Oakdale Cemetery

Oakdale Cemetery. To Our Confederate Dead. After the Civil War, women’s associations 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 Memorial Day, May 10, 1888, at Washington’s Monument Park (then located at the corner of Water and Monumental Streets). Exactly ten years later, the memorial was relocated to Oakdale Cemetery. The monument was dedicated to “The Private Soldier” and modeled after Capt. Thomas M. Allen, Co. E, (Southern Guards), 4th North Carolina Infantry. Allen, captured at Gettysburg, 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 offices eventually were 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 southwest entrance on May 10, 1905. On May 10, 1975, the Confederate cannon was placed in memory of Edmond Hoyt Harding by the United Daughters of the Confederacy. The Pamlico Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy has conducted annual Memorial Day celebrations from 1883 to the present. The old veterans marched from Washington to the monument until the last one, J.D. Paul, died in 1938., (captions) , (left) Wilson T. Farrow served in Co. H, 33rd North Carolina Infantry Regiment as 1st Lt. He is buried in Oakdale Cemetery. , (right) 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, Hartford, Conn. He became a deacon in 1873 and a priest in 1875. From 1873 until his death in 1917, he spent his ministry a St. Peter’s Episcopal Church here in Washington. He is buried in Oakdale Cemetery.