For nearly thirty years after the war, the story of Sam Davis's execution was not widely remembered. In 1866 Davis's father erected the first monument to his son, a twenty-five foot shaft of Italian marble, at the back of the family's plantation home outside Smyrna. The Sam Davis story became part of a broader social memory only in the mid-1890s and chiefly through the efforts of Sumner Archibald Cunningham, the founding editor of "Confederate Veteran" magazine. A native of Middle Tennessee, Cunningham had an undistinguished record of Confederate service, having deserted the Army of Tennessee after the Battle of Nashville in 1864. After the war he worked as a newspaperman before becoming the general agent for the Jefferson Davis Memorial Fund after the former Confederate president's death in 1889. He left this position shortly after launching the Nashville-based "Confederate Veteran" in January 1893.