The story of Mattie Harris Lyon is told on monuments throughout the cemetery. She penned her memoirs and excerpts from these are inscribed on open bronze books set upon benches across the grounds. One of the first seen upon entering the cemetery from the north parking lot past the statue of the Confederate widows on a bench with a bronze wide brimmed hat of Mattie's says, "This cemetery was born when mothers and grandmothers, with bleeding hearts and hope about gone, yet with a loyalty and devotion unknown, established it to honor the Confederate soldier."
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| Mattie's History of the Establishment of the Marietta Confederate Cemetery |
"There was no money to buy markers but they would take their flowers, consecrated with their tears, to mark the spot where the soldiers slept under the sod and dew."
"These noble women personally superintended the work, seeing their precious bodies tenderly handled. They brought them from the trenches, from fence corners, from hastily made graves of the battlefields from the top of Kennesaw Mountain."
Mattie wrote her memoirs when she was aged in her 90s. She tended the cemetery to her final days. Her wishes were expressed in her memoirs when she wrote, "I want you younger generations to always remember the best men - the flowers of the South - were in the army." She is buried in the Marietta Cemetery next to her husband, a Confederate veteran.
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| Mattie Harris Lyon (1850-1947) |
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