File #6: "Auditorium Building at the Old Soldiers' Home"

This artifact’s depiction of the soldiers’ home auditorium building, i.e., Memorial Hall, corresponded with the aforesaid civic focus. As historian Randall B. Rosenberg argued, events held within said building typified how “Confederate soldiers' homes were gathering places where people could congregate and reaffirm their devotion to the dear principles of the Lost Cause” [1]. Hence, why Falkner referred to that building as “the centre of the world” [2]. That perceptual centricity emboldened the “indigent” veterans toward politico-civic efficacy with their U.C.V. chapter’s resolutions about what qualified a Confederate veteran: “only those who won the encomiums of duty well done by decoration to the cause we espoused should be worthy of a cross of honor [and thus] recognized as true soldiers of the ‘Lost Cause’” [3]. Such “reaffirm[ations]” from “gathering places” consequently demonstrated how the soldiers’ home provided a physical space that the veterans and visitors imbued with the requisite milieu for “their [Lost Cause] devotion.”

1. Randall B. Rosenberg, Living Monuments: Confederate Soldiers’ Homes in the New South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 107.
2. Marielou A. Corey, “A Visit to Soldiers’ Home at Mountain Creek and the Work that can be Seen,” in the Birmingham Age-Herald (Jan. 26, 1906), in the University of Alabama Libraries, in the Library of Congress Digital Archive.
3. “Veterans Elect Reunion Delegates -- Inmates of Soldiers’ Home at Mountain Creek Also Adopt Resolutions,” in the Birmingham Age-Herald (Oct. 4, 1912), in the University of Alabama Libraries, in the Library of Congress Digital Archive.