Kate Cumming

Born:  Circa 1830, Edinburgh, Scotland

Died:  June 5, 1909, Birmingham, Alabama

Resting Place:  Magnolia Cemetery, Mobile, Alabama

Brief History:  She continued volunteering in various Confederate hospitals across the South and was eventually hired as a paid nurse. Kate began recording her activities and thoughts and describing hospitals and surrounding events from the time she was assigned her first post in Okolona, Mississippi in April 1862. Cumming, despite having no formal nursing training, decided to offer her services. Cumming kept a daily journal of her wartime experiences, observations and emotions, which was published after the war as Hospital Life in the Army of Tennessee and is considered one of the most accurate and vivid accounts of life in Southern wartime hospitals. Cumming was an active nurse throughout the war, which was unusual as nurses usually served temporarily. Cumming eventually became the head of food and housekeeping departments in multiple hospitals in Georgia. The Confederate medical department was small and disorganized when the conflict broke out, and for the first year and a half of the war, efforts by Cumming and her fellow volunteer nurses filled the gaps in medical care.

After the fall of Chattanooga in the summer of 1863, Cumming moved on to Georgia, where she served in numerous mobile field hospitals established throughout the state in response to the destruction inflicted by Union general William T. Sherman’s troops. One of the very few accounts of the work of Confederate women during the Civil War is Kate Cumming’s A journal of hospital life in the Confederate Army of Tennessee. A copy of this journal, published in 1866, is held at the Reynolds-Finley Historical Library. The jobs performed by Cumming and other matrons included managing hospital departments, cooking, foraging in the countryside for supplies, caring for soldiers' physical and emotional wellbeing, sewing, writing letters, attending men's deathbeds, and supervising the hospital labor force. This compassionate act allowed many families to find the remains of their loved ones, even if it took generations to do so.