Obituary

Widow's death at 97 breaks last living link to Civil War

MONTGOMERY, Ala. - Alberta Martin, the last widow of a Civil War veteran, died on Memorial Day (May 31, 2004), ending an unlikely ascent from sharecropper's daughter to the belle of 21st century Confederate history buffs who paraded her across the South. She was 97.

Mrs. Martin died at a nursing home in Enterprise of complications from a heart attack she suffered May 7, said her caretaker, Dr. Kenneth Chancey. She died nearly 140 years after the Civil War ended.

Her May-December marriage in the 1920s to Civil War veteran William Jasper Martin and her longevity made her a celebrated final link to the Confederacy.

"People would get emotional, holding her hand, crying and thinking about their family that suffered greatly in the past," Chancey said.

Alberta Stewart Martin was not from the Gone With the Wind South of white-columned mansions and hoop skirts. She was born Alberta Stewart to sharecroppers on Dec. 4, 1906, in Danley's Crossroads, a tiny settlement 70 miles south of Montgomery.

Her mother died when she was 11. At 18, she met a cab driver named Howard Farrow, and they had a son before Farrow died in a car accident in 1926.

She, her father and her son moved to Opp. Just up the road lived William Jasper Martin, a widower born in Georgia in 1845 who had a $50-a-month Confederate veteran's pension.

The 81-year-old man struck up a few conversations with the 21-year-old neighbor and a marriage of convenience was born.

"I had this little boy and I needed some help to raise him," Mrs. Martin recalled in 1998.

They were married on Dec. 10, 1927, and 10 months later had a son, William.

She said her husband never talked much about the war, except the harsh times at Petersburg, Va.

"He'd say it was rough, how the trenches were full of water. They were so hungry in Virginia that during the time they were fighting, they had to grab food as they went along. They came across a potato patch and made up some mashed potatoes," she said.

William Jasper Martin died on July 8, 1931. Two months later, Mrs. Martin married her husband's grandson, Charlie Martin. He died in 1983.

Martin's older son, Harold Farrow of North Little Rock, Ark., died last June. Her younger son, Willie Martin, lives in Elba.

Mrs. Martin is to be interred at New Ebenezer Baptist Church, 6 miles west of Elba, in an 1860s-style ceremony after her funeral June 12.

The last widow of a Union veteran from the Civil War, Gertrude Janeway, died in January 2003 at her home in Tennessee. She was 93 and had married veteran John Janeway when she was 18.

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