Helen Viola Jackson died on 16 December 2020 at a nursing home in Marshfield, Missouri, at the age of 101. She was the last surviving widow of a Civil War veteran, the last living person who had been married to a man who fought between 1861 and 1865 in the American Civil War. Her husband, James Bolin, a private in the 14th Missouri Cavalry of the Union Army, had died in 1939. They had been married for three years, from 1936 to his death. He had been 93 years old at the wedding; she had been 17. She had outlived him, in the end, by 81 years.
The story is, by the standards of modern history, almost impossibly long. The Civil War ended on 9 April 1865, with Robert E. Lee’s surrender to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House in Virginia. The end of the war is, on every conventional measure, the closing event of the 19th century in American history. The last Union veteran of that war, Albert Woolson, died in 1956. The Civil War belongs, in the public imagination, to a world that is fundamentally separate from the modern one. Jackson’s death in 2020 means that someone who was married to a Civil War soldier was alive into the 21st-century COVID-19 pandemic, 155 years after the war that defined her late husband’s life had ended.
How the marriage happened
The Jackson-Bolin marriage was a product of the Great Depression and the surprisingly generous American Civil War pension system. According to the Associated Press obituary of Jackson carried by KSDK in St. Louis, she grew up the daughter of James Washington Jackson and Thursa Shelby Jackson on a family farm outside Niangua, Missouri, one of ten children. James Bolin was a widower in his nineties who lived nearby. His first wife, Elizabeth Davenport Bolin, had died in 1922 after a marriage that began in 1868, three years after the Civil War ended. Bolin himself had been born in March 1843. By the time his neighbours were sending teenagers over to help him with chores, he was one of the dwindling number of surviving Union veterans, drawing a pension authorised by the Dependent and Disability Pension Act of 1890.
Jackson’s father volunteered his teenage daughter to stop by Bolin’s home each day to provide basic care — cooking, cleaning, light errands — for the elderly veteran. According to Nicholas Inman, the pastor and longtime friend who eventually brought Jackson’s story to public attention, Bolin proposed marriage in 1936 as a way to repay the kindness. The marriage would entitle Jackson to receive Bolin’s Civil War pension after his death, a substantial financial benefit in the depths of the Great Depression. Jackson agreed, in large part because, as Inman later told reporters, “she felt her daily care was prolonging his life.” They were married on 4 September 1936 at Bolin’s home.
The marriage was unusual in other ways beyond the age gap. Jackson did not move in with Bolin. The marriage was not consummated. She continued to live with her parents and attend school. She kept the wedding secret from her siblings, her parents, and almost everyone she knew. According to InsideHook’s profile of Jackson published shortly after her death, “Throughout their three years of marriage there was no intimacy and she never lived with him. She never told her parents, her siblings or anyone else about the wedding.” Bolin died on 18 June 1939, aged 96. After his death, Jackson never applied for the pension she would have been entitled to. She never remarried. She told almost no one for the next seven decades.
Why she didn’t tell anyone
The reasons Jackson kept the marriage secret were partly social and partly practical. Marriages between young women and elderly Civil War veterans were not rare in the 1920s and 1930s — they were common enough that at least four such widows survived into the 21st century, including Gertrude Janeway in Tennessee (died 2003, aged 93), Alberta Martin in Alabama (died 2004), and Maudie Hopkins in Arkansas (died 2008). The Dependent and Disability Pension Act made Civil War widows’ pensions generous by the standards of the era, and the arithmetic of pairing a young woman with a veteran in his nineties produced what was effectively a long-term annuity for the younger spouse. Jackson and her contemporaries were participating in a recognisable, if unconventional, financial arrangement.
The arrangement carried a stigma. Jackson appears to have been concerned that her community would see her as having married Bolin for the money, rather than out of compassion. The fact that she never collected the pension she would have been entitled to suggests that she was genuinely uncomfortable with the financial framing of the marriage and preferred to absorb the cost of the secrecy rather than benefit from it. Inman has said that Jackson regarded the marriage as something she expected people to treat as “a scarlet letter,” and that her decision to disclose it in her late nineties was a kind of “healing process” — late recognition that what she had done in 1936 was caregiving rather than opportunism.
The arc of her life
Jackson lived the rest of the 20th century in Missouri, doing the kinds of work that women of her era and class generally did: domestic labour, family care, church involvement, occasional employment. She remained close to her large family, never remarried, and never publicly identified herself as a Civil War widow. Her marriage to Bolin became a private fact that she had decided long before not to share. She watched, from rural Missouri, the entire arc of 20th-century American history: the Second World War, the Cold War, the Civil Rights movement, Vietnam, the moon landings, the personal computer, the internet, mobile phones, the 9/11 attacks, the election of Barack Obama. The Civil War, by the time of Obama’s first inauguration in 2009, was 144 years in the past. Jackson, who had been married to a man who had fought in that war, was 89 years old and still alive.
According to the Gerontology Research Group’s reference page on Jackson, her quiet life began to receive public attention only in 2017, when she finally told her pastor Nicholas Inman about the 1936 marriage. Inman, an amateur historian, verified the story through Bolin’s military service records and pension files, then made contact with the Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War. The organisation formally recognised Jackson as a Civil War widow, and the story began to circulate in heritage and local-history publications. She received a star on the Missouri Walk of Fame in 2018. The Niangua High School class of 1937 — which she had been unable to graduate from at the time, owing to her family’s poverty during the Depression — presented her with an honorary diploma the same year. She gave interviews to historians, accepted cards and letters from across the country, and embraced the late recognition with what those who knew her described as a kind of relief.
Jackson died in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, in a Missouri nursing home, 155 years and eight months after the surrender at Appomattox. Her death was the closing of the last living link between the present and the American Civil War. The veterans of that war are now all dead. The widows of those veterans are now all dead. The next living link — children of Civil War veterans, of whom several are still believed to be alive in 2026 — is one generation further removed. With Jackson’s death, the war that ended in 1865 has receded one further step from anyone who can be said to have been part of it. Whoever holds the title of “last person related to a Civil War soldier” will, in time, also die, and the war will pass entirely into the category of events for which no living witness or witness-by-marriage remains. Jackson was the last person in the second-to-last of those categories. She lived to 101, in a small town in southern Missouri, having been married for three years in the 1930s to a man born in 1843.
