Last Living Widows of Civil War Union Veterans
| Gertrude Grubb Janeway, age 93, died Friday Jan. 19,
2003
Article 1 - Article 2 - Article 3 - Article 4 - More Articles |
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| Mrs. Daisy Anderson, the
last known living widow of a Black Union soldier, died in September 1998
at the age of 97.
Article 1 - Article 2 - Article 3 - Article 4 - More Articles |
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| Read about the very Last Living Widow of a Civil War
Veteran - Mrs. Alberta Martin, now of Elba, AL http://www.confederate-rose.org/widow-Alberta_Martin.htm |
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| http://www.HoustonChronicle.com
| Section: Deaths Jan. 21, 2003, 6:25PM http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.hts/features/barnette/1745195 Last Union widow dies By MIC BARNETTE Gertrude Grubb Janeway, age 93, died Friday Jan. 19, 2003, at her home in Blaine, Tenn. She lived in a three-room log cabin bought for her by her husband in 1927. She was the last surviving widow of a Union soldier. Her husband, John Janeway, died in 1937 at age 91. She married her husband in 1927 when she was 18 and he was 81. In an interview in 1998 she said they sparked for three years because her mother would not sign for her to marry. As a Union widow pensioner Janeway received $70 per month from the Veterans Administration. Still living is the last surviving widow of a Confederate soldier, Alberta Martin, age 95, of Elba, Ala. She was born in 1909 and was a widow from her first marriage by the time she was 21. She married her Civil War husband, William Jasper Martin in 1927 when he was 81. |
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America’s Last Union Army Widow Dies In Her Cabin By The Roadside By: By
BOB HURLEY/Columnist Source:
The Greeneville Sun
Click here
to go to source. Sun
Photo by Bob Hurley East Tennessee's last link to the Civil War is gone. Gertrude Grubb Janeway, the last known widow of a Union soldier from the Civil War, died Friday in her log cabin in Grainger County, near Blaine. Only one widow of a Civil War soldier now remains, and her name is Alberta Martin, who was married to a Confederate soldier. She now resides in a nursing home in Enterprise, Ala. Mrs. Janeway's funeral arrangements are being handled by Smith Funeral Home, of Rutledge. A spokesman there late Friday said the burial will be in the New Corinth Baptist Church Cemetery, in Grainger County, probably on Monday. Mrs. Janeway was known as Gertie to her family and friends, and while I had a little trouble with it because of my respect for her, she insisted that I, too, call her Gertie on my first visit almost three years ago. Her's is a story of abiding love, but it is so steeped in history that I fear I will be unable to put into words the awe I experienced as I looked into her soft green eyes. She was the closest I had ever come, or ever will come, to the Civil War, and it was as if I was meeting history face-to-face. She was warm and gracious, even charming, and I was at a loss for words because I really did have a feeling that I was in the presence of Mother History Herself. A day or two before my first visit with Gertie, I had been reminded by one of my Mohawk friends that the American Civil War is ancient history, and that I need to get over it and move on to today and the future. But my Mohawk friend could not even tell me the years that the Civil War was fought, and he gave me an awful look when I asked him why it was fought in the first place. As I held Gertie's hand on that first visit, I tried to tell her that I was honored, even thrilled, to finally meet Blaine's most famous citizen. "Look at you," she laughed. "You can just forget stuff like that. I’m not famous. I'm just Gertie, and I'm tickled that you came to see me." Gertie's story spans three centuries in a fashion so remarkable that I wondered how one tiny lady could come to represent so much time, so much history and, yes, so much love all at the same time. She was just 18 when she married John Janeway in the middle of dirt road in 1927, and he was 81. I never asked her the question that is probably burning in your mind right now, but a lot of others did, and I've got her answer from some of the stories that were written about her down through the years. "I loved that man," she has told countless people. "I adored him, and he was wonderful to me and my family." There is another question that is probably burning in your mind: How could a woman still be living who was married to a soldier that fought in a war that began more than 140 years ago? I'm glad you asked, because I have done a lot of work to piece together the story that Gertie told multitudes of visitors down through the years. It was in the spring of 1864 when 18-year-old John Janeway headed to the mill on Buffalo Creek, in Grainger County. The corn he was taking to be made into meal never got ground that day, and he never returned home for a very long time. A regiment of soldiers in blue met him and his horse in the road that day, a meeting that changed John Janeway's