Confederate Soldier's Widow Dies at 93

[Newsman]

Note the claim there are others still alive.


John 
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Widow of Confederate soldier dies at 93 By PEGGY HARRIS, Associated Press Writer
Tue Aug 19, 3:55 PM ET



Maudie White Hopkins, who grew up during the Depression in the hardscrabble Ozarks and married a Confederate army veteran 67 years her senior, has died. She was 93.

Hopkins, the mother of three children from a second marriage who loved to make fried peach pies and applesauce cakes, died Sunday at a hospital in Helena-West Helena, said Rodger Hooker of the Roller-Citizens Funeral Home.

Other Confederate widows are still living, but they don't want any publicity, Martha Boltz of the United Daughters of the Confederacy said Tuesday.

Hopkins grew up in a family of 10 children, did laundry and cleaned house for William M. Cantrell, an elderly Confederate veteran in Baxter County whose wife had died years earlier.

When he offered to leave his land and home to her if she would marry him and care for him in his later years, she said yes. She was 19; he was 86.

"After Mr. Cantrell died I took a little old mule he had and plowed me a vegetable garden and had plenty of vegetables to eat. It was hard times; you had to work to eat," she said in an Associated Press interview in 2004.

Hopkins later married Winfred White and started a family. In all, she was married four times.

For decades, she didn't speak about her marriage to Cantrell, concerned that people would think less of her. Four years ago, she came around after a Confederate widow in Alabama died amid claims that she was the last widow from that war.

"I didn't do anything wrong," Hopkins told the AP in 2004. "I've worked hard my whole life and did what I had to, what I could, to survive. I didn't want to talk about it for a while because I didn't want people to gossip about it. I didn't want people to make it out to be worse than it was."

Military records show Cantrell served in Company A, French's Battalion, of the Virginia Infantry. He enlisted in the Confederate army at age 16 in Pikeville, Ky., and was captured the same year and sent to a prison camp in Ohio. He was exchanged for a Northern prisoner, and after the war moved to Arkansas to live with relatives.

In the interview, Hopkins referred to her first husband as "Mr. Cantrell" and described him as "a good, clean, respectable man." She recalled one description he gave of life as a Civil War soldier, how lice infested his sock supports and "ate a trail around his legs."

Baxter County records show they were married in January 1934 by a justice of the peace. She said Cantrell supported her with his Confederate pension of "$25 every two or three months" and left her his home when he died in 1937.

The pension benefits ended at Cantrell's death, according to records filed with the state Pension Board.

She is survived by two daughters and a son.

[EricShane]

He enlisted in the Confederate army at age 16 in Pikeville, Ky.

been there many times!

sent to a prison camp in Ohio.

umm...


Been there many times too!  :grin:



lol jk

[World Traveler]

So, there is still hope I can get me a 19 year old wife??? Wooo hoooo!

[yosemite]

i havnt done the math, but it seems credible. people done some weird things back in the depression times. my grand mother always told us a story bout a man that thought he made a good trade back then. she said he told that he traded his mule then everyone said we hope you didnt trade fer no land, he said that he had. money was hard to come by and taxes were hard to pay on such things. this is why share cropping was so popular in the south in those days. my family has a long history in share cropping.

[Sis]

Re: Confederate Soldier's Widow Dies at 93

Oh, I knew her. Nice lady!

[sunlight]

loved to make fried peach pies

how ironic! ha!

[Newsman]

Get in line! I was here first! 


John 

So, there is still hope I can get me a 19 year old wife??? Wooo hoooo!

[yosemite]

she must have been real homely to have waited so long to get married during that time. most girls were considered old maids if they waited that long in that time.

[Chinadoll]

So, there is still hope I can get me a 19 year old wife??? Wooo hoooo!

Nope not Vince.

And no chance of you getting a 19 year old redhead either!

Nai