CONOR BOND, 9, left, and Gavin Lee Hopkins, 6, place a confederate battle flag at the foot of the monument to Confederate dead during a memorial service Sunday.(The Vicksburg Post/C. TODD SHERMAN)

[04/29/02]It was a small gathering at Soldiers Rest Sunday, but that didn’t matter to the Sons of the Confederate Veterans and United Daughters of the Confederacy remembering their heritage.

“These men did their duty. They did the ultimate to do their duty,” said Chuck Bond, Third Brigade councilman for the Mississippi Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans and speaker for the event attended by 17 people.

County and state government offices are closed today in observance of Confederate Memorial Day, officially on April 26. Soldiers Rest is in Cedar Hill Cemetery and is the burial ground of hundreds of Southern men and officers who served in the fighting in and near Vicksburg.

Sunday’s turnout is in contrast to 1893 when 7,000 attended dedication of a large memorial in the cemetery. Most individual headstones were not placed until the 1970s.

The brief ceremony in Vicksburg was one of many across the state. A larger service was Saturday at Beauvoir, the last home of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, in Biloxi.

The holiday began as Decoration Day in 1866 in Columbus and evolved into Memorial Day by declaration of Congress and is now observed the last Monday in May.

In 1874, the Georgia General Assembly approved legislation making April 26 Confederate Memorial Day. The date marked the anniversary of the end of the Civil War for Georgia. On that day in 1865, Confederate Gen. Joseph E. Johnston’s surrender to Gen. William Sherman in North Carolina became official.

Bond encouraged the audience to pass along the values of duty and honor to their children.

“If the revisionist historians have their way, this war will be wiped out of history,” he said.

Confederate Memorial Day is also April 26 in Alabama, Florida and Georgia. It’s May 10 in North Carolina and South Carolina; May 30 in Virginia; and June 3 in Kentucky, Louisiana and Tennessee.

Vicksburg, the scene of one of the longest battles that pitted the North against South, surrendered to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant on July 4, 1863, following a 47-day siege.