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Program honors not just CSA soldier but Friendship community
Members of the Pvt. James Carlos Anderson Camp 1489 of the Sons of Confederate Veterans gathered at the remote church and cemetery northeast of Coffeeville to honor the namesake of their camp and other Confederate soldiers. April is Confederate History Month. Old community honored The recognition of Anderson was also a day to remember all of those who once lived in the Friendship community and many descendants of the families that once populated the area were present. Today, there are several square miles of uninhabited timberland where once there were homesteads and open farming land. All that remains to mark the community is the old church and cemetery. Families who lived in the area in the late 1800s and early 1900s included the Andersons, Counselmans, Purvises, Howells, Dunagans, Brunsons and Shepherds. If you look closely, you may find old crape myrtles, sunken spots that were once wells and maybe a few foundation stones that once supported homes.
"My sister and I still own a little acreage that was in James Carlos' original property," the former owner of the old Ed's Drive-In explained. The original tract was huge. "Homesteads all over these woods" "I went to church here and was baptized in the old baptism pool down at the spring under the hill from the church when I was 17," he said. "There used to be homesteads all over these woods. When World War II came the men either went to war or moved to Mobile to work in the shipyard. They'd sell out a 40-acre farm for $300 or $400. That was big money back then." The community, like so many rural ones, never recovered after World War II.
Donated land for church in 1893 Anderson and his wife, Adeline Green Anderson, relocated with their family from Choctaw Corner to what would become the Friendship area around 1870. In 1893, they donated one and a half acres for a church and cemetery, declaring that, "It shall be called Friendship." Another descendant, Len Roberts, said James Carlos also ran a store in the community and built a school not far from the church. Harris, in his early 70s, said he never knew his great-grandfather. "But he must have been a good Christian man or he never would have built this church. I hope I've got some of his characteristics." Harris did remember his grandfather, Bryant Anderson. He was 89 when he died. "He lived four or five miles from here [the church], but even in his 80s he was walking here on Sundays to attend church." He always sat on one of the front benches that were called the "Deacon Benches," Harris said.
"Otis Hare would drive down with a truck load from Prospect and William Harper would bring a truck load over from Bethel. There would be wagons and mules parked all over the place. The windows would all be up and you could hear the singing from a long ways off. Everybody would be singing at the top of their voices- the men, women and children," one person observed. "They were all Americans" Randall East of the SCV concluded by observing that the north contributed over two million soldiers to the war and the south over one million. The north lost over 360,000 and the south over 258,000.
See Hardy Jackson's column on the Editorial Page, 6B, for more on Confederate History Month.
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