Death be not proud.

Today the picture of stately grace, the churches of Holly Springs suffered indignities great and small during the Civil War. The elegant Romanesque First Presbyterian Church became a Union horse stable and ammunition storage facility. Horses ate from the hand-made pews at the Christ Episcopal Church, while the organ was dismantled so that rowdy soldiers could blow their own tunes through the pipes.

However, the Yellow Fever Martyrs Museum at the former St. Joseph’s Catholic Church bears witness to horrors worse than indignity. When “Yellow Jack” rampaged through Holly Springs, the townspeople opened their doors to the sick at great personal cost. At the headquarters for the Holly Springs Tourism Bureau, known now as the Yellow Fever House, W. J. L. Holland, editor of the Holly Springs Reporter, took in the epidemic’s first victims only to become one of the last victims himself.

Fronted by cedar trees and a wrought iron gate, Hillcrest cemetery is the final resting place for many of those who died during the fever. It is also the burial site of 11 Confederate generals, as well as Hiram Revels, the first African American elected to the United States Senate. A stroll through this picturesque cemetery is well worth the time; the town’s writers and poets are buried here, their own verse adorning some of their graves.

But one writer who came to rest here wanted no lines, no mark at all on her gravestone. Her name was Sherwood Bonner, and her story, along with that of painter Kate Freeman Clark, reveal the high cost of decorum in 19th century Southern society. Both women were great talents who passed away young: Bonner died of breast cancer at the age of 34; in Clark’s case, it was her heart and her spirit that gave out, and she spent the next two decades with her talent buried in the invisible life of a small-town spinster before her body finally expired as well.

After death, Bonner became a feminist icon, and Clark’s paintings finally found the light of day. Today their stories—and in Clark’s case more than 1,000 paintings—are preserved in Holly Springs.