life forever and created the story that Gertie never tired of telling. The soldiers were part of the 14th Illinois Cavalry, the unit that had fought its way out of a trap at Knoxville, chased Confederate Gen. John Hunt Morgan to Greeneville, and was on its way to join Gen. Tecumseh Sherman, who was preparing his army for a campaign of fire in Georgia. "You look like a stout young man," the Union soldiers told young John that day. The soldiers talked about adventure in distant places, and asked him to join them. John turned the horse back toward home with the sack of corn still thrown across its back. When the Union soldiers asked for his name, Gertie's future husband told them it was “John January” because he feared that his parents would come looking for him, and he also wanted to protect the family name of Janeway as much as possible. At the time of Gertie's death, she was still receiving a $70 monthly Civil War pension check, with the name of "John January" on it. John first went to Maryville with the soldiers, and was soon a part of the Union cavalry outside Atlanta. Two months later, he was captured near Macon, Ga., and he and 700 other Union soldiers there became prisoners of war. John was released by the Confederates in December of 1864, and he was somehow able to return to his old outfit, but the war would be over in four months. He never returned home. Gertie's story of her Civil War soldier is left with many holes and unanswered questions from the end of the war in 1865 until he resurfaced in Grainger County in 1925. She knew he went to California after the war, but he talked very little of those years. He was 77 when he returned home to Blaine. Gertie's mother insisted that she and John courted for three years after they met in 1925, and she smiled when she told me she got by with waiting just two years. "John said he would wait for me, and he did," she said. "We'd sit and talk for hours, and he was so good and kind to me." A few years after the wedding, Gertie and John bought the log cabin they had been admiring by the side of the road. She was 23 when she moved into the cabin, and she was 93 when she died in it Friday morning. There was no electricity until just a few years ago, but she never stopped cooking on her wood-burning stove as long as she was able to make cornbread, one of her favorite foods. Gertie and John lived together for 10 years, until he died in 1937 at the age of 91. That means Gertie has been a widow since she was 28. "John was a good man. He helped me and my family. I called him Honey and he called me Gertie," she said. After she buried John at New Corinth, she had to struggle with the government for years for a grave marker. But she finally prevailed, and it now sun-bleached and hard to read, but if you squint and look closely, you will see "John January Co. E 14 Ill. Cav." There are no dates of birth and death on the stone. Gertie will not be buried beside him. She had her own stone erected 200 yards down the hill from John's grave, at a spot next to her brother, Rube. She said that Rube always wanted to be buried beside her. "So, that's where I'm going. Right beside Rube," she said. After my first visit with Gertie, I left her little log cabin with the feeling I had just landed the best history story I had ever stumbled across, but that is no longer the case. It is indeed history, and I will cherish my memories of Gertie and her Civil War soldier, but from this day forward, her story will not be filed under history at all, but under undying love and devotion. "There was never anyone but John," she said, "and after he died, why it just seemed like a part of me went down under the ground with him. |
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| http://www.rootsweb.com/~ilcivilw/scrapbk/janewaystory.html A Love Story John Janeway and Gertrude Grubb 14th Illinois Cavalry From the Thousand Oaks Star, Monday, June 22, 1998 CIVIL WAR MEMORIES ENDURE THROUGH LOVE Gertrude Janeway: She lives now as she did 70 years ago; memories sustain her. by Fred Brown, Scripps Howard News Service KNOXVILLE, Tenn. Gertrude Grubb Janeway has a red ribbon in her hair and a smile on her face. In the thin mid-morning light of her log cabin, she looks out from her bed onto a world that must seem strange, even bizarre at times, compared to life as she has known it. Her perspective is from a long, long way back, almost as if she were a stranger from a strange land emerging into the present. Gertrude, 89, is something of a phenomenon. She is Tennessee's only widow of a Civil War veteran listed on Department of Veteran Affairs records and one of only 15 remaining nationwide. She married John Janeway when he was 81 years old and she was but an 18-year-old farm girl from Grainger County. Theirs is the love story of an era now so far away it seems like a dream, but Gertrude has not forgotten a single detail. She loves to tell the story because in a way it keeps her husband alive. When she talks about it, her face lights up. Her memories are so vivid, the listener is transported back over 100 years to a time when even Gertrude had not been born. This