Comment