Helen Viola Jackson America’s last known Civil War widow dead at age 101. How a then 17 year old teen married Private James Bolin.
America’s last known Civil War widow has died at age 101.
Helen Viola Jackson, who had been living at the Webco Manor Nursing Home in Marshfield, Missouri, died on Dec. 16, the Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War said in a statement on Saturday.
She married Private James Bolin — who fought with the 14th Missouri Cavalry and F Company — when she was 17 and he was 93 in September 1936.
The civil war which broke out in 1861, ended in 1865, 156 years ago.
The couple’s relationship began when Jackson’s father volunteered her to help Bolin with his chores on her way to school.
Jackson never remarried, didn’t have any children, and also never collected her husband’s pension.
Bolin didn’t want to accept charity so he decided to ask Jackson to marry him in order to provide for her future and for her to collect his Union pension, according to the organization.
They had a small ceremony in front of a few witnesses at Bolin’s home in Niangua, Missouri. Bolin told his wife the marriage would be on her terms, and she continued to live on her family’s farm and retained her surname.
Bolin died on June 18, 1939, less than three years after the two wed.
Jackson never remarried, didn’t have any children, and also never collected her husband’s pension.
‘How do you explain that you have married someone with such a difference in age,’ she reportedly said at the 2018 Missouri Cherry Blossom Festival. ‘I had great respect for Mr. Bolin and I did not want him to be hurt by the scorn of wagging tongues.’
Jackson didn’t publicly share she was married to a Civil War veteran until 2017.
‘Mr. Bolin really cared for me,’ she said in an interview with “Our America Magazine” in Missouri. ‘He wanted me to have a future and he was so kind.’
‘He said that he would leave me his Union pension’
‘He said that he would leave me his Union pension,’ Jackson told the historian Hamilton C. Clark in an interview. ‘It was during the Depression and times were hard. He said that it might be my only way of leaving the farm.’
Jackson was a prominent figure in her local community, serving as a charter member of the Elkland Independent Methodist Church and Cherry Blossom Festival Auxiliary, a member of the Ladies of the Grand Army of the Republic, and numerous other groups, according to the Cherry Blossom Festival site.
She was a 2018 honoree on the Missouri Walk of Fame.
Before Jackson shared her history, Maudie Hopkins was believed to be the last known surviving widow of a Civil War soldier. She died in 2008. She married Confederate veteran William Cantrell when she was 19 and he was 86.
Not immediately clear is why the civil war widow declined to collect on her soldier husband’s pension.