I knew this would happen—when “the last Confederate war widow” died recently, I said, ‘hmmm, that’s the fifth "last Confederate war widow’ in as many years. More’ll turn up." Shore 'nuff:
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) - News reports that the last widow of a Civil War soldier had died last month in Alabama prompted relatives of an Arkansas woman to verify her claims, kept private for decades, that her late husband also was a veteran of that conflict. Now the United Daughters of the Confederacy recognizes Maudie Celia Hopkins as a surviving widow of a Civil War soldier - and the group says there may be others like her still alive. Hopkins married 86-year-old William M. Cantrell on Feb. 2, 1934, after he hired the 19-year-old to clean his house. But she says she never talked about it much. “I thought people would gossip about it and say, ‘Oh, she married an old man, she married an old man.’ I thought that if I didn’t talk about it, people would keep their mouths shut,” Hopkins, 89, of Lexa, told The Associated Press in a telephone interview on Monday.
She said Cantrell supported her with his Confederate pension of “$25 every two or three months” and that Cantrell left her his home when he died in 1937. Railsback said it wasn’t uncommon for young women in Arkansas to marry Confederate veterans with military pensions - until the state Legislature passed laws restricting and then prohibiting delivery of pension benefits to young women who quickly became widows. Railsback traced Cantrell’s military service to Company A, French’s Battalion, of the Virginia Infantry. Cantrell enlisted at age 16 in Pikeville, Ky., and was captured at Piketon, Ky., in 1863, and sent to Ohio where he was later exchanged for a Northern prisoner. Hopkins said she had fond memories of her first husband. “I sure took care of him like he was a baby and he was as good to me as I was him. He was lonely and that’s the reason he wanted to get married,” she said.
Dang it Eve you’re right. Them war widows are getting real pesky nowadays. You think they’re gone and then there comes another one. Something must be done. I think it’s time to call an exterminator.
Yes, but keep in mind many of the war wounds back then weren’t very clean. A man in those days might take a bullet to the leg or buttocks, and with no easy way to get it out, would die an excruciatingly slow death.
Some took fifty or sixty years to finally succumb to their war wounds. It happened to my great-great grampa - shot in 1862…died 1921.
I told Eve about my plan. As we can see, being a “war spouse” doesn’t require you actually have been alive during the Civil War. Most of the current crop of Civil War widows were teenage women who married men in their eighties and nineties. And now it’s time to reverse the trend. We need young men willing to marry these elderly women, so they can continue the chain and become future Civil War Widowers. You’ll be entitled to the pension - plus you’ll have the knowledge that seventy years from now, it’ll be some 18 year old girl’s turn to marry you.
No, there was another one who died more recently. I can’t remember the details (I’m sure someone else will), which brings me to my main point - does anyone actually care if there’s one single stinking Civil War widow left?
Well, conceivably it ties us to the past with the possibility of an “unbroken” actual or verbal link… firsthand stories and whatnot. Firsthand accounts and anecdotes are deemed to have the potential to give us much more of a true flavor of what transpired in the past, as opposed to deciphering events from an archaeological dig or reading the elements from a history book.
After that’s gone, filteration by historians and revisionism may reign, an example being the current state of confusion over what really happened in the last days of the Alamo. All eyewitnesses are now gone.
I’ve no idea what 86 year old veterans and their 19 year old wives dwell on during pillow talk, but at least a single link remains as yet unbroken and some may still find solace and hope, misguided or not, in that.
Heck, I’m willing to be a little more liberal than that. I’d consider any woman who was married to a soldier at any point during the war whose husband subsequently died before her to be a Civil War widow. These old broads who long ago married a Civil War veteran days before he died of old age are not Civil War widows!
BESSEMER, Ala. (AP) – Matilda really is a magic chicken. Long a prop in a magician’s show, the hen has been certified by Guinness World Records as the world’s oldest living chicken. Matilda, who works with Keith Barton in his “Mort the Mystifying” act, is 14 years old. The little gray bird is believed to be an Old English Red Pyle hen. Guinness confirmed Matilda’s longevity in an April 27 Web page posting, followed by a letter to the Bartons, which was accompanied by a certificate proclaiming the distinction.
—It seems Matilda was fed from the same seed sack that once fed a chicken who was eaten before the battle of Athens, Alabama, on January 26, 1864 . . .