Nation’s last publicly known widow of Confederate soldier dies at 93
Posted on Wednesday, August 20, 2008
The last publicly known Confederate widow, who as a teenager married an elderly infantryman who had settled in the Ozark Mountains, died at a Helena-West Helena hospital over the weekend, family members said Tuesday.
Doctors hospitalized Maudie Hopkins, 93, last week after discovering fluid in her lungs. She died in her sleep Sunday night.
No official cause of death was available Tuesday.
Hopkins was the only living Confederate widow known publicly, said Martha Boltz, the Civil War historian who first detailed Hopkins’ story in a 2004 article.
Susan Railsback, past president of the Arkansas division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, said the organization also recognized Hopkins as a Confederate widow.
For a time, Hopkins collected money through the group’s relief fund for wives and daughters of Confederate soldiers.
“She was a living link to the past,” Railsback said. “But it never occurred to her why it was such a big deal.” Boltz said she has confirmed the existence of other living Confederate widows across the nation, but none want to be acknowledged publicly. She said fewer than 10 are still alive.
Hopkins was born Maudie Acklin in Baxter County in 1914.
She married William M. Cantrell, a former soldier in the Confederate Army’s Seventh Virginia Mounted Infantry, in Baxter County in 1934, during the Depression. Cantrell was 86 years old, and Hopkins was 19.
Cantrell died in 1937, and Hopkins remarried and was widowed three more times after that.
Robert Byrd of Cabot, Hopkins’ grandson, said economics, not romance, united his grand- mother and Cantrell.
Cantrell had just lost a previous wife, and in his old age, needed someone to care for him and help with the chores on his 200-acre farm in Lone Rock, a small community in the mountains southwest of Norfork.
He turned to Hopkins, whose family lived in the forest across the White River from Cantrell.
Cantrell paid Hopkins $ 12 to clean his house.
“My mother and daddy had a bunch of kids, and it was hard times back then,” Hopkins told The Associated Press in 2004. “My daddy couldn’t make a living for us, and I didn’t have no shoes.” Cantrell asked Hopkins to move in with him and work on the farm full time. If she agreed, Cantrell offered to marry her and deed his property to her upon his death.
Hopkins soon became Mrs. Cantrell.
“It wasn’t some ungodly-type thing,” Byrd said. “She did it to survive.” An undated photograph shows Hopkins in a white dress, standing next to Cantrell. It is the only photograph that remains. Rain destroyed a box of other pictures Hopkins had kept.
A Confederate pension of about $ 25 per month helped support the newlyweds.
Cantrell died in 1937 at age 90 after falling off a mule, Boltz said. He was buried in a Mountain Home cemetery.
The couple never had children.
Hopkins had all three of her children with her second husband, Winfred White, whom she married the same year that Cantrell died.
Hopkins rarely spoke with family members about her time with Cantrell.
Fred Chamness, husband to Hopkins’ oldest daughter, Ida Mae Chamness of Virginia, said the relationship embarrassed his mother-in-law.
She didn’t discuss it with family until 2004, after Fred Chamness and some others started asking about her long-forgotten first husband.
The only story Cantrell told of his Civil War days was that the lice used to eat through his leather garters to get to his skin, Boltz said.
Hopkins described Cantrell as a kind man, said her son Melvin White of Lexa.
“She said he was a good fella who treated her good,” Melvin White said. “But that’s about it. She wouldn’t hardly talk about it.” Records show that Cantrell was born in 1847 and was raised in Wise, Va., Boltz said.
He enlisted in the nearby east Kentucky town of Pikeville at age 16. Records said he was 5 feet 4 inches tall and had black hair and dark eyes.
He was captured by the Union Army after an April 15, 1863, battle near Piketon, Ky.
Cantrell was a prisoner of war for about a month before being released as part of a prisoner exchange on May 13, 1863.
There are no other records of his wartime experience, Boltz said.
Melvin White lived with his parents in Cantrell’s old mountain home until he was about 4 years old. He said he remembers that the family used a nearby creek as a refrigerator, storing jugs of fresh milk there.
The family moved to Phillips County about 1950, White said, where family members picked cotton on a family farm.
“Mother worked hard constantly,” White said. “She went from the fields to the house, where she was constantly cleaning or cooking. She was one of those people who never stopped.” The family later moved to nearby Barton, where Melvin White’s parents took jobs as custodians at Barton High School.
Later, they moved to Lexa, bought a home and retired together.
Hopkins sometimes worked as a caregiver for the elderly, Melvin White said.
Winfred White died in 1969. Hopkins stayed in Lexa for nearly 40 years afterward, remarrying twice more.
Hopkins’ fourth husband, Milton Hopkins, died in 1997.
She lived independently until four years ago, when complications from arthritis and diabetes forced her into a nursing home in Helena-West Helena.
Melvin White said his mother’s years in Lexa were among the best of her life.
“She got to slow down and not work as much,” White said. “She got to sit out on the front porch every once in awhile and look around and enjoy life.”
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