- Joined
- Dec 3, 2011
- Location
- Laurinburg NC
He was in the 7th Virginia Infantry Company K, the Madison county grays.
This picture was taken on Dec. 20, 1947, in the town of Orange, VA in a parade.
He was 103 years old!
Even if they made it to 103, most folks would be lucky to be able to see a horse let alone ride one.
He was in the 7th Virginia Infantry Company K, the Madison county grays.
This picture was taken on Dec. 20, 1947, in the town of Orange, VA in a parade.
He was 103 years old!
I wonder what old vets like him thought of things like machine guns, tanks, fighter and bomber aircraft, penicillin, K rations, etc., etc. (Although rudimentary versions of some of these existed in '61 - '65 I'm talking about fully functional ones.)
Clip from 11 Feb 1948 edition of the Newport News VA Daily Press. View attachment 210505
I wonder what old vets like him thought of things like machine guns, tanks, fighter and bomber aircraft, penicillin, K rations, etc., etc. (Although rudimentary versions of some of these existed in '61 - '65 I'm talking about fully functional ones.)
...This picture was taken on Dec. 20, 1947, in the town of Orange, VA in a parade. He was 103 years old!
I wonder what old vets like him thought of things like machine guns, tanks, fighter and bomber aircraft, penicillin, K rations, etc., etc. (Although rudimentary versions of some of these existed in '61 - '65 I'm talking about fully functional ones.)
Of course this was unfortunately the very story of the last Civil War veteran, the now-discredited Walter Williams of Texas, who lied about his age in the 1930's to claim a veteran's pension he wasn't entitled to. He might not have been discovered had he not lived as long as he did, dying I believe in 1959. Last time I heard, that distinction actually belonged to Union veteran Albert Woolson, former drummer boy from Wisconsin who died in 1956.Just a note of caution I've learned from my museum work. Records on Confederate soldiers are not as consistent as those for Unions. At times old southern gents would push their birth dates back a decade or two to make it plausible they were at least teens during the CW, though their "original military record had been lost."...Rural birth records in the Antebellum were spotty to begin with. One old guy looks like any other old guy after all.
The motivation was the opportunity to file for a Confederate soldier's pension when that became available. Elderly gentlemen who looked the part would take advantage of it, relying on hearsay testimony of family and friends to "prove" their age and service. After all it was hard times for Southerners in the remaining century, and the whole family benefited from additional income. Pension boards were willing to "wink" on it.
An additional benefit of the ruse showed itself as the new century turned. The old fellas found more and more that they were celebrities, receiving the adulation of the public as "centetarian veterans" and "spry ones at that" - according to newspapers eager for the novelty and the readership.
Bottom line; men that were actually in their 80s would pose as being over 100, as late as the 1940s ("I was a drummer boy" or "an irregular" or whatever). For the reasons above we can understand and forgive them for it, I feel. They lived close enough to the CW.
One instance I found was of an "oldest CW vet" posing in flight gear near the cockpit of a 1960s supersonic F-100 fighter. With a little work I was able to sort out the back story.
What a life he led - fought in the Civil War and lived to see the atomic bomb drop.