Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, August 17, 1994 TAG: 9408250070
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By KEVIN KITTREDGE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: WARRENTON, N.C. LENGTH: Long
She died a lousy death, from typhoid fever, on a visit from Virginia. She was only 23.
Her end was, among other things, inconvenient. To the north, the Civil War was raging. Her mother had little choice; she left poor Annie here among the cotton plantations, in a pretty private cemetery outside town, bright with roses.
Alas, the roses are gone now, replaced by beer cans.
Gone, too, are the cotton fields and the antebellum mansions. Nowadays, teen-agers gather in the empty woods to drink and topple tombstones.
The truth is, after 132 years, Warren County is a different place.
The daughter of Robert E. Lee, say Lee family descendants, deserves a different fate.
Spurred by reports of recent vandalism to Annie's grave - someone knocked over her 11-foot granite monument in the winter of 1992-3 - descendants of the fabled Confederate general have asked permission to exhume Annie's body and take it up to Lexington, back in Virginia.
The petition - signed by Annie's grandniece, Anne Zimmer of Fauquier County - was filed with the Warren County Health Department months ago.
The uproar it created may never die.
North Carolina grand dames have hurled down gauntlets. Reporters - lots of reporters - have come to poke and pry. Newspaper columnists have ruminated sadly.
Here and there, apparently, people are girding for war:
``The Southern Yell is alive again,'' a Warrenton resident wrote The Warren Record. ``We must fight for the cause to protect our historic places and our Southern pride.''
Others are more tactful.
``I just don't think this request is timely,'' says Richard Hunter, Warren County's court clerk. ``I think if Gen. Lee had wanted it done back in the '70s, that would have been timely.''
Clearly, the attempt to move poor Annie has touched Warren County's pride.
The ruckus has reportedly dismayed the Lee descendants, who had hoped to bring Annie home without a fuss.
Zimmer, 67, the family member designated to carry out the family's wishes regarding Annie, has made her own chagrin well known - telling reporters she feels as if she has been ``left hanging out to dry,'' and ``like the tar baby caught in the briar patch.''
``I really wish I hadn't gotten into this,'' she confessed to The Washington Post.
She is no longer talking to to the media. ``I have said entirely too much to too many reporters,'' Zimmer told a reporter recently, adding that in the future she intends to invoke ``the Fifth Amendment... I hope you find someone more communicative that I am.''
No problem.
There's always her lawyer.
``I anticipate and hope very much the permit [to exhume Annie] will be issued immediately,'' said Larry Norman, of Louisburg, N.C., late last week. Norman is representing the Lee family over Annie.
There is also Sam Currin, the lawyer for what might be regarded as the other side - the local chapter of the Military Order of the Stars and Bars. The MOSB is a group of descendants of Confederate officers.
Currin insists, as do MOSB members, that they do not not wish to stand in the Lee family's way if the family really wants Annie moved.
On the other hand, ``I think Norman is jumping the gun a little bit'' by asking that a permit be issued immediately, Currin said. He called for a meeting first of Lee family members and North Carolina officials, to discuss the future of the grave site.
``We are simply trying to make sure that the right thing is done,'' Currin said.
Through it all, Warren County Health Director Dennis Retzlaff, whose job it is to consider the request to exhume the body, has bounced from rock to hard place. Retzlaff says he has no authority to reject the Lee family's request - but he'd also like the lawyers to work things out first.
Recently, and maybe logically, Retzlaff, too, has begun to avoid the media. He now issues daily bulletins saying there is nothing new.
He had to do this, he explains. On a day last week, Retzlaff returned from lunch to find 12 messages on his desk.
Little enough is known of Anne Carter ``Annie'' Lee, second-born of the general's four daughters and the fourth of his seven children.
She was born in 1839. She died in the midst of the Civil War, following a months-long bout with typhoid - probably contracted from water at a supposedly therapeutic spring.
She is the only one of the Lee children who isn't buried with her mother and father in the family crypt in Lee Chapel, at Washington and Lee University in Lexington. Lee was president of the school - then called Washington College - for five years after the Civil War.
Inside those bare outlines of a life, the details rattle about like coins in a near-empty safe: Annie had rich, dark hair. She attended the Virginia Female Institute in Staunton. During the war, she was captured along with her mother and sister, Mildred, by federal troops, only to be released later by a courtly Gen. George McClellan - who escorted the ladies into a waiting carriage himself.
As a small child, Annie Lee stabbed one eye with scissors, leaving a permanent scar. As a result, perhaps, she was shy of portraits and photographs; in any case there are no undisputed likenesses of Annie.
``She was very sensitive about her looks,'' said Mary Coulling of Lexington, author of the 1987 book, ``The Lee Girls.''
``We know that she had very dark, glossy, almost black hair,'' Coulling said. ``We know that she seems to have been the family member that her mother called on most. She was a very sturdy, reliable kind of person.''
Coulling thinks it unlikely Annie ever had a suitor. The general himself was known to be tenderly solicitous of his ``gentle Annie.'' Lee made special provisions in his will for Annie - who, due to her childhood injury, ``may be more in want of aid than the rest,'' he said.
Annie died on Oct. 20, 1862. Near the end she was complaining of horrendous headaches and abdominal pain - which leads Coulling to believe she had suffered two possible side-effects of typhoid fever - meningitis and a ruptured appendix.
She was buried in the Jones family cemetery outside Warrenton. The Joneses also owned the spa resort where Annie had been staying.
In time, it would all seem for the best.
``I have loved to think of her lying so quiet in that lovely place where the foot of our invaders has never trod,'' Mary Lee is said to have written of her daughter's grave site, in the grim days after the war.
But time has not been kind to Warren County. The South lost the war, of course. Then came the boll weevil and other trials. ``We have a few small industries,'' said Hunter, the county clerk. ``I don't think we've come back since the Depression.''
For whatever reason, the wealth has bled away from Warren County. And with the surrounding plantations gone, Annie's grave site lies has become a woodsy hangout.
Vandals broke down Annie's stately monument the winter before last - but they didn't stop there. Visitors that spring found a shambles of fallen monuments and broken tombstones. Weirdly, the base of Annie's monument was streaked with wax.
Who knows why? ``Some of it was blue, some of it was white,'' said Addie Jenkins , president of the local chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. ``Your guess is as good as mine.''
Capt. Robert Peniston sees it like this: ``There's a lot of nuts in the world.''
Peniston is the director of Lee Chapel, where the rest of the Lee family is interred. He visited the site that spring with the university's communications director, Brian Shaw.
It isn't, say Warren County residents, as if they haven't tried to care for Annie.
After Annie's monument was broken, the Joneses planted upright railroad ties across the pathway to the cemetery, to keep out cars.
The MOSB, meanwhile, raised more than $4,000 to resurrect Annie's monument. Members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy also have helped tidy up the site, and frequently bring flowers.
On a recent visit to the site, a reporter found the re-erected monument intact, and two bouquets of fresh flowers on Annie's grave.
Still, Howard Jones, for one, says if Annie has to leave, he will understand.
``Things have changed,'' said Jones, editor of The Warren Record. Jones' family still owns the cemetery. ``There's no war on going on now, and you could easily get her up to Virginia. If we were hospitable to her when she came down, we ought to be hospitable to her when she wants to leave.''
Which leads to the inescapable question : What, after all these years, is left of Annie anyway?
``Hell, I don't know,'' said Peniston, when asked what might be found in a 132-year-old grave. ``It's probably nothing but dust.''
by CNB