The "Last Known" Photo...

Toad

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Jun 16, 2020
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The Pond
For some reason I love looking at photos of Civil War veterans in their twilight years... especially a good ole "last known" photo when I can find it. The well known cast of the Civil War usually appears to us visually frozen in time, in images made during that tumultuous four year period. But for those who survived into elderhood, they aged and declined just like anyone else... their hair grew white and upright shoulders began to stoop. Often their hair and beard styles changed making them almost unrecognizable to us who are used to seeing them only in their Civil War prime. But more than anything it's often the look in their eyes, the pensive gaze of an old veteran in the closing chapter, looking back over a life of... well how does one think of one's own life at the end? Regrets? Sorrow? A sense of accomplishment, or a sense of what might have been...? Anger? Injustice? Pride? Or maybe just the folly and vanity of it all...?

Anyway I apologize if this theme has already been covered in another thread... I'm new here, and I tried searching to see if a thread of this nature already existed. I suspect it does and that I probably just missed it, and if so please point me in the right direction and accept my apologies. If not, or if you'd like to anyway, please share some of your favorite "last known/elderhood photos" of your favorite Civil War characters... I'd really love to see them.

Here are a couple of photos that I think might be the last known - Humphreys and Longstreet.
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And while I don't think this image of Lee and Johnston is a "last known", it nevertheless seems to capture a poignant sentiment of two old warriors pondering the past...
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Please share more if you'd like... thank you.
 
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