The teachers beat her at school, for not knowing the answers to questions or how to read or write. Other kids beat her and called her father “traitor,” 70 years after the war had ended. Her mother beat her, perhaps finding her lazy or insufficiently attentive. Her father shot guns at the trees (and the neighbors) and probably beat her for any reason he could think of.
Every story about Irene Triplett centers on the “amazing” fact that she received a Civil War pension, based on her father’s service, until she died in 2020. None focus on the fact that as a disabled child, addicted to tobacco, harassed and beaten, she lived. And lived. And lived.
Yesterday, I wrote about her father Mose, who served on both sides during the Civil War and married his second wife when he was nearly 80. Today, I want to write about his daughter Irene and her mother Lydia, who survived Mose as well as some of the harshest conditions imaginable. They fought their own battles, for a very long time.
LYDIA
Of the three Tripletts cited in this extraordinary story, Elida “Lydia” Hall Triplett was the least well known. All the clues we have is her daughter’s description and a death certificate. Born in 1896, she was fifty years younger than her husband, Mose, the focus of yesterday’s post. She was 28 when she married, a little old. But that seemed to run in the family, too.
ANCESTORS
Lydia’s mother, Edith “Eda” Dula Hall, was a distant cousin to Tom Dula, who had a song written for him. The famous Kingston Trio folk song, “Tom Dooley,” chronicles the execution of a man convicted of stabbing his pregnant girlfriend because he was having an affair with her cousin (perhaps two of them). Such were the relationships in Wilkes County, North Carolina in the 1860s.
Eda had two children, married in her thirties, gave birth when she was nearly forty, and lived into her nineties. Such was the longevity of the Dula-Hall-Triplett women, with daughter Lydia and granddaughter Irene no exception.
Eda Hall didn’t stab anyone or fight in the war, so her story isn’t well known. Did she have children that weren’t noted in the records? Women of that time and place did not typically marry or have children so late. It seems odd that she did not bear more children; perhaps no one kept records. Most women had several children because so few lasted.
Between the risks of childbirth and the dangers of childhood diseases–measles, smallpox, diptheria, whooping cough–child mortality rates were high. Habsburg Empress Maria Teresa had sixteen children, in the 1740s, but only half made it to adulthood. Her daughter had 18, only 7 survived, and HER daughter had 12, where only 7 survived. And they had the best health care Viennese empresses could buy.
Statistics aren’t easy to tease out, but the biggest reason for the advancement in longevity between the medieval period and the 20th century wasn’t that people lived longer, but that children could make it into their teens. As the Triplett history showed, if you make it into your sixties, you had a good chance to go further. Even in poor conditions.
Eda, mother of Lydia and Frank, died at 92. She’s buried in the Triplett-Hall Cemetery, with a few dozen others, including Mose, Lydia, and Irene.
MOTHERHOOD
Lydia was born near the turn of the century, 1896. Several of the reports note that she had mental disabilities, thought not their nature. We know she never learned to read or write, same as her husband and daughter.
She had five children, starting when she was 28. The first one, Phenia (“Phemie”) only made it four months, born in January 1925 and died in May. There is other human math to tease out here. Lydia and Mose were married in 1924, but Phemie came along the following January, barely 9 months later. There is a cryptic reference in one report to a “fast wedding.” Lydia was “mentally disabled” and a little older, which may have explained why she had not already married. Mose was 78 but surely needed a nurse and cook, and one without the mental capacity to fend for herself might have been just fine, even if being pregnant was the impetus for the marriage.
Infant Phemie didn’t make it out of the spring. The infant’s cause of death is blurred by the doctor’s scrawl, though it doesn’t seem to contain a “k” (unknown) or an “l” (smallpox, influenza). Diptheria? Disease?
As an aside, apologies that so much of this post’s history centers around gravestones and death certificates. When you’re not in a war, records are sparser. I do give a huge thanks to those who filled out so much genealogy information, especially here.
The next two children of Lydia and Mose did not make it past childbirth. Lydia’s fourth child, Irene, finally made it as did her fifth, son Everette Mose. The two that lived were born in 1930 and 1933, respectively. Just to make this story more intriguing for me personally, Irene was born January 9, 1930, two weeks to the day before my own mother was born.
IRENE
SCHOOL
The Great Depression was well underway in Irene’s earliest days. That may not have made as much of a difference to the just-scraping-by chicken & pig farmer/moonshiners who grew tobacco up in the hills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Mose Triplett was awarded a small pension, and when he died in 1938, Lydia and Irene both were granted survivor benefits. It may have been because both were deemed disabled, rather than simply from being family.
Irene seemed to rub many people the wrong way. The photos of her in her eighties show her to be quite small in stature, and those who met her said she may have been born prematurely and was disabled as a young child. She said she was beaten at school and at home. The teachers used an oak paddle. According to NCpedia, in 1931, at least one-quarter of the schools were still one-room, with one teacher and all grades. She couldn’t learn much. Later, in the nursing home, they diagnosed her as autistic, so it’s likely she had trouble accomplishing whatever that teacher was trying to make her do.
Irene didn’t go to school in Boone, the nearest town, rather somewhere in Wilkes County. This happens to be a photo of the children her age, mid-1930s, climbing on a fire truck that was once a bigger deal than Pokemon. Maybe none of these kids knew the Tripletts, but some of them might have. They’re the right age.
