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By J.R. TIDWELL / Editor

Confederate Memorial Park in Marbury is hosting a walking tour Sept. 14 beginning at 10 a.m.

The park is putting on the event in conjunction with the Alabama Historical Commission.

Tickets for the event are $10 per person and can be paid at the museum on site prior to the tour. The park opens at 9 a.m., and admission to the museum is included with the tour ticket.

“A walking tour really helps people visualize the complexity of the Soldiers’ Home,” said Site Director Calvin Chappelle. “The natural setting of Mountain Creek provided a home-like environment, but it was also modern in its design.”

According to a release for the event, “Confederate Memorial Park incorporates the site of Alabama’s only Confederate veterans’ home. Life for the old soldiers, called ‘inmates’ at the Home, was better than most had known before their admission. The Home provided housing, meals, clothing, allowances, medical care, and for many, a place to die and be buried with dignity. Visitors will explore the locations and ruins of the original structures that once occupied the site, as well as a tour of one of the cemeteries and the park’s museum.”

“At the beginning of the 20th century, there were many Confederate veterans living in Alabama whose ‘wants cannot be supplied by means of pension funds … who have no homes, no families, no relatives, no friends, no money, or property and who are too feeble to work or earn a living,’” according to a release from the park.

“Jefferson Manly Falkner, a Montgomery attorney and Confederate veteran, was determined that something more than just the payment of a meager state pension had to be done for his needy and disabled comrades-in-arms. Through his untiring efforts, the Alabama Confederate Soldiers’ Home, the state’s only facility for the care of indigent Confederate veterans, was established in the fall of 1901.”

Confederate Memorial Park is located at 437 County Road 63 in Marbury.