Sisters pen book on Davie County, NC Confederate Soldiers

Via Southern Nationalist Network

Davie County sisters, Mary Alice Hasty and Hazel Winfree, spent years compiling and preparing a book that lists all of the 1,147 Davie County men that served in the Civil War. Photo by Jon C. Lakey, Salisbury Post.

For five years, sisters Mary Alice Hasty and Hazel Winfree relied on John Spillman to supply the ham biscuits and coffee for breakfast or the tomato soup and grilled sandwiches for lunch.

Meanwhile, they sat at Spillman’s dining room table — piled high with their research — and wrote out in long-hand the manuscript for a state award-winning book, “The Civil War Roster for Davie County, North Carolina.”

“I was a referee,” Spillman says, laughing. “I kept them from clawing and biting each other. I kept the momentum going and gave them the praise they needed.”

The sisters called him their business manager. His pay in the end: a free book.

Published in 2009, the women’s book gives short biographies of 1,147 Davie County Confederate soldiers before, during and after the war.

It’s filled with photographs and includes invaluable extras such as the company and regiment rosters for Davie County soldiers, townships covered by the census information they used, cemeteries in Davie County where Confederate soldiers are buried, the names of the Davie men who died in the Civil War and a complete bibliography and index.

“It would make a movie,” Spillman says of the sisters’ devotion to the project. “Not ‘Gone With the Wind,’ but ...

“The sequel,” Winfree says, finishing the thought.