is John Janeway's story as he told it to her. Return to the year 1864. It is late May, a fresh, slightly cool morning. An 18-year-old boy is astride the family horse. A sack of corn is thrown across the horse's neck. The two are on their way to the grist mill on Buffalo Creek, the one near the falls that drops about 20 feet. As the old horse plods the familiar trail to the grist mill, a wild-riding regiment of men in blue suddenly rounds a corner and pulls their mounts to a stop. Clouds of dust powder the soldiers' backs and shoulders. The soldiers are part of the 14th Illinois Cavalry, a distinguished unit that has fought its way from the siege of Knoxville, chased Confederate Gen. John Hunt Morgan to Greeneville and run down Thomas' Legion of Cherokees. It is now on its way to join Gen. Tecumseh Sherman, who is readying his army for a campaign that will make Georgia howl. A BOY BECOMES A MAN "You look like a stout young man," one of the soldiers says. John Janeway is a stout young man -- tall, angular, rawboned even. The soldiers tell him stories of firing muskets, of fighting Rebels in distant places, of adventures he'll have but one time to see and a lifetime to tell about. On that fine spring morning, he turns his back on the grist mill and turns his face toward war. John Janeway joins the 14th Illinois Cavalry and rides off with them, pointing the family horse toward home. When the soldiers ask him his name, he improvises. "John January." He does not give them his family name in fear that his parents will find out and make him come home. He is eager for adventure, eager to leave behind the familiar landmarks of Grainger County's New Corinth Community. After enlisting June 1 at Maryville, he is sent with the Union cavalry to just outside Atlanta, where Sherman is sharpening his troops. Barely two months later, John January is captured in a fierce fight during which his unit, under the command of Union Gen. George Stoneman, is "cut to pieces" in a running battle near Macon, Ga. Stoneman has managed to get himself and his 6,500 infantry and cavalry surrounded by Confederate Maj. Gen. Joseph Wheeler's cavalry. After losing 2,000 men, Stoneman is captured along with 700 of his soldiers. Pvt. John January becomes a prisoner of war at a place he wrote down as "Chattahoochee." LITTLE TO SAY Years later, after he married Gertrude Grubb, he would speak sparingly of his exploits, the adventure the horse soldiers had promised. "I just hope I never killed anyone," he said. "A soldier's life is a hard life," he told Gertrude. "I had to beg at houses for food. You slept when you could, ate when you could. I've seen some hard things." His only words about his capture were that he was almost shot in the head the night he and other members of the 14th Illinois were surrounded by swarming Confederates. The 14th had had no rest or sleep for four days, being hounded by Wheeler's men. Finally, at midnight on Aug. 2, Capron halted his men on the road back toward Atlanta. About 2 a.m., the men of the 14th were curled up on the ground near their horses, having been ordered not even to dismount. Tired and tormented, they slept. Almost as soon as they fell asleep, they were surrounded. Some were shot where they slept. One Confederate put a bullet through John January's hat brim, barely missing his head. In December, John January was paroled. He returned to his unit but, four months later, the war was over. It would be nice to say that he returned to Grainger County, got on the family horse and took the corn to the grist mill on Buffalo Springs. But the reality of the story is that not much is known about John January's post-war history. Gertrude's recollections are mainly from shards of conversations she had with her husband. John Janeway was already 63 years old when she was born July 3, 1909. WHAT LITTLE SHE KNOWS She knows that he was in California after the war. John Janeway had a family and lived to be an old man. By the time he was 77 years old, he simply showed up in Grainger County. "He knew my mother, Halley. He came by to see us one day when I was 16 years old, "Gertrude said. She shut her eyes. It was like watching someone sweep away the dust from a set of books. "He asked Hal-- that's what we called Mama---if he could marry me. She said he would have to spark for three years before she would sign the papers." Gertrude was born with a badly deformed right hand. Her right leg was shorter than the left and she was 7 years old before she learned to walk. But, she was a pretty green-eyed girl. Growing up was not easy for Gertrude. She was the oldest of four children. Her father, Tom Grubb, died in 1922 at age 69 when Gertrude was only 13 years old. Her old green eyes tear up as she recalls her father. "He taught me how to walk," she said softly. "He would give me one end of a piece of string. He would walk to the other side of the room and tell me to bring him my end of the string." Before she could walk, Tom Grubb carried his daughter piggyback wherever they went. After Tom Grubb died, Halley had four children to care for. Gertrude was the oldest at 13. Her three