News - Local/State

Monday, Apr. 28, 2008

130 years after death, soldier honored with Iron Cross

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McCONNELLS -- Confederate States of America Pvt. John Jackson Ashe took a near-fatal miniball in his shoulder near the end of the Civil War, and some family members say he lost his arm.

He returned to his family's McConnells farm and lived another 23 years, long enough to see the end of Reconstruction. During that period, Southerners often were concerned more with survival than tributes.

But Sunday, more than 130 years after his death, Olivet Presbyterian Church Cemetery echoed years past. About 150 people, descendants from the Southeast and other interested persons, turned out to pay him tribute in an Iron Cross Dedication organized by the United Daughters of the Confederacy White Rose Chapter.

The Iron Cross is about 1 1/2 to 2 feet tall and lists the dates of the war, said Lillian Wilson, one of Ashe's descendants and White Rose Chapter president.

"It's just a remembrance," she said. "It shows that that man in that grave fought and was a soldier and took pay and was mustered in and mustered out. That he was a true soldier."

There was a portrayal of the traditional, veiled Confederate widow. Clad all in black and clasping a black rose, she was the "ghost" of Sarah Jane Rainey Ashe.

There was a eulogy by Mike Short, a bagpipe, a rifle salute by the 6th Regiment S.C. Volunteers Palmetto Battalion and three blasts from a cannon.

Short lauded Confederate soldiers "who put on the gray and the butternut" and fought for commitment to community, family and God, he said.

The Verdin Singers warbled "Dixie" and Robert E. Lee's favorite hymn, "How Firm a Foundation." They pledged allegiance to the American flag and saluted the flags of South Carolina and the Confederate States of America.

"I salute the Confederate Flag with affection, reverence and undying remembrance," they said in unison.

And they prayed.

Pvt. Ashe, a member of then-McConnellsville's Mount Olivet Church, is said to have been the first person buried in the cemetery.

He was part of a South Carolina troop that joined forces with a Charleston infantry battalion to do battle with Union troops at Fort Sumter in 1862, according to his great-great-grandson, William Kirby Ashe.

His company, the 27th Regiment Company C, S.C. Volunteers Infantry CSA, went on to fight in Virginia, including Drewry's Bluff, Cold Harbor and the bloody trench warfare siege between generals Lee and Grant at Petersburg. When they retreated into North Carolina, he fought at Deep Bottom, Fort Fisher and Bentonville, his great-great-grandson said.

It is no surprise Ashe wound up in the conflict between the states. His father had fought in the Battle of 1812, and both of his grandfathers in the Revolutionary War, including the Battle of Williams Plantation, also known as Huck's Defeat.

Before the war in 1854, Ashe had waged a successful campaign to establish a voting poll in McConnellsville. After he returned from the war wounded, he and his family made bricks that built a cotton mill and Olivet Presbyterian Church in McConnells.

He died in February 1878, before benefits were established for veterans and their widows.

But Sunday, he was remembered. Wilson delivered the dedication.

"Nothing is ended until it is forgotten," she said. "That which is held in memory still endures and is real."