The Saga of the Last to Die...

[Darrell]

(05-08-2017 10:04 AM)L Verge Wrote:  You might enjoy this century-old contest to see which side of the CW lasted the longest:

http://mashable.com/2015/04/10/civil-war...WGoJDK6OqI

Thanks for that link - great photos!

Richard Serrano, in the "Last of the Blue and Gray," described Bruce Catton's youthful remembrances of the aged veterans in his hometown. Although speaking of the Yanks, I like to think his words also applied to the Boys in Gray:

Bruce Catton, long a chronicler of the Civil War, could recall his boyhood in the “pre-automobile age” of rural Michigan and how a group of old Union veterans in white whiskers and blue greatcoats had delighted his young eyes. He remembered one selling summer berries from a pail he hooked over the stub of his forearm, an arm he had lost in the Battle of the Wilderness. A church deacon had fought with the 2nd Ohio Cavalry in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, burning barns and killing livestock. Another had returned to Gettysburg for the 50th anniversary there, and when he arrived back by train and his buggy was late, the 70-year-old simply hoisted his bag and walked the five miles home. “They were grave, dignified, and thoughtful,” Catton would write of his hometown heroes. “For the most part they had never been 50 miles away from the farm or the dusty village streets; yet once, ages ago, they had been everywhere and had seen everything. . . . All that was real had taken place when they were young; everything after that had simply been a process of waiting for death.” Eventually, one by one the old men were carried up a small hilltop to the town cemetery. “As they departed,” Catton wrote, “we began to lose more than we knew we were losing.”