brothers were 8, 6 and 1. "Mama took to the wash tub," she said. Her voice wraps around the words. Hal Grubb, a slender, work-worn woman with large hands, washed clothes six days a week. She was paid 50 cents a day for an entire day's work that involved boiling the clothes in a big black pot and then scrubbing them on a scrub board. HARD RAW DAYS Gertrude still has her mother's black pot. It's a reminder of those hard, raw days. "We ate wheat bread and cornbread three meals a day," she said of those times. Gertrude had to mother her three brothers, Arthur, Rubin and Barney, the baby. She attended school when she could, but then that stopped. "I got through the fifth reader," she said, but the fifth reader was far enough. Gertrude is a big reader today. She loves reading the newspaper and watching television. The day John Janeway walked into her life, it was like someone opening the door into another world. Here was the tall, lean and handsome Janeway. Hal's mother had known the Janeways, and now one was knocking on her door wanting to court her daughter. "Mama said we'd have to court for three years until I was of age. We courted for two years. We'd sit out back of the house in cane chairs and talk for hours." The day the talking stopped was June 9, 1927. That was the day John Janeway married Gertrude Grubb in the middle of a dirt road at 9 am. "He and all of his people came up in a Model T Ford owned by his friend Horace Maples. I'd never been in a car before," she said. They drove to a farm owned by county squire Joe Collins, who was in the fields cradling hay. "It was a warm Thursday morning," Gertrude said. Her green eyes gleamed with emotion. One year later, her Civil War veteran, a man of the world, took his new bride to Knoxville to People's Studio. The photograph they had made there and mounted in a round, wooden frame hangs on a wall beside her bed where she can look at it daily. She was only 19 years old. Her husband was 81. In the photograph he sits in a chair, stiff and straight, hands on his knees. He is wearing a hat. Gertrude also sits in a chair, stiff and straight, hands on her knees. She is wearing a hat. 
That was the first photograph she had ever had taken and she did not know how one should act or what one should do in such matters.
"I did what he did," she said.
"I guess I should have taken my hat off," she said, almost embarrassed.
"John was long-legged. My feet wasn't touching the floor," she said.A HOME OF HER OWN After a few years of boarding with friends, Gertrude told John she wanted a home of their own. They had been walking by a log cabin by the side of the road. After the death of the old couple who had lived there, John and Gertrude bought it and began paying it off. Gertrude does not know how old the log cabin is. She remembers seeing it when she was a child. The boards on a later addition are more than a foot wide, and the rusting tin roof is the same one John put on when the wooden shingles began leaking. It is the only house Gertrude has lived in since she was 23 . There is only one electric light in the front of the cabin. There are two electric outlets and two more fixtures in the back of the cabin. 
Electricity is another element of her life that she says she can do without and did until a few years ago, when some of her family wanted her to have electricity for heat. She has talked on a telephone only once in her life and that was when she was a child. She has never owned a driver's license or driven an automobile. Neither did John Janeway. Gertrude and John lived together as husband and wife for only 10 years. During that decade she cooked on the black and white Mascot's Solitaire wood stove that still crouches in a corner in the back kitchen. Gertrude loved to cook cornbread, and she remembers her first batch. "It crumbled." John said not to worry. You had to break it up before you could eat it anyway. "John was good to me," she said, turning to look at the photograph. "I called him honey, and he called me Gertie." "I told him I wouldn't stay with him if he drank. He never did drink or curse. John was a good man. He helped my mama and took care of her." DEATH LEAVES 'THE LEAST 'UNS' Beginning in 1937, death began to come in bunches for Gertrude. First, John Janeway died. Two years later her mother died in the same bed in which Janeway had died at the age of 91. Then, four months later, her youngest brother, Barney, died. "He just grieved himself to death over Mama. He kept saying that Mama was in a hole. Mama was in a hole." Moments before her mother died, Hal made Gertrude promise she would take care of "the least 'uns." "She died a-shoutin' when I told her I would." Another brother, Rubin, lived with his sister until he died at the age of 73. He is buried in the New Corinth Baptist Church cemetery down the hill about 200 yards from John's grave. "I asked Rube where he wanted to be buried. He told me he wanted to be buried beside me. John is buried there," she said, tears filling the corners of her eyes. "There is space for one more beside my man. But Rube asked me to be buried beside him, and that's where I'm