Remembering a heritage of honor
05/06/08
A local group recently hosted a memorial service to honor 13 Confederate veterans from Chickamauga, as well as the widow of a Confederate soldier.
“During Confederate Memorial Month each local camp (of the Sons of Confederate Veterans 599) try to do something special,” said John Culpepper, sergeant major of the 37th Georgia Infantry, a reenactment group. “We are here today to honor the 13 Confederate veterans buried here, plus the widow Glenn.”
The widow Glenn is best remembered as the owner of the property where Wilder Tower stands in Chickamauga & Chattanooga National Military Park.
“General Rosecran (of the union Army) used her farm house as his headquarters during the Battle of Chickamauga,” Culpepper said. “It was located where Wilder’s Tower is now. It burnt during the battle and she never came back. She settled out here.
“She was originally a Camp, which their home place is close to here. Her husband died in Confe Cmdr. Charlie Lott of the Georgia Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans was the keynote speaker. derate service in Mobile, Alabama, in 1862. That is how she is known as the widow Glenn in all the history books in the Battle of Chickamauga.”
The local Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) cleaned each of the graves and placed a monument at the grave of the widow Glenn that details her role in the Battle of Chickamauga.
The service was held April 19 before a crowd of approximately 50 participants at the cemetery of Cove Methodist Church on Cove Road, west of Chickamauga.
Charlie Lott, commander of the Georgia Division of the SCV, was the keynote speaker.
“When we are young life seems so big it will never run out of minutes,” Lott said. “We have a tendency to waste these minutes on trivial content. But once released they are gone; we can never get them back.
“If they are used for the betterment of mankind then so much the better, but they are still gone … We all know the results of a pen prick on an inflated balloon. If a pen pricks our time balloon, our years, months, days, hours are gone. So all the things we were going to do tomorrow now have to be done by someone else.
“The most wasted event in this country’s history was the Civil War. Over 600,000 time balloons were busted. How many of these causalities had something inside them, which could have benefited humanity, had they lived? How many more, though they survived the war, found themselves injured to the extent they could little more than just try to exist?
“Could someone now lying dead from this Battle of Chickamauga have made some great discovery to benefit all mankind? Did a cure for cancer die with a soldier at Chickamauga? We will never know.”
Members of the widow Glenn’s family were on hand to receive a Confederate battle flag that covered the new monument that now marks her grave.
“We appreciate what the Sons of Confederate Veterans camp has done,” said Denise Clopton of the widow’s family.
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