Lizzie Brown, 111; One of 19 True Daughters of the Confederacy

Lizzie Brown, 111, one of 19 true daughters of the Confederacy and the oldest one living in Georgia, died Friday at her home in suburban Atlanta.

The cause of death was not reported, but she had been in declining health since a fall in August.

Brown’s father, Pleasant Marion McEachern, fought in the Civil War as a 16-year-old. She grew up working on her father’s 84-acre farm in Kenwood. She attended State Normal School, now the University of Georgia, and was the only teacher for seven grades and 45 students in a one-room schoolhouse in Ebenezer.

Brown took her first airplane trip at age 85, and avoided hospitalization until she broke her leg, when she was 99. She tended her garden as recently as last year, and still lived in the same house she moved into in 1941. When Brown was born in 1891, the average life expectancy in the United States was 45.

“My mother was just a very easygoing person,” her daughter, Willette Brown of Fayetteville, told the Atlanta Journal and Constitution. “She never got mad. She never talked about anybody and wouldn’t let people talk bad about her.”