Caroline Pafford Miller, Pulitzer Prize Author

Valdosta, GA

In 1911, the Valdosta chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy raised this monument in south Georgia's Lowndes County, nearly fifty years after the Civil War's end. It belongs to the great wave of Confederate memorial-building that swept the South between the 1890s and 1920s, when veterans were aging and dying and their descendants sought to fix the war's memory in granite. The chosen words—"Lest we forget" and the claim that the soldiers' principles "live eternally"—express the reverent, defiant tone typical of these dedications.

Columbia County, GA

Blue Star Memorial Highways date to 1945, when garden clubs began planting trees and setting markers along American roads to honor the men and women of the armed forces. The name echoes the blue star service flags that families hung in their windows during World War II, each star standing for a loved one in uniform. The National Council of State Garden Clubs carried the idea across the country, and local clubs like Willow Wood have tended these roadside tributes ever since.

Eatonton, GA

Eatonton's Bronson House grew from an 1816 tavern into an elegant Greek Revival mansion, remodeled by 1852 with twelve fluted Doric columns by carpenter-architect James M. Broadfield. Over the decades it served as an inn, a hotel, a private residence, and finally a boarding house, passing through the hands of planters, a U.S. marshal, and railroad agent Emerson Bronson. His widow Nena and later her descendants carefully preserved its architecture before the family gave it to the county historical society in 1985.

Walterboro, SC

In the Lowcountry seat of Colleton County, this monument gathers the memory of local men who marched off to the Civil War — some who came home and many who did not. Like hundreds of memorials raised across the South in the generations after 1865, it was meant to fix a community's grief and pride in stone. Its second face is more unusual: it turns to the mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters who 'fought the home battle,' keeping farms, households, and families going through years of war and hardship.