Greenwood Cemetery Confederate Monument & Graves

Perhaps the least known of the city's monuments stands in a quiet corner of Greenwood Cemetery in near North Dallas. Here, beside Hall Street, stands a granite column topped by a statue of a Confederate soldier. It appears at first glance to be a memorial to all Confederate soldiers. In fact, it is a memorial to a particular individual.

The monument honors Capt. S. P. Emerson, a native of Allen County, Kentucky who came to live in Dallas after the Civil War. In 1861, when he was twenty-nine years old, Emerson enlisted in the Confederate Army. Under the command of General Simon Buckner, he saw action at Fort Donelson, on the Cumberland River in Northern Tennessee. When the fort fell to federal forces under Ulysses S. Grant in February 1862, General Buckner surrendered some 15,000 troops. Emerson, however, escaped by swimming and wading the river. He subsequently had a number of adventures; as captain of a company of Confederate scouts, "his name became a synonym throughout middle Kentucky for deeds of incomparable daring. So desperate and successful were his forays that the federals set a price upon his head."

Following the war, Emerson settled in Dallas, "where he became a quiet and useful citizen and by his energy accumulated a very considerable estate." The captain, who never married, was particularly close to the Cabell family and on the day the Confederate monument in City Park was unveiled, he revealed to Katie Cabell Currie his wish that she take charge of his funeral arrangements when the time came. He asked that the services "be conducted in a manner befitting an ex-Confederate who loved the cause for which he struggled," and he described a monument he wanted placed over his grave.

When Emerson died in October 1900, Mrs. Currie carried out his wishes. His coffin lay in state, covered with a Confederate flag that was not removed until the coffin was lowered into the grave in a plot owned by the United Daughters of the Confederacy. "The Confederate ritual, which is most impressive, was observed at the grave," reported Mrs. Currie in a newspaper story published the day after the funeral. "It consists of ex-Confederates forming a circle around the grave as the body is lowered and quoting, each in turn, the Lord's Prayer, followed by one of their own as bunches of white roses are thrown in, one by one, until the coffin is hid from view; then the circle is broken and all ex-Confederates present drop dust upon the bed of roses."

In his will, Emerson left $5,000 for Mrs. Currie to use for his monument, which was unveiled a year after his death. It was as he had described it to Mrs. Currie four years earlier. "He wanted a monument," she said, "around the shaft of which should appear a likeness of a Confederate flag and standing guard on top, the figure of a Confederate soldier, perfect of form and dressed as the youths of the Southland were when they first left home to endure four years of privation and hardships, while battling for what they considered a just and holy cause…He said it was his desire that the youths of future and far distant days should behold a true Confederate grave and understand that the youth of Dixie was the noblest type of humanity." Near the bottom of the south side of the monument are large raised letters that read CONFEDERATE, and on the east side are the words Emerson wanted above his name, "Here Lies One That Was True to the Teachings of the Old South."

Sharing the plot with Emerson are thirty-six other ex-Confederates whose graves all face south, marked by two neat rows of identical short white stones.