Stewart County, Lumpkin. Our soldier on the courthouse grou
OF STEWAR BOTH THOSE W AND FELL, AN FOUGHT AND
Confederate soldiers on courthouse squares and other locations in communities throughout state. Huge throngs witnessed the dedication ceremonies, listened to inspiring oratory and paid thei abiding respects to the aged veter still in their midst. In compariso to other places, Georgia has seen relatively little agitation t remove memorials to the Southern Confederacy. However, there is som chatter on the subject, including of destroying the carving on Stone Mountain. Destruction of this uniq work of art is unlikely, to say th least. But as Yogi Berra said, “It tough to make predictions, especia about the future.” Like Yogi, we do not know what the future holds, but for now, Geo gia’s courthouse squares contain a rich architectural heritage in the plus sculpted memorials to Souther
soldiers raised over the decades in every corner of our state. Beginning in the summer of 1865 Southern ladies formed memorial associations to tend to the many cemeteries in which Confederate soldiers had been buried. Confederate Memorial Day is said to have been first observed in rituals on April 2 1866, in Columbus. Georgia’s first Confederate memorial was raised in June of that year in a rural cemeter in Richmond County, a modest column honoring the 23 men from the small Linwood Church who went to war and did not return. Atlanta was not far behind. In 1869, citizens or ganized to raise a monument to Confederate soldiers; the 65-foot obeli was dedicated April 26, 1874, in Oakland Cemetery. Indeed, most of the South’s first Confederate monuments were like these, erected in the many soldiers’ graveyards strewn across our region. However, as time passed memorializers wanted more visible reminders of their Confederate heroes and began to set their statues in county courthouse squares and other prominent sites. In downtown Griffin, fo instance, 1909 saw the dedication of a new soldier monument, while the angel erected in 1867 continued to watch over the graves of the fallen nearby Stonewall Cemetery. The waning years of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth were the heyday of Confederate monument building in Georgia and across the South. In Lumpkin, the seat of Stewart County, there was raised the tall stone lar atop which stands a Confederate soldier’s sculpted likeness. He is not holding his musket in a bayonet charge, and not shouldering it on th march. This rather relaxed Johnny Reb, holding his rifle at parade res is casually tamping tobacco into his pipe. The Stewart County monument introduces us to the rich variety of Confederate monumentation in our state. Join us on a drive around Geo gia to visit these memorials and lea of the men they honor. Stephen Davis is the author of What the Yankees Did to Us: Sherman’s Bombardment and Destruction of Atlanta (Mercer University Press, 2012) and Atlanta Will Fall: Sherman, Joe Johnston, and the Yankee Heavy Battalions (Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2001). Davis is also the author of two additional books on the Atlanta Campaign to be published this year as part of th Emerging Civil War Series by Savas Beatie.
In Honor of a Fallen Nation (Mercer University Press, 2014). All the pho
able from Mercer University Press, retail outlets, online sellers, and directly from the author by email at
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