Marker Text: "Built in 1915 for the widows and daughters of state's Confederate veterans. Closed, 1981. Cemetery 300 yds. W." At the 1908 convention of the North Carolina Division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), Mrs. Hunter G. Smith proposed establishment of a home in North Carolina for Confederate widows and daughters. Five years later the legislature granted $10,000 for building purposes and $5,000 per year for maintenance. The home opened on November 18, 1915, and the UDC accepted it as a charge from the state. To live in the home a woman had to be sixty-five or older; a wife, daughter, or widow of a Confederate veteran; and in need. She also had to assign her property and pension over to the state. Mrs. Smith, who died in 1929, was the first superintendent.
Originally the home was scheduled to close in 1950, but twice it received ten-year reprieves. By 1981 only seven women lived there and the Department of Human Resources, together with the board of directors, decided that it was not practical to keep it in operation. The property was sold to the Fayetteville Board of Education. In 1982 the two-story brick building was razed and the land was made part of the campus of Terry Sanford High School which adjoined the tract. Sixty-five women are buried in a cemetery on the grounds which was fenced in and reserved. (Its counterpart institution, the Confederate Soldiers Home, for veterans, operated in Raleigh from 1891 to 1938.)
References:
Confederate Women’s Home, Biennial Report, 1930/32
Lou Rogers, “Mrs. Hunter G. Smith,” We the People (July 1944)
Fayetteville Observer, August 22, 1982
Durham Morning Herald, November 17, 1946, and March 17, 1974
Charlotte Observer, August 14, 1966
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Related Themes: C.S.A., Confederate States of America, Confederacy
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