A corner of Downtown Waynesville went back in time this past weekend for a ceremony and commemoration of Confederate veterans.

On Saturday, May 10, the state’s Confederate Memorial Day, members of the 22nd North Carolina Company B encamped on the courthouse lawn, held military exercises in uniform and gave a 21-gun salute during a wreath-laying ceremony at the Haywood County Courthouse monument for Confederate veterans.

The event began with the reading of nearly 300 names of Haywood County soldiers who died in the war. More than 1,400 native sons of Haywood fought and died in battles ranging from Fredericksburg to Sharpsburg and Chickamauga to the Shenandoah Valley. According to military records, Haywood County soldiers are listed in campaigns with Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, the armies of Gen. Braxton Bragg and Joseph Johnston in Georgia and Tennessee, and regiments in Alabama, Mississippi, eastern Louisiana and Maryland.

“From Big Bethel through Appomattox and beyond, Haywood’s heroes could be found at almost every major battle fought during the war,” said Derrick Shipman, commander of the Capt. Julius Welch Camp 229 Sons of Confederate Veterans. The chapter is named in honor of Capt. Julius Welch, who died at the Battle of Piedmont in Northern Virginia in 1864. As the story goes, Col. W.W. Stringfield, a Tennessee-born officer who later settled in Waynesville and ran the White Sulphur Springs Hotel, was carrying a wounded Welch off the battlefield when he died in Stringfield’s arms.

Many of Haywood’s Confederate soldiers who died in the war perished in Union prisons. According to Shipman, at least 70 Haywood County soldiers are buried at Oakwood Cemetery in Chicago, Ill., making it second only to Green Hill Cemetery in Waynesville as having the most known graves of Haywood County Confederate veterans.

For the re-enactors, the weekend encampment was more than a chance to dress up and be soldiers for a day. It was an opportunity to remember their ancestors and share 19th century history with local residents and tourists, who snapped photographs and watched the soldiers in gray march, relax among their “A” tents, and receive orders as they would have nearly 150 years ago.

“We hope to honor our ancestors and remember what they did,” said Shipman, who gave a detailed account of Haywood’s involvement in the war. In 1860, Waynesville only had about 100 residents, but it was invaded four times during the war by Union forces, the last being in May 1865, when Confederate forces met Union infantry and exchanged gunfire. It is considered by many historians to be the last shot fired in the war east of the Mississippi River. The Thomas Legion led by Col William Holland Thomas — a Haywood native, adopted Cherokee and later chief as well as a U.S. Congressman — surrendered to Union forces at the Battle House (a site that is today next to the Waynesville Town Hall on Main Street) one month after Lee had surrendered at Appomattox.

The Sons of Confederate Veterans carry along statistics and artifacts as well as oral history with their re-enactments, public events, historical meetings, and recognition and decorations of veteran gravestones.

The Confederate soldier’s life was a rough one, according to Shawn Eplee of Asheville and a new member of the 22nd North Carolina Company B re-enactors who attended the May 10 encampment in Waynesville. Eplee shared some of the basics that a soldier would have in his haversack — a knife, a three-pronged metal fork, a toothbrush, a candle, a Bible, and a sewing kit (nicknamed “his housewife”) with buttons, needles, thread and shoelaces for on-the-road sewing and mending.

In some cases, a soldier may also have had paper and pencil for writing letters to family back home. For water, there were streams and rivers along the way, and for food, there might be cornmeal, a biscuit, pork, and the stone-hard cracker standby known as hardtack, which needed water to soften it up for chewing. Toward the end of the war, most of these basic supplies would have been precious commodities. In fact, one of the reasons Gen. Robert E. Lee’s army sought out Gettysburg was because some of his soldiers were in need of shoes.

Though no large-scale battles were fought in Haywood County, the region was a hotbed of bloody activity and lawlessness during the war, with Union raiders, bands of Confederate deserters, Home Guard militias, and guerrilla groups known as “bushwhackers” attacking farms, burning homes, killing civilians, and stealing food and supplies.

“The war was used to settle old feuds,” said Eplee.

In some mountain coves, there were deep-seated rivalries that had

existed for decades where families had rubbed each other the wrong way, Eplee explained. With a depleted male population and lack of resources to make ends meet in an already secluded part of the state that lacked railroad lines, Haywood County residents faced invasions from both Confederate and Union raids. Eplee suggests that Western North Carolina during the Civil War was more of a Wild West atmosphere than the cowboy legends of the Wild West decades later.

North Carolina did not start out as a steadfast member of the Confederacy. The state debated the issue of secession in the months leading up to the war, and many in Western North Carolina were against the move. Secessionist meetings were being held as early as November of 1860 in North Carolina’s Cleveland County, but the General Assembly voted against secession in February 1861. However, on April 15, 1861, after the bombardment of Fort Sumter and its surrender to Confederate forces, a newly elected President Abraham Lincoln called for 75,000 troops to force South Carolina and the other Southern states back into the union after they had seceded. Public opinion quickly turned Haywood County and North Carolina toward the Confederate cause. Haywood County and much of Western North Carolina had established strong economic trading ties with South Carolina. That, together with the issue of individual states’ rights and a strong Scots-Irish notion of independence, trumped the notion of answering Lincoln’s call and keeping the Union together.

“I can be no party to this wicked violation of the laws of the country and to this war upon the liberties of a free people,” North Carolina’s Gov. John Ellis issued in his reply to the U.S. Secretary of War. “You can get no troops from North Carolina.”

On May 20, 1861, North Carolina became the tenth state to secede from the Union and joined the Confederacy the next day.

In the South — and to this day — the Civil War is referred to as “The War Between the States,” “The War of Northern Aggression” and “The War for Southern Independence,” which points to the fact that the war had — and continues to have — multiple perspectives in viewing its history.

To learn more about Western North Carolina’s Confederate history during this war, go to the Web site www.scv.org. Some recommended books on this time period in history include Storm in the Mountains by Vernon H. Crow, The Heart of Confederate Appalachia by John C. Inscoe and Gordon B. McKinney, and Bushwhackers by William R. Trotter.