Oakdale cemetery: to our Confederate dead

              OAKDALE CEMETERY
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To Our Confederate Dead
After the Civil War, women’s associ-ations
throughout the South sought
to gather the Confederate dead from
battlefield burial sites and reinter
the remains in proper cemeteries,
while Confederate monuments were
erected in courthouse squares and
other public places. A monument
titled “To Our Confederate Dead”
was unveiled on Confederate Memo-rial
Day, May 10, 1888, at Washing-ton’s
Monumental Park (then locat-ed
at the corner of Water and Monu-mental
Streets). Exactly ten years
later, the memorial was relocated to
Oakdale Cemetery. The monument
was dedicated to “The Private Sol-dier”
and modeled after Capt.
Thomas M. Allen, Co. E (Southern
Guards), 4th North Carolina
Infantry. Allen, captured at Gettys-burg,
Pa., in July 1863, was among
600 officers transferred from Fort
Delaware to Morris Island, S.C., in
August 1864, to be confined in front
of the Union batteries during the
siege of Charleston. Allen and most
of the officers eventually were
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You Are
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Siege of Washington
USS
Picket
Reverend Nathaniel Harding enlisted on August 20,
1864, at age 17 as a private in Co. I, 67th Regiment
N.C. Troops, also known as Co. I, Whitford’s Battalion
N.C. Partisan Rangers. According to his family, while
serving near Plymouth, N.C., he fell in a creek while
weighted down with equipment and was pulled to
safety by a Union officer who took him under his wing.
After the war, Harding was educated at the Episcopal
Academy, Cheshire, Conn., and Trinity College, Hart-ford,
Conn. He became a deacon in 1873 and a priest
in 1875. From 1873 until his death in 1917, he spent
his ministry at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church here in
Washington. He is buried in Oakdale Cemetery.
Wilson T. Farrow served in Co. H, 33rd North Carolina
Infantry Regiment as 1st Lt. He is buried in Oakdale
Cemetery.
returned to Fort Delaware and
released after the war, becoming
known as the “Immortal 600.”
On January 17, 1897, here
in Oakdale Cemetery, the Ladies
Memorial Association of Beaufort
County reburied 17 Confederates
killed during the September 6, 1862,
Battle of Washington. The Children
of the Confederacy dedicated the
monument at the cemetery’s south-west
entrance on May 10, 1905.
On May 10, 1975, the Confederate
cannon was placed in memory of
Edmond Hoyt Harding by the Unit-ed
Daughters of the Confederacy.
The Pamlico Chapter of the United
Daughters of the Confederacy has
conducted annual Memorial Day
celebrations from 1883 to the pres-ent.
The old veterans marched from
Washington to the monument until
the last one, J.D. Paul, died in 1938.