I spent much of my Monday at Mississippi’s most iconic cemetery for the graveside service of my uncle, Jim Hoffman.
“Uncle Jim,” who has struggled with cancer for some time, was my last living uncle. He was raised in Louisiana and an LSU graduate. He took me to my first college football game when I was a kid – Ole Miss vs LSU at Memorial Stadium in Jackson.
My “Uncle Jim” had an encyclopedia of stories at the ready for any occasion, but LSU football history was definitely in his wheel house.
He and my “Aunt Jan” lived most of his adult life in Brandon. I only learned recently of his ties to Columbus and Lowndes County.
Upon receiving word of his death and burial planned in Friendship Cemetery, I knew some of the history there.
The cemetery was founded around 1840 by the Friendship Presbyterian Church in Columbus. In 1853, the church moved. The cemetery stayed. Today it’s among Mississippi’s most famous landmarks. It was named to the National Register of Historic Places in 1980.
It’s best known for being the place where modern day Memorial Day originated. Columbus was a small town of about 6,000 people during the Civil War. Being near a rail line, Columbus received many mainly Confederate casualties of war, including those from the Battle of Shiloh in April, 1862, in nearby southwestern Tennessee. During the two days of that battle, a total of almost 3,500 soldiers were killed on both sides, and over 16,000 wounded. Columbus’s share of the casualties led to its becoming well known as a hospital town.
By the war’s end, several thousand Confederate and Union soldiers had been buried at Friendship.
History says that on April 25, 1866, four women from Columbus decided to celebrate this day, originally called Decoration Day, by decorating the graves of Confederate soldiers with flowers.
One of the women, Augusta Sykes, whose husband and brother-in-law had been killed in the war, posed the question, “How can we expect the Northern states to honor Confederate graves if we don’t honor the Union graves here?” This brought about the change to adorn both Confederate and Union graves with flowers. The new Columbus tradition was picked up and sent nationwide and even covered by The New York Times newspaper.
Poignant images of the mass loss of life during the Civil War are evident in Friendship Cemetery. Rows and rows of marble stones marking the final resting place of soldiers cover the beautiful landscape of giant, old oaks and Magnolia trees.
I arrived early Monday and visited the grave of Lt. Gen. Stephen Lee, one of many Confederate officers buried at Friendship.
There are two large Confederate memorials in the cemetery.
Nearly 25,000 people are buried in Friendship and it features some of the most incredible grave markers anywhere.
Among the most famous is the “Angel of Grief” over the grave of the Rev. Thomas Cox Teasdale, the ninth pastor of First Baptist Church in Columbus, who died in 1891, at the age of 83.
My Uncle Jim’s marker will be much more subtle to put it mildly. He was buried next to his parents Anne and O. Henry Hoffman.
It was a beautiful day for a graveside service in a moment the family was most thankful that my uncle’s long suffering had ended. I found it appropriate that my uncle was buried in such a historic place and that now he and my Aunt Jan will forever link our family to one of Mississippi’s most iconic sites.