Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 31.djvu/179

 Zollicoffer's Oak. 171

1863, in the Atlanta campaign. He had only the rank of sergeant, but at the time was in command of his company.

He was for twenty-four years clerk of the County Court of Pulaski county, and is now postmaster at Somerset. He was educated in the public schools and afterwards graduated in law at Stratford Law School.

His father gave the ground for the National Cemetery in whom the Federal dead are buried at Logan's Cross-Roads, now called Mill Spring National Cemetery.

Captain Trimble has given renewed evidence of the broad and liberal views of his family in donating this ground for a Conlederate monument and cemetery. It is the spirit of such men as H. G. Trimble that makes the American republic the greatest nation in the world.

Within 300 feet of this oak lives Mr. William L. Burton, a Con- federate sympathizer, who on the day of the conflict was n years of age, and came with his father to look at the sad, weird happenings of the struggle. He saw General Zollicoffer's body, with his head resting on a root of the oak tree under which he met death. Around him were other bodies clad in gray. He and his father helped to bury these strangers. Mr. Burton has a little girl 10 years old named Dorothea Burton. For two years past' on Decoration Day this child has woven a wreath of wild flowers and hung it on Zolli- coffer's oak and scattered blossoms over the trenches where sleep the Mississippi, Tennessee and Alabama heroes who on that fateful Sunday morning in January, 1862, went down to death.

This little girl had seen the crowds go to the well-kept Federal Cemetery, half a mile away. She could hear the inspiring strains of martial music and the responsive shouts to the words of eloquent orators who recounted the brave deeds of those who wore the blue, and somehow it came into her pure and tender heart that the General who died under the oak, and his men who were killed on the moun- tain side near by, and who were hidden in the unkept trenches, ought to have somebody remember them, and, with no guide or inspiration other than her own loving, womanly impulse, with her brown, bare feet and sun-tinted hands, she searched the forest for its most brilliant-hued flowers and came and laid the beautiful offering on the tombs of these almost forgotten heroes.

On the 2ist of July, 1903, in company with Dr. and Mrs. E. L. Sanders, of Louisville, and Miss Ellanetta Harrison, of Somerset, I visited the battlefield to advise and help in the inclosure of a park