Civil War widow dies

Enterprise, Ala.

The last widow of a Civil War veteran died this week at an Alabama nursing home. Alberta Martin, 97, married the aging former rebel soldier William Jasper Martin in 1927. He was 81 and died four years later. Martin said her husband talked little about the war, except the conditions on a Petersburg, Va., battlefield. “He’d say it was rough,” she said, “how the trenches were full of water. They were so hungry.” Martin, a sharecropper’s daughter, lived in obscurity until Confederate history buffs embraced her in her old age. In 1996, the state of Alabama began sending her $50 a month in widow’s benefits. “She became a symbol,” said historian Wayne Flynt, “like the Confederate battle flag.”

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