As the Civil War drew to a close, the desire to honor those who fought for the Confederacy was an impulse many Southern white women shared. Throughout the South, Ladies Memorial Associations were formed. They oversaw burial of the dead, monument construction and advocacy for establishing Confederate Memorial Day.
In Atlanta, like in many other Southern cities, a benevolent association was formed by the wives, widows, sisters and mothers of Confederate soldiers. Assuming “men’s work” while the men were off to war, the women volunteered in benevolent societies, hospital associations, sewing groups and other organizations.
The Atlanta Ladies Memorial Association was formed April 15, 1866 to help honor living and deceased Confederate veterans. The association would undertake many projects in the following decades, including creation of a large section of Oakland Cemetery for Confederate veterans. One of their most memorable projects was the marble Atlanta Lion memorial to the unknown Confederate dead.
The Atlanta Ladies Memorial Association commissioned T. M. Brady of Canton to create the monument to the 3,000 unknown Confederate war dead buried in Oakland Cemetery.
The work was sculpted from a single piece of marble supplied by the Tate Marble Company in Georgia. This massive monument weighs more than 15 tons.
In 1894 it was the largest block of marble quarried in America. The figure of the lion is 9 feet long and rests upon a rustic base of approximately 10 feet. The monument depicts the lion fallen on the Confederate flag, which he clinches in one paw. Beneath him are several muskets and a saber.
Brady’s sculpture was commemorated on April 26, 1894. The inspiration for the Lion of Atlanta was Bertil Thorvaldsen’s colossal Lion of Lucerne (Switzerland) which honors the 16 Swiss Guards who died defending Marie Antoinette in the French Revolution. Many have pointed out that ironically, the Swiss Guards also died for a lost cause.
Author Mark Twain once called the Lion of Lucerne “the most mournful and moving stone in the world.”
Common lore says that after the Battle of Atlanta, the association went over the battlefields in buggies, gathered the dead with their own hands and took them to Oakland for proper burial. Reportedly, these women paid people $1 for every body they interred in the section for unknown Confederate soldiers.
The Ladies Memorial Association also dedicated a 65-foot obelisk on April 26, 1874. At that time it was the tallest structure in Atlanta. The Romanesque style obelisk was carved from Stone Mountain granite. The base was dedicated on Oct. 15, 1870, the date of Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s funeral in Virginia. It was completed four years later. It reads: “Our Confederate Dead 1873.”
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