going. Right beside Rube." The cemetery in the New Corinth Community is on Smith Hollow Road in Grainger County. A slender, sun-bleached Civil War tombstone stands out on the top of the hill. It says, "John January. CO E. 14 Ill. Cav." Gertrude had it put there after struggling with the government for a few years to get the headstone. She receives a $70 monthly Civil War pension check. It still comes to her mailbox in the name of John January. It has been a long day, and Gertrude is tiring. She loves to talk with the people whom her nephew Duel Grubb of Athens brings to visit her and with the home nurses who attend her twice a day. The single question left for Gertrude is this: Why did a pretty young girl marry such an old man in the last years of his life? Gertrude is quick to answer that one. She doesn't blink. She doesn't even have to think about it. Her eyes flash and her face beams. "I loved him, I adored him," she said. Copyright c 1998, The Knoxville News-Sentinel Co. All Rights Reserved. Source: Ernie Grubb May 2000-Jacob.GED |
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| Janeway, Gertrude Grubb b. 1909 d. January 17, 2003 Folk Personality. Last widow of a union civil war veteran. With her death, the only known one left is a 95 year old woman, who lives in Alabama. In 1927 at the age of 18, she married John Janeway, an 81 year old Union Civil War Veteran. (bio by: Kristian T. Peterson) New Corrinth Baptist Church Cemetery, Blaine, Grainger County, Tennessee, USA John Janeway is in the same cemetery; Grubb family plot. http://www.findagrave.com |
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| Janeway articles http://www.s-t.com/daily/11-98/11-26-98/a08wn030.htm http://www.appalachianlife.com/stories.htm |
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| Mrs. Martin meets Mrs. Daisy Anderson, the last known living widow of a Black Union soldier in 1997. Visit http://lastconfederatewidow.com/kiss.htm & http://lastconfederatewidow.com/gettysburg_supper.htm | |
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of Three Civil War Widows Dies DENVER (AP) -- Daisy Anderson, whose husband was a slave who ran away and joined the Union Army, has died at age 97, leaving just two known surviving Civil War widows, one a Union widow, one a Confederate. She died Saturday at a Denver nursing home. Mrs. Anderson was 21 when she married a 79-year-old veteran, Robert Ball Anderson. It was a marriage of love and convenience, she told The Denver Post last year. ``I wanted a home. I didn't have anything. I didn't have but one dress. We had no chairs; we ate standing up at the table,'' she told. ``We met 30 days before we got married, and I loved him until the day he died.'' Her husband was a slave in Kentucky and at age 22 he ran off to avoid whippings and joined the Union Army. It was late in the war and he never saw action, Mrs. Anderson wrote in a memoir five years after her wedding, but he joined the Buffalo Soldiers on the Western frontier after the war. While serving in New Mexico, he refused to carry out an order to kill an American Indian woman and her baby, she said. Mrs. Anderson's death leaves two known surviving Civil War widows: Alberta Martin, 91, of Elba, Ala., who was married to a Confederate soldier, and Gertrude Grubb Janeway, 89, of Blaine, Tenn., whose husband was a Union soldier. Last year, Mrs. Anderson and Mrs. Martin were recognized at a special ceremony at Gettysburg. Mrs. Janeway wasn't invited since at the time no one outside her family knew her whereabouts. Mrs. Anderson was born Daisy Graham in Tennessee's Hardin County on Dec. 14, 1900. Her father worked as a sharecropper, while she and her seven siblings hoed and picked cotton to help support the family. The family left Tennessee in 1917 because of racial tension and moved to Forrest City, Ark., where she met Anderson after church one Sunday while he was in town visiting his brother. They were married after a brief courtship, both for the first time, and went to lived on Anderson's 2,000-acre ranch near Hemingford, Neb. After her husband died in a car accident in 1930, Mrs. Anderson moved to South Dakota and then to Steamboat Springs to be near a sister. She became known as an author, poet and lecturer. ``She told wonderful stories,'' said Dick Mowry, a local audiologist who befriended Mrs. Anderson in recent years. |
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| http://www.well.com/user/jkr/trcww.html
Transcript of "The Last Civil War Widows" This story was first heard on July 1, 1998 All Things Considered (NPR) 7re/1/98 ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST Teenage Diaries is a radio series about - and by - teenagers. |
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| Daisy Anderson, 97 of Denver, Colorado, was married to Pvt. Robert Anderson and served in the 125th United States Colored Troups. They were married in 1922 when she was 21 and he was 79. http://www.csacurrency.com/csatriv.htm | |
| Anderson articles http://www.queenhyte.com/dobb/dobb_archives/dobb_98/nov-98.htm | |
| Return to Last Confederate Widow - Alberta Martin | |
