Civil War Romance Seems Like Only Yesterday to Soldier’s Widow, 89

Gertrude Janeway looks up from her bed and extends a frail little hand to greet a visitor entering her tiny log cabin.

Her touch is a fragile link to an epic period in America’s history. Mrs. Janeway is one of three surviving widows of Civil War veterans.

She still lives in the three-room home she and her husband, John, moved into 66 years ago. Electricity came much later, a phone only recently.

“It don’t seem like it has been too long since I was playin’ like a young ‘un,” she said as she celebrated her 89th birthday in July. “No, it don’t seem like it has been that long.”

She is now just a few years older than Janeway was when, in 1927, he married her as family and friends gathered in the middle of a dirt road. He was 81; she was 18.

This, of course, was long after his service in the military. He joined the Union Army as a 19-year-old farm boy from Blount County and served in the 14th Illinois Cavalry for barely a year before the war ended in 1865.

He would rarely talk about that, or about the decades he spent in California before coming home to Tennessee just before they met.

“We sparked for three years, starting when I was 16,” she recalls of their courtship, and of her mother’s stubbornness. “Mother wouldn’t sign no papers” to let her marry before 18.

“So my man says, ‘Well, I will wait for her until you won’t have to.’ ”

A half-million soldiers died in the four years of the Civil War--still America’s most devastating conflict. Of the more than 3 million who came home, the last were centenarians when they died in the 1950s.

Now, only Mrs. Janeway and two other women remain who knew these men most intimately. Daisy Anderson of Denver and Alberta Martin of Elba, Ala., both in their 90s, also married much older men.

“These three widows are something unlike anybody else,” says Sarah Anderson of Selmer, Tenn., president of the Tennessee Tent 2 Chapter of the Daughters of Union Veterans.

Last year, two widows were recognized at a special ceremony at Gettysburg, but Mrs. Janeway wasn’t invited. No one outside her family knew her whereabouts.

The Daughters searched for Mrs. Janeway for more than two years, looking for a black woman on a miscue from the organization’s record-keepers. Then the Knoxville News-Sentinel, tipped by the local Department of Veterans Affairs, wrote about her in June.

Sarah Anderson brought Mrs. Janeway a birthday cake and made her an honorary member. She was delighted. But Sarah Anderson says she deserves more--both in recognition and federal benefits. She is “a figure that the nation should honor.”

But Mrs. Janeway hasn’t sought attention from an encroaching and curious world. She worries “she doesn’t have the answers people are looking for,” Sarah Anderson says. After all, the war ended 44 years before she was born.

Bedridden from arthritis, Mrs. Janeway gazes fondly at a tinted photograph of her and her husband. It was taken in a Knoxville studio, about 20 miles southwest of Blaine, a year after they married. The couple sits stiffly, both wearing hats. Her feet strain to reach the floor.

“I would have looked better if I’d a had my hat off,” Mrs. Janeway says. “But I didn’t know. That was the first picture I’d ever had in my life. And I thought I had to do just as he’d done.”

Though Blaine is rural, it is not isolated. Just down the road from Mrs. Janeway’s tin-roof cabin, a suburbanite father swings a golf club with his young son.

But, in ways, time stopped at Mrs. Janeway’s front door. She has never wanted to live anywhere else. “No, no. Lord, no,” she says to suggestions that she move to a nursing home.

“She has a hold on that cabin,” says nephew Duel Grubb of Athens, Tenn., who visits regularly and arranges for caregivers. “I guess she feels like it is the only thing that ever belonged to her and she is not about to give that up.”

Mrs. Janeway and her husband bought the cabin in 1932, and it is where he died in 1937, at 91, from pneumonia. It is where she cared for her mother, Halley, until she died two years later, and for her handicapped brother, Ruben, until he passed away at 73 in 1989.

Born with a crippled right hand and leg, Mrs. Janeway looked out for all of them. She accepted the responsibility willingly, while John Janeway lifted the burden. He was the love of her life.

“He treated me like a baby. You know how an old person, sometimes they will speak ill or something? Well, I would go crying. I couldn’t speak ill back to him to save my life.

“And he would say, ‘Well, honey, I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings,’ ” she recalls, with a crackling giggle.

Over time, Mrs. Janeway learned bits of his war experience.

He was doing chores, riding to a gristmill, when he met a group of Union horse soldiers who persuaded him to join up. He sent the family horse home and enlisted under the surname January because, his widow says, “he was afraid his people would come and claim him.”

Barely two months in uniform, he was captured near Athens in August 1864, during the Georgia campaign. He was paroled at Savannah four months later and discharged the following July.

“He says the nighest he ever got to gettin’ killed was when they shot a hole through his hat brim,” she says. But he never told her where it happened.

Mrs. Janeway still gets a $70 check each month from the VA for John January--the name on his slender military tombstone in the New Corrinth Baptist Church cemetery a few miles away.

“After he died, why, it just seemed like a part of me went down under the ground with him,” Mrs. Janeway says.

But she never let go. “He is the only one I ever had,” she says. “There wasn’t anybody else.”