THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, June 27, 1994 TAG: 9406270132
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B5 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: 940627 LENGTH: WARRENTON
Annie Carter Lee was 23 when she died 132 years ago at the former White Sulfur Springs. She is the only child of the Confederate general not buried in the family crypt.
{REST} Lee descendants worry that, despite a 1939 state law that directs the state Transportation Department to maintain the grounds and a state road to the site, vandals will continue to desecrate the memorial.
``That vandalism is in essence why I have signed a request for her exhumation,'' Anne Zimmer of Upperville, Va., the great-niece of Annie Carter Lee, told the Winston-Salem Journal.
The move to Lee Chapel on the campus of Washington & Lee University in Lexington, Va., won't come without resistance. Lee, his parents and his six other children are interred there.
Mary Louise Limer, a county librarian who loves to point out the watercolor painting of the gravesite that hangs in the library, puts it this way: ``This is where she'll stay because, pardon the expression, hell will have to freeze over before she leaves Warren County.''
Over the years, vandals have trashed the grounds around the 4-acre tract where Annie Carter Lee was buried after contracting typhoid while vacationing with her mother and three sisters in Warren County in October 1862.
The 11-foot-tall granite obelisk atop her grave has been hammered and battered several times and adjacent tombstones toppled and broken.
About a year ago, someone backed a car or truck up to the edge of the iron fence that surrounds the cemetery and managed to topple the memorial, which had been hand-carved by a disabled Confederate veteran in 1866.
A North Carolina chapter of The Military Order of the Stars and Bars, whose members are descendants of Confederate military officers, raised $4,000 and restored the marker last year.
State transportation crews followed up earlier this year by embedding eight wooden rail ties in the roadbed to block a repeat performance. But last week, vandals struck a state historic roadside marker that the United Daughters of the Confederacy had helped place along the southbound lanes of U.S. 401, a half-mile from the cemetery.
The cast aluminum marker, which had been in place since April 1936, read: ``Annie Carter Lee, Daughter of Robert E. Lee. Died 1862, age 23, and was buried one-half mile west. Lee visited grave in 1870.''
It lay broken in a roadside ditch among poison ivy and Johnson grass last week.
Michael Hill, who oversees 1,382 such historic markers across the state for the state Division of Archives and History, said that marker had been one of the state's first.
``I'm sorry to hear that, because that site has received a lot of attention,'' Hill said. ``It was at Gen. Lee's own request that she was buried in Warren County.''
Zimmer said she has filed an application for a permit to have her great-aunt's body removed. She has hired an attorney to see that her request is honored.
Warren County health director Dennis Retzlaff must decide whether to authorize the removal of the body. He said he has delayed making a decision about as long as he can.
``The statute says that the request may be made by the next of kin, but I don't think the statute envisioned a request coming 132 years after someone was buried, so there is very little guidance on determining whether Mrs. Zimmer has a basis for making the request,'' Retzlaff said.
He said he plans to ask a judge to place the burden of proof on Zimmer to show that she qualifies as next of kin and is eligible to request the body's removal.
Otherwise, Retzlaff said, ``I'm not going to be very popular with the people of North Carolina.''
Historic accounts say that Lee expressed his thanks to residents of the county for allowing his daughter to be buried in the cemetery of the William Duke Jones' estate, whose family was related to Lee's wife.
At the time of her death, the Lee family mansion at Arlington, Va., was under watch by Union forces, and Lee was engaged along the North Potomac River. Lee was not able to visit his daughter's burial site until eight years later in 1870, the same year he died.
Brian Shaw, a spokesman for Washington & Lee University, said that the school is not a party to the request for Annie Carter Lee's exhumation.
by CNB