Ladies Memorial Association

Ladies' Memorial Associations are organizations of women that sprang up all over the American South in the years after the American Civil War. Typically, these were organizations by and for wealthy white women, whose goal was to inter or re-inter the bodies of Confederate soldiers and to raise monuments in their honor. Their immediate goal, of providing decent burial for soldiers, was joined with the desire to commemorate the sacrifices of Southerners and to propagate the Lost Cause of the Confederacy. Between 1865 and 1900, these associations were a formidable force in Southern culture, establishing cemeteries and raising large monuments often in very conspicuous places, and helped unite white Southerners in an ideology at once therapeutic and political.

The first Ladies' Memorial Association (LMA) sprang up immediately after the end of the Civil War in Winchester, Virginia, which had suffered significantly during the war. Mary Dunbar Williams of Winchester organized a group of women to give proper burial to Confederate dead whose bodies were found in the countryside, and to decorate those graves annually. In the summer of 1865, the Winchester women appealed in newspapers for financial aid and soon money began pouring in for the Winchester cemetery. Alabamians, following an appeal by a Montgomery newspaper, were significant contributors, and Stonewall Cemetery, Winchester, (named for Stonewall Jackson) was opened in 1866. Within a year, according to Caroline Janney, seventy such organizations had been founded throughout the South. Another early cemetery was established by the LMA of Wake County, North Carolina. The history of the Montgomery LMA indicates that these organizations were part of a broader movement: it built on the work of individuals and "Ladies Aid Organizations" done during the war, and was given extra impetus by the formation (by gentlemen of the city) of a historical society (toward the end of 1865) and the news from other states (Mississippi) and cities (Selma) of the formation of women's associations in early 1866. After an emotional plea in the paper, "the women of Montgomery, in answer to this call, filled the sacred halls of the old Court Street Methodist Church on that beautiful Monday morning on the sixteenth day of April, eighteen-hundred and sixty-six!"

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