For 144 years, members of the Ladies' Memorial Association have decorated the graves of hundreds of Confederate soldiers with Confederate flags for Memorial Day in the Fredericksburg Confederate Cemetery. The ceremony is held at 10 a.m. each Memorial Day.

Absent -- but present in spirit -- will be the men in gray. In 1901 the Maury Camp of Confederate Veterans were joined in the march from Princess Anne Street by the Washington Guards; the R.S. Chew Camp, Sons of Confederate Veterans; scholars of the Fredericksburg College and other schools, public and private, and young ladies as wreath-bearers.

Members of the Ladies' Memorial Association and the Daughters of the Confederacy rode in carriages, with young people in white, the girls with wreaths of flowers in their hair, the boys with wide crimson ribbons across their chests. Wagon-loads of flowers had been brought from the country for the decoration of the graves.

It all began just two months after Appomattox when the ladies of Fredericksburg met to face the almost impossible task of preparing graves for the fallen Confederate soldiers. They began by sodding, with their own hands, the graves of 200 Confederates already buried in the City Cemetery.

[Their task was to] find the graves of those who were buried here and throughout the area, the dead from four great battles and many minor skirmishes. Land [had to] be purchased for a cemetery and markers erected.

Raising funds seemed an impossible task in the war-ravaged town, but the band of ladies refused to use the word. After a series of entertainments and musicals, several tableaux at the Court House, and even an excursion to Mount Vernon, land for the Confederate Cemetery was purchased on October 24, 1867, for $1,200. (It was adjacent to the already established City Cemetery on Washington Avenue.)

But more was needed to complete the reinterment of the dead. They called on Confederate Major J. Horace Lacy for help. His commission from the Ladies' Memorial Association, endorsed by nearly all of the prominent Confederate Generals, is now in the Confederate Museum in Richmond.

The Major -- who worked for the Association without compensation -- was successful from the start. In Baltimore he raised $2,000 in a day and night. On the journey to his plantations in Louisiana, he received a handsome amount from steamboat passengers on the Mississippi. He was responsible for raising the money to complete the work; including building the brick wall, the monument and gate, and a fund to keep the cemetery in order.

Dedication ceremonies were on Memorial Day, 1870.

In 1887 a new crisis came: the posts marking the graves were decaying and the work had to be done again. Some suggested the posts be removed, the plot made a solid green, and the names recorded in the Court House.

But Mrs. J. N. Barney (Nannie Seddon Barney), whose husband had been a captain in the Confederate Navy, refused to compromise and took on the task of writing to the Legislatures of the Southern States for money for headstones.

Her friend, "Bill Arp" (Charles Francis Smith, the noted humorist), was a member of the Georgia Legislature. He told the Sergeant-at-Arms: "Lock the doors, Sergeant, not a man leaves this room until he has given me two dollars for Mrs. Barney."

Georgia took charge and the names of her more than 200 dead were sent to the marble quarry. The Legislature paid the bill and the stones arrived in Fredericksburg.

The rest was easy, according to Mrs. Vivian Minor Fleming (Emily White Fleming), who in A Leaf From the Past tells the story of the Cemetery. Every one of the 13 other legislatures ordered stones for their native sons. On June 10, 1890, Confederate generals and soldiers from near and far came to honor Mrs. Barney and the graves of the Confederate soldiers who had been rescued from oblivion.

Today, the Ladies' Memorial Association follows in the tradition of its first members.