Soldiers Reunion

​For a week in August, Catawba County (NC) citizens honor their war veterans at a patriotic festival established by the founder of Ransom-Sherrill Chapter as the first county-wide reunion of Confederate veterans.  Soldiers Reunion  is credited by federal authorities as the oldest continuous patriotic festival in the nation that is not tied to a national holiday.

It began in the summer of 1889 on Courthouse Square in Newton in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. That day marked the first county-wide gathering of aging Confederate veterans, so they could register to receive federal military pensions. Almost 1,800 men had volunteered to go to war from a county with just 10,000 total residents and more than 600 of them had died in the war.

A local woman, Fannie Ransom Williams, daughter and niece of two Confederate generals, Robert and Matt Ransom,  persuaded  officials to include a veterans’ reunion with the sign-up, and the women of the town prepared a bounteous picnic lunch to serve the several hundred men from long wooden tables set up under the shade of large trees on the courthouse lawn. Many of the old soldiers wore their faded uniforms and they marched around the Square on the dusty streets under a broiling sun, not once that afternoon but three times, enjoying comradeship and renewing old acquaintances.

That occasion has never stopped and is repeated on the third Thursday in August every year. Besides Christmas, Reunion Day is the most important day of the year in the county. Schools let out, factories shut down early and thousands throng  Courthouse Square.

Similar reunions were held throughout the South and the North but they gradually faded from the calendar. But not here--because Soldiers Reunion evolved. Each time our reunited nation was involved in a war and our county sent more young people off to serve their homeland, we officially included them in the honorees of our annual gathering. Men and women just back from Iraq and Afghanistan are among the honorees now.

The old Confederates are gone; the last one died just before the 1937 Reunion;  the eldest veterans honored this year are from World War II.

Soldiers Reunion has also grown over the century and a quarter. It now is a week-long festival  still centered on Courthouse Square in this town of 14,000 people in this county of 157,000.  It includes a classic car show and a cruise around the Square, athletic tournaments and bicycle and foot races, a baby parade with tykes in patriotic-decorated carriages and wagons, pet show with costumed critters, outdoor concerts of beach music, gospel and country music,  evening street dances, beauty pageants for girls of five age groups to select Miss Reunion and her court-- and those winners keep that title for the rest of their lives. It goes into their wedding stories in the newspaper and sometimes into their obituaries.

On Reunion Day activities take place all day, with the UDC chapter participating in a morning memorial service for recently deceased veterans, when we place a magnolia wreath on the Confederate statue monument and a smaller one on the county war memorial which has a huge bronze plaque listing the 600-plus Confederates who died in the war.

There are tents on the courthouse lawn to buy Confederate-themed souvenirs and eat funnel cakes and barbecue,  hear a high school band concert of patriotic tunes and a formal program with a prominent speaker, usually a local native with  military credentials.

The highlight of the day is the five o’clock parade—a follow-up to those old soldiers circling the Square. It features special guests, sometimes the governor of the state or a national war hero; costumed Confederate re-enactors; patriotic-themed floats and decorated vehicles; politicians and celebrities; beauty queens; school bands and athletes.

But in the most prominent place, and drawing the most applause from the folks lining the streets, are the veterans—old and young. Our UDC chapter president rides in a convertible wearing a Southern belle costume and members ride in a limousine. We are at the front of the parade which has almost 200 entries.

Miss Fannie founded our UDC chapter, named for her father and uncle and for Uriah Franklin Sherrill, the first Catawba soldier to die in the war, in 1903. She raised the money for the Confederate statue monument, dedicated on Reunion Day in 1907, when the largest crowd ever to assemble in town heard the state’s governor pay tribute to our veterans and our UDC founder, who died in 1928.

By Sylvia K. Ray