Soldiers Reunion has also grown over the century and a quarter. The old Confederates are gone the last one died just before the 1937 Reunion the eldest veterans honored this year are from World War II. Men and women just back from Iraq and Afghanistan are among the honorees now. Each time our reunited nation was involved in a war and our county sent more young people off to serve their homeland, we officially included them in the honorees of our annual gathering.

But not here-because Soldiers Reunion evolved. Similar reunions were held throughout the South and the North but they gradually faded from the calendar.

Schools let out, factories shut down early and thousands throng Courthouse Square. Besides Christmas, Reunion Day is the most important day of the year in the county. That occasion has never stopped and is repeated on the third Thursday in August every year. Many of the old soldiers wore their faded uniforms and they marched around the Square on the dusty streets under a broiling sun, not once that afternoon but three times, enjoying comradeship and renewing old acquaintances. Almost 1,800 men had volunteered to go to war from a county with just 10,000 total residents and more than 600 of them had died in the war.Ī local woman, Fannie Ransom Williams, daughter and niece of two Confederate generals, Robert and Matt Ransom, persuaded officials to include a veterans’ reunion with the sign-up, and the women of the town prepared a bounteous picnic lunch to serve the several hundred men from long wooden tables set up under the shade of large trees on the courthouse lawn. That day marked the first county-wide gathering of aging Confederate veterans, so they could register to receive federal military pensions. It began in the summer of 1889 on Courthouse Square in Newton in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Soldiers Reunion is credited by federal authorities as the oldest continuous patriotic festival in the nation that is not tied to a national holiday. And among the Union “dead” at the Fort Adams Park reenactment lay a smiling Mikal Madyun, a 19-year-old African-American from Providence who’s been at it since he was 14. For a week in August, Catawba County (NC) citizens honor their war veterans at a patriotic festival established by the founder of Ransom-Sherrill Chapter as the first county-wide reunion of Confederate veterans.

At Marshfield Fair, Daniel Dupre, 18, from Rhode Island, wore the uniform of the US Signal Corps and brandished a sword and single-action Colt revolver. Other youngsters suited up for the two events. But she brought along her 15-year-old daughter Elyse, portraying a Confederate belle in a splendid blue dress. “They went off to war because it’s what you did.”īrady’s husband and son are missing in action, because of football practice. “Most of those kids didn’t know what they were fighting for,” Brady said. Because of her mother’s experiences, Brady has sympathy for the rank-and-file Confederate soldiers who did most of the fighting and dying for the South. Michelle Brady’s mother grew up in Germany during World War II, where she was at the mercy first of the Nazis and then of the occupying Americans. “They can’t say, ‘OK, I don’t like this, I’ll turn the channel, I’ll go to a different place.’ Instead, if I don’t like it, ‘well, you can’t do it.’ I don’t feel that’s the American way.”Īmanda Morgante (left) and her sister, Jennifer, of Woodbury, Conn., prepared for the reenactment. “I think people are a lot less tolerant now,” he said. That’s starting to change, said Brundige. Yet for decades, hardly anyone objected when reenactors donned Confederate gray and unfurled the infamous battle flag. Many Americans are outraged by positive depictions of the Confederacy. You can’t reenact the Civil War without recreating the Confederate army, an army that fought on behalf of an evil cause - the preservation of slavery. Then there is the growing worry that Civil War reenactments will become the next battleground in the nation’s cultural war. The baby boomers who revived historical reenactments as a major hobby are aging out and moving on, and there are not enough younger enthusiasts to replace them. These days Brundige and his comrades are facing new and unfamiliar foes.

Old soldiers reunion 2017 newton nc