Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, September 30, 1994 TAG: 9409300031
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KEVIN KITTREDGE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LEXINGTON LENGTH: Medium
Annie Lee's remains joined those of the rest of her famous family Thursday, ending a dispute with North Carolinians over her exhumation.
More or less.
"We wish the Lee family well. We hope that they're satisfied," said Sam Currin, lawyer for the Military Order of the Stars and Bars, after the removal of Robert E. Lee's daughter from her grave near Warrenton, N.C., this week. The order is a group of descendants of Confederate veterans. "The Confederate heritage groups of North Carolina will continue to pay their respects to the grave site" in North Carolina, Currin said.
Anne Carter "Annie" Lee, second-born daughter of the South's most famous general, has been much in the news of late.
She was buried in North Carolina in 1862 after her death there from typhoid fever at 23.
The war raging to the north made sending her body back to Virginia impossible at the time. Both Robert E. Lee and his wife, Mary Custis Lee, later expressed their satisfaction with their daughter's North Carolina resting place, however.
"I have loved to think of her lying there so quiet in that lovely place where the foot of our invaders has never trod," Mary Custis Lee wrote after the war.
At the time, the private Warren County graveyard where Annie lay was a rose garden surrounded by cotton and tobacco plantations. It now is in a remote section amid trees and underbrush.
It has sometimes attracted vandals. When the marble obelisk marking her grave was toppled two winters ago, the general's descendants elected to bring her home.
Lee himself is buried in Lee Chapel at Washington and Lee University - where he served as president after the war. So are his wife and the other six of his seven children.
So, at last, is Annie.
"She arrived at approximately 11:30 this morning," W&L spokesman Brian Shaw said Thursday afternoon. Plans were to place Annie - who was said to have spent the day at a funeral home - in the Lee family crypt Thursday night.
Annie's reburial was closed to the public at the family's request.
The decision to move Annie originally provoked bewilderment and anger in Warren County - a once-genteel place that has suffered economic decline. Annie was visiting a mineral spring resort there when she died.
"The Southern Yell is alive again," one overwrought resident wrote the weekly Warren Record about Annie. "We must fight for the cause."
Others, though less dramatic, also were concerned. "I just don't think this request is timely," said Richard Hunter, Warren County clerk, last month. "I think if General Lee had wanted it done, that would have been timely."
Contacted again on Thursday, Hunter said reaction to the exhumation has been muted. "I don't think there is any bitterness," Hunter said. "There are those who don't really understand the necessity for it [an exhumation] 132 years later."
Currin, lawyer for the Military Order of the Stars and Bars, was "disappointed" about Annie's removal, he said. He also said he had heard there were no remains found in her aged grave. "I don't know what was accomplished" by the exhumation, Currin said.
The lawyer representing the Lee family, Larry Norman, said they are confident that Annie's remains were enclosed in the new yellow pine casket sent to Virginia on Thursday. Norman, of Louisburg, N.C., also said the Lee family is pleased that Annie is in Lexington - a town, incidently, that she never even visited. Annie always considered Arlington home.
"It was a long, arduous process," Norman said of moving Annie. "It seemed like every time we crossed a hurdle there was another one." County Health Director Dennis Retzlaff finally issued the permit for the exhumation Tuesday morning, Norman said.
The exhumation was completed Tuesday afternoon.
James Edwards Jr., the North Carolina funeral director who oversaw the exhumation, said they found bone fragments, pieces of pine, cast-iron coffin handles and some discolored, hard-packed earth that clearly indicated where the bottom of the casket had once been. He said several members of the local Sons of Confederate Veterans chapter performed the four-hour exhumation with picks, shovels and a metal detector - proof that not all who live there were opposed to moving Annie.
Edwards said he understood the Lee family's unhappiness about vandalism to the grave site, and their desire that Annie be allowed rest in peace.
He also spoke of the exhumation with some pride.
After all, the funeral director said, "It's not many times a funeral home gets to rebury Robert E. Lee's daughter."
by CNB