BY EDIE GROSS

At first, they were buried where they fell.

On battlefields. By roadsides. On farms.

And in shallow, scattered graves those soldiers might have remained if not for the legions of Southern women who demanded proper burials for the Confederate dead.

They called themselves Ladies Memorial Associations, and in the years after the Civil War, their white-gloved ranks acted as quasi-governmental bodies, securing land for cemeteries and hiring crews to collect and reinter the fallen.

They raised money for headstones and erected monuments to their fallen brothers, husbands, fathers and sons.

With prayers and parades, they organized some of this country's earliest Memorial Day observances.

And then, as the War Between the States slipped from recent memory to distant past, the Ladies Memorial Associations began to fade away.

Today, only a handful remain, including the Fredericksburg association, founded on May 10, 1866.

Like the ladies who came before them, they faithfully maintain the city's Confederate Cemetery on Washington Avenue at Amelia Street and organize Memorial Day activities there.

"I think it's wonderful it's lasted so long," said Lou Silvey, who joined about 25 years ago. "We must have some good Fredericksburg women around here. We're persistent. We never let go."

When the Civil War ended, the U.S. government dispatched crews to collect the bodies of Union soldiers for burial in national cemeteries.

But no one organization was willing and able to do the same for Confederate soldiers, according to "Burying the Dead but not the Past: Ladies Memorial Associations and The Lost Cause," a book by Purdue University history professor Caroline Janney.

GETTING THE JOB DONE

Recognizing the need, Southern women rallied to the cause. Within a year of Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox in April 1865, roughly 70 Ladies Memorial Associations had sprung up around the South, according to Janney's research.

They were particularly important in Virginia, where so many battlefields had become de facto graveyards. Eventually, the seven associations in Fredericksburg, Lynchburg, Petersburg, Winchester and Richmond would reinter the remains of more than 75,500 soldiers, nearly 28 percent of the South's war dead, according to Janney.

In war-ravaged Fredericksburg, the association managed to raise $1,200 initially, enough money to purchase several acres next to the city cemetery.