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The Life of SOPHIA ARMS PARTRIDGE

Sophia Partridge operated the Select School for Young Ladies at her home on East Hargett Street in Raleigh, Wake County, from 1846 until 1851 and again after 1858. Partridge offered academic subjects, including French and Latin, but was perhaps best known for her artistic talents. Her classes in drawing, watercolor and oil painting, and music were quite popular. Partridge, born May 15, 1817, in Vienna, New York, originally came to North Carolina to help nurse an ill sister. She adopted the state as her home and lived here for the remainder of her life. She became an ardent Confederate and actively supported the war, creating a painted flag for Company I (Cedar Fork Rifles), Sixth Regiment North Carolina State Troops and serving in the local aid society. Sophia Partridge continued to conduct her school for girls in Raleigh during the war. She directed her students as they gathered items such as jelly, pillows, glass, china, and socks to send to local military hospitals, and she spent time herself sewing and making supplies for sick and wounded soldiers. In a letter written to a friend in late 1861, she described a box of items recently sent by her church to Virginia and continued: "Don't you feel sorry for the sick ones. . . . Does not this war seem a strange thing yet, so unnatural, so barbarous, and uncalled for, and useless, on the part of the Federals. Sometimes I almost forget where I am, thinking upon the future, when the war will close. I begin to think there will be no peace, as long as the Dictator at Washington can get any money to carry it on." As the war progressed, Partridge tried to keep high spirits and a positive attitude, writing in January 1864, "When I begin to feel a little doleful about the state of affairs generally, I go right to the History of the first revolution, and find that we are not in half so bad a condition as our forefathers were, and it brightens everything. You know I am one of the hopeful ones. Hope is strong, and though all is dark around I keep my eye on a bright light in the distance." Sophia Partridge closed her school after the 1865 winter session. In May 1866, she joined several other prominent Raleigh women to form the Wake County Memorial Association for the purpose of tending Confederate graves and providing "a suitable and permanent resting place for the heroes of crushed hopes." Partridge served as secretary for the association. Minutes from the early meetings noted that many Confederate graves in Raleigh were "surrounded by graves of Federal Soldiers" and that some graves were in areas "Selected by Federal Army Officers" as burial places for their own dead. The association concluded that "it would be better, if practicable, to remove the Confederates to another spot." According to an 1889 issue of the Raleigh Daily Call, Sophia Partridge "first conceived the idea of having a collective place of interment for the dead boys in gray, and to her belongs the credit of suggesting and mainly organizing the first Confederate cemetery." This area now forms part of Raleigh's Oakwood Cemetery. After suffering from a respiratory disease for many years, Partridge died on March 4, 1881, and was buried in Oakwood Cemetery. (Courtesy of North Carolina Museum of History)

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