Alberta Martin, 97; Believed to Be Last Confederate Widow

Alberta Martin, America’s last-known living widow of a Civil War veteran, died Monday. She was 97.

Martin died in an Enterprise, Ala., nursing home of complications from a heart attack she suffered May 7, said her caretaker, Dr. Kenneth Chancey.

“Miz Alberta,” as nearly everyone called her, lived in obscurity until the mid-1990s, when it became known that she was the last Confederate widow.

She was already a widow with a baby in 1927, when she married William Jasper Martin, a former private in the Confederate army.

She was 21; he was 81.

They were married for nearly five years and had one son before “the ol’ man,” as she later came to call him, died in 1932.

Martin, whose third marriage lasted 50 years until her husband’s death in 1983, became known over the last eight years as a last fragile link to America’s bloodiest war, one in which 3.2 million men fought.

She was a frequent guest of honor in parades and at Civil War reenactments, where she signed autographs and posed for pictures.

She cut the ribbon at the inauguration of the Jefferson Davis Presidential Library in Biloxi, Miss. And when she attended a Sons of Confederate Veterans Centennial in Richmond, Va., in 1996, which marked her first ride in an airplane, she received a five-minute standing ovation.

Former Alabama Gov. George Wallace cried upon meeting the last Confederate widow the same year in Montgomery, prompting “Miz Alberta” to dig a napkin out of her purse to dry his tears.

With the January 2003 death of 93-year-old Gertrude Janeway of Tennessee, the last known widow of a Union veteran of the Civil War, Martin became the last Civil War widow.

“She became a symbol like the Confederate battle flag,” Wayne Flynt, a Southern history expert at Auburn University, told Associated Press on Monday. He said she provided people with one last chance to see the waning historical distinctiveness of the South that was so tied to the Civil War.

“She was a link to the past,” Chancey said. “People would get emotional, holding her hand, crying and thinking about their family that suffered greatly in the past.”

Born Dec. 4, 1906, near Danley’s Crossroads, a rural community about 60 miles west of Dothan, Ala., Martin was the daughter of sharecroppers.

Her mother died of cancer when Martin was 11, and she dropped out of school after the seventh grade to work in the cotton and peanut fields. At 15, she got a job spooling thread in a cotton mill. “Lord, how my hands blistered running spools of thread through them in that mill,” she recalled decades later.

At 19, she married Howard Farrow, a cabdriver, who died in a car accident six months after their son, Harold, was born.

She and her son moved in with her father and her brother’s family in Opp, Ala., where she met the man who would give her a place in history.

A twice-married, retired farmer, William Jasper Martin used to stop to exchange a few words with her over the white-picket frontyard fence when he was on his way to play dominoes with friends.

“He was crazy about me,” she told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution last year.

He proposed marriage after only a few chats. She accepted. The incentive? His $50-a-month military pension for serving in Company K of the 4th Alabama Infantry Regiment.

“Us girls had it hard after Mama died,” she said in the Journal-Constitution interview. “That’s why I had to marry him. He had a pension and I knew we could live on that.”

Married in the county courthouse and serenaded with cowbells and horns on their wedding night, Dec. 10, 1927, the newlyweds set up housekeeping in a rented, wood-frame house initially furnished with only a stove and table.

He called her “Sis”; she called him “Mr. Martin.”

“Mr. Martin never did talk much about the war,” she told the Los Angeles Times in 2003. “Except he’d tell me how cold and wet it was up in Richmond, how he’d wrap blankets around himself in the trenches and how, when he crossed a field, he’d dig up potatoes and eat them raw because he was so hungry.”

Ten months after they were married, she gave birth to their son, William. “The old man was crazy about that baby,” she said.

Life with her husband, whom she found to be jealous and quick-tempered, “was hard but it was a good life too,” she told The Times. “We were happy.”

Did she love him?

“I don’t know,” she told National Public Radio in 1998. “It ain’t the same love that you got for a young man, if that’s what you’re asking. He slept on one bed and me on the other one. People when they get old like that, they don’t require kissing and hugging and necking and one thing or another. The old saying is, ‘Better to be an old man’s darling than a young man’s slave.’ ”

In 1932, after less than five years of marriage, William Martin died. Two months later, Alberta created something of a stir when she married Charlie Martin, her husband’s grandson from his first marriage.

After Charlie Martin’s death in 1983, she continued to live in their tiny, white-frame house down a gravel road in Elba. She was still living there in 1996 when Chancey of the Sons of Confederate Veterans met her.

“She asked for two things,” Chancey told The Times last year. “One, could the [Sons of Confederate Veterans] get her recognition as the last Confederate widow? She said she’d never done anything all that important in life, but she had married into history and that history was part of the nation’s. And two, could we help her get a Confederate pension. I said I’d try.”

A successful legislative battle to switch Martin from a federally run World War II pension earned by her third husband to a more substantial state-financed Confederate pension turned Alberta Martin into a Southern celebrity.

Martin, who had diabetes and other health problems, moved out of her house with its portrait of Gen. Robert E. Lee in the living room and into a nursing home in Enterprise in 1999.

In planning her funeral, Martin reportedly asked to be buried next to her third husband.

She also asked that the song “Beyond Sunset” be sung and that the hand-stitched Confederate flag given to her by the Sons of Confederate Veterans be draped over her mule-drawn casket.

The 1860s-style ceremony is planned for June 12 at the New Ebenezer Baptist Church six miles west of Elba.

Martin’s older son, Harold Farrow of North Little Rock, Ark., died last June. She is survived by her younger son, William Martin, of Elba.