America’s last Civil War Widow / The Times 16/1/21

“Miss Jackson” they called her in the small town of Marshfield, Missouri (population 7,562). She was stern, stoic and somewhat intimidating, a stalwart of local societies, a regular at her Methodist church who objected if anyone sat in her pew. She was an old maid who had never married, or so everyone believed until three years ago.

In December 2017, aged 98, Helen Jackson met Nicholas Inman, her pastor and longtime friend, to discuss her funeral arrangements, but before doing so she said there was something she should tell him. She had been married once, a very long time ago. And her husband had fought for the Union in the American Civil War.

Inman was astounded. The last shots of that terrible conflict had been fired 152 years earlier. Maudie Hopkins, the last known widow of a Civil War soldier, had died nine years earlier. But here was another one, and little by little Inman persuaded her to tell him her astonishing story.

Helen Viola Jackson was born in the tiny rural community of Niangua, a few miles from Marshfield, in 1919. She was one of a poor farmer’s ten children, five girls and five boys, and grew up in the midst of the Great Depression.

Her father was a friend of James Bolin, a widower in his nineties who had served as a private in the 14th Missouri Cavalry during the Civil War which lasted from 1861 to 1865. When she was in her teens he arranged for her to visit Bolin on her way back from school each day so she could do chores for him.

One day Bolin said that he would like to repay Jackson for her help. He suggested he marry her so she could receive his civil war pension after his death and escape the extreme hardship of those times.

At first she said no, but she relented after speaking to her minister. She duly accepted Bolin’s proposal on condition that she kept her own name and continued to live with her parents, and that the marriage remained secret and was never consummated.

Bolin agreed. They were married at his home on September 4, 1936. She was 17 and he was 93. He died three years later.

Jackson never claimed Bolin’s pension. His daughter by his first marriage threatened to tell everyone if she did, and to ruin her good name by suggesting she married a man 76 years her senior for money. Moreover, said Jackson, “I had great respect for Mr Bolin and didn’t want him to be hurt by the scorn of wagging tongues”.

She instead kept her secret for another 78 years, always fearful that she would be exposed as some sort of Scarlet Woman.

“It affected her whole life,” said Inman. “She never dated or anything because she knew that if she got into a serious relationship and began to talk about marriage someone would figure out that she had been married before.”

Following Bolin’s death she left school without graduating because her father needed her to help on the farm. Her siblings left home, married and had children, but she stayed to look after her ageing parents. After they died she lived alone and worked in a factory in Marshfield until the 1990s.

In retirement Jackson became a substitute cook at a school, sat on the local Democratic Party committee, organised the local Cherry Blossom Festival and took charge of funeral dinners at her church.

“You either loved Helen, or were scared to death of her,” said Inman, but after revealing her secret she mellowed. It was the start of what he called a “healing process . . . it was as if a weight had been lifted off her shoulders.”

He was able to corroborate her story because Bolin had recorded the marriage in the family bible he bequeathed to his young wife, and because, miraculously, a witness was still alive. Tommy Macdonnell, now 98, was the son of a doctor and had accompanied his father when he visited the ailing Bolin hours after the marriage.

As word of Jackson’s childhood marriage spread she became something of a celebrity. She received fan mail and requests for autographs from around the world. She was embraced by Civil War heritage organisations, given a place on the Missouri Walk of Fame and served as Grand Marshal in Marshfield’s Independence Day parade. She was awarded an honorary diploma by the school in Niangua from which she had been unable to graduate in 1937.

She also spoke at schools, recalling how her husband talked constantly about “the blood and guts” of the Civil War, and would become emotional when he remembered the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

From a great-great-great-grandchild of Bolin, Inman obtained the only photograph of Jackson’s husband that she had ever seen, and presented it to her in her nursing home. “She never normally showed emotion. She regarded that as a sign of weakness. But she broke down and cried,” he recalled. “She said, ‘This is the only man who ever truly loved me . . . He respected me. He cared for me. He loved me as a person’.”

Inman took Jackson to the grave in Niangua where her husband was buried alongside his first wife. She had never visited it and had not even attended his funeral, for fear of discovery.

He also recalled how, shortly before her death, Jackson asked him: “ ‘Do you think Mr Bolin is going to be mad at me for telling the story?’

“I said, ‘I don’t think he’s going to be angry at all. He’s going to be very excited to see you again’.”

Helen Jackson, American Civil War widow, was born on August 3, 1919. She died on December 16, 2020, aged 101