Whoever her schoolmates were, they constantly needled her about her dad fighting for the Other Side (technically, he fought for both sides and was wounded). Irene told reporters she left school after the sixth grade, unable to write her name. Probably also unable to stomach daily bullying. She did pick up something from school, though. She dipped snuff and started chewing tobacco in the first grade. It became a lifelong addiction.
When you got a whooping in school you’d be getting tore up when you got back in those mountains….I didn’t care for neither one of them, to tell you the truth about it. I wanted to get away from both of them. I wanted to get me a house and crawl in it all by myself.
Irene’s 92-year-old father, Mose, died when she was only eight. If she remembers him, it must be from the beating, which happened even when she was pretty young. Irene lived with her mother for over 30 years, though she was clear that it was not a loving relationship..
WILL
When Mose died, he divided his 40 acres of land equally among wife and two children. He had $1500 in the bank, and it was directed to go to his two children when they turned eighteen. It seems unlikely that happened. Mose also left two cows and a steer plus farming tools to Lydia’s brother Frank. Thus, we can know that Frank was around when the children were young and friendly enough to Mose. None of the news reports ever mentions Frank. Seems like Frank took the cattle and split and probably didn’t stay on to help his sister after his brother-in-law’s death.
Without the livestock and her husband, Lydia and her two children tried to eke out a living for a few years. Irene said she grew tobacco, and if she was out of school, she was home all day to work. Even with learning disabilities, the women could work. It might also be worth noting that when Mose and Lydia got married, up in the hills with all the distilleries “around,” it was during Prohibition. Maybe moonshine made them extra money. If so, that was all over by the mid 1930s.
In 1943, without enough ongoing resources to sustain them, 47-year-old Irene and 13-year-old Lydia moved into the Wilkes County “poorhouse.” They were still receiving Mose’s pension, but it couldn’t sustain them and the property.
INSTITUTIONS
Ten-year-old Everette moved with them, but he quickly ran away. It’s no surprise: the County poorhouse was a desperate place, concrete and brick, with rodents running as they pleased across the cold floors. Blacks were housed in a separate, even grimmer building, and there was a quarantine hut for TB sufferers.
Much later in life, Everette married and had a family, was reported as working in a sawmill and in construction. He lived into his sixties and his son, Charlie, talked to the reporters and historians who were checking on the “Civil War pension story.” Everette left the women in the poorhouse, but was eventually also buried in the family cemetery.
I didn’t play around. I mowed the grass. I washed dishes, made up beds, washed and ironed. They had hogs. They raised hogs up there. I raised eight hogs.
Lydia and Irene both lived in the home for 17 years. According to Irene, there was work to be done, and she did it, with some pride. Every report also stresses that she and her mother didn’t get along, enough so that those who ran the place preferred them to be separated. Reports of Irene in her eighties comment on her cheerfulness, her smiling–toothless–but smiling. Perhaps she felt differently about the mother who used to give her whooping after school, a woman raised in the mountains, full of its own griefs and hardships. Lydia died of lung cancer at 71, Irene not the only one addicted to tobacco.
SURVIVOR
In 1960, a few years before Lydia’s death, the county home shut down, and the women moved into a nursing facility. When Everette later invited her to join his family, Irene declined, having lived in institutions for so long she preferred it. They didn’t beat on her, and the second place was probably much nicer. She lived in the nursing home for most of the next 55 years.
Irene’s story only surfaced because of this unusual thing, that she was paid this pittance, this $73 monthly pension, 150 years after the end of war. Historians interested in finding Civil War survivors tracked her down, though she was apparently willing to tell what story she could. Researcher Jerry Orton said he searched for children of veterans for 30 years, and Irene was the only one “who wrote back.” We know Irene could not write as a child, so it seems she was helped by the staff, who were happy to help with that exchange.
We may all have opinions about what constitutes the quality of life, and maybe it isn’t sitting in a wheelchair, sipping a Coke or a Dr. Pepper and watching the world go by from a facility. Irene must have had a lot to think about, even as her memories faded over time. She broke her hip at 84 and moved into a more hands-on, skilled-nursing facility. Medicaid and her small pension kept her going for another six years. She finally passed away in 2020, after another fall and surgery was just too much for her 90-year-old heart. Once again, all the stories reminded the world about that $73 pension. But they might have reminded the world about the capability of humans to survive under the most dire conditions.
Tolkein wrote of a race of people called the Dúnedain, from Numenor. They were long-lived people, grim in appearance and dress, able to withstand hardship. Aragon came from their stock. Maybe some of Aragorn’s people drifted into the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina.
To me, this is not a story about a long-paid pension, but about a long-lived survivor of the world, one who had such a tough start but may have outlived many of the schoolmates who called her traitor and the teachers with their oak paddles. In the end, the Daughters of the Confederacy still refused to recognize her father; the Sons of the Union sent her a plaque. She must have found all of it quite strange, none of it her war, not her choices.
When I saw that quiz question about Irene a few weeks ago, I wondered about how someone born to a father so old and a mother so bitter could live that long. She was my mother’s age ; she also looked like one of my aunts who, as it happens, was named Irene and was institutionalized as part of her own troubled life.
But Irene Triplett wasn’t related to me, nor was she just a strange statistic. She was someone who put a smile on the face of everyone, so many who went to find out about that pension and discovered this paragon of endurance.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Dylan Thomas
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.