Person:Lucy Grubb (1)

This interview was printed 24 MAY 1998:

TENNESSEE'S OLDEST LIVING UNION

                        WIDOW TELLS ALL

MEMORIES OF HER CIVIL WAR VETERAN

                     HAVEN'T DIMMED WITH TIME

By Fred Brown, Knoxville News-Sentinel staff writer

Gertrude Grubb Janeway has a red ribbon in her hair and a smile on her

face. In the thin mid-morning light of her log cabin, she looks out from her
bed onto a world that must seem strange, even bizarre at times, compared
to life as she has known it. Her perspective is from a long, long way back,
almost as if she were a stranger from a strange land emerging into the
present.(The article had a picture I was unable to copy)

Gertrude, 89, is something of a phenomenon. She is Tennessee's only

widow of a Civil War veteran listed on Department of Veteran Affairs
records and one of only 15 remaining nationwide. She married John
Janeway when he was 81 years old and she was but a 18-year-old farm
girl from Grainger County.

Theirs is the love story of an era so far away it seems like a dream, but

Gertrude has not forgotten a single detail. She loves to tell the story
because in a way it keeps her husband alive.

When she talks about it, her face lights up. Her memories are so vivid, the

listener is transported back over 100 years to a time when even Gertrude
had not been born. This is John Janeway's story as he told it to her.

Return to the year 1864. It is late May, a fresh, cool morning. An

18-year-old boy is astride the family horse. A sack of corn is thrown
across the horse's neck. The two are on their way to the grist mill on
Buffalo Creek, the one near the falls that drops about 20 feet.

As the old horse plods the familiar trail to the grist mill, a wild-riding

regiment of men in blue suddenly rounds a corner and pulls their mounts to
a stop. Clouds of dust powder the soldiers' backs and shoulders.

The soldiers are part of the 14th Illinois Cavalry, a distinguished unit that

has fought its way from the siege of Knoxville, chased Confederate Gen.
John Hunt Morgan to Greeneville, run down Thomas' Legion of Cherokees
and are now on their way to join Gen. Tecumseh Sherman, who is readying
his army for a campaign that will make Georgia howl.

"You look like a stout young man," one of the soldiers says.

John Janeway is a stout young man, tall, angular, rawboned even. The
soldiers tell him stories of firing muskets, of fighting Rebels in distant places,
of adventures he'll have but one time to see and a lifetime to tell about.

On that fine spring morning, he turns his back on the grist mill and turns

his face toward war. John Janeway joins the 14th Illinois
Cavalry and rides off with them, pointing the family horse toward home.

When the soldiers ask him his name, he improvises. "John January." He does

not give them his family name in fear that his parents will find out and
make him come home. He is eager for adventure, eager to leave behind
the familiar landmarks of Grainger County's New Corinth Community.

After enlisting June 1 at Maryville, he is sent with the Union cavalry to just

outside Atlanta, where Sherman is sharpening his troops.
Barely two months later, John January is captured in a fierce fight during
which his unit, under the bold cavalry Col. Horace Capron, commanded by
Union Gen. George Stoneman, is "cut to pieces" in a running battle near
Macon, Ga.

Stoneman has managed to get himself and his 6,500 infantry and cavalry

surrounded by Confederate Maj. Gen. Joseph Wheeler's cavalry.
After losing 2,000 men Stoneman is captured along with 700 of his
soldiers. Pvt. John January becomes a prisoner of war at a place he wrote
down as "Chattahoochee."

Years later, after he married Gertrude Grubb, he would speak sparingly of

his exploits, the adventure the horse soldiers had promised.
"I just hope I never killed anyone," he said.

"A soldier's life is a hard life," he told Gertrude. "I had to beg at houses for

food. You slept when you could. Ate when you could. I've seen some hard
things."

In December, John January was paroled. He returned to his unit but four

months later, the war was over.

It would be nice to say that he returned to , got on the family horse and

took the corn to the grist mill on Buffalo Springs. But the reality of the
story is that not much is known about John January's post-war history.

Gertrude's recollections are from shards of conversations she had with her

husband. John Janeway was already 63 years old when she was born July
3, 1909.

She knows that he was in California after the war. John Janeway had a

family and lived to be an old man. By the time he was 77 years old, he was
back in Grainger County.

"He knew my mother, Halley. He came by to see us one day when I was

16 years old," says Gertrude. She shuts her eyes. It's like watching
someone sweep away the dust from a set of books.

"He asked Hal -- that's what we called Mama -- if he could marry me. She

said he would have to spark for three years before she would sign the
papers."

Gertrude was born with a badly deformed right hand. Her right leg was

shorter than the left and she was 7 years old before she learned to walk.
But, she was a pretty green-eyed girl.

Growing up was not easy for Gertrude. She was the oldest of four children.

Her father, Tom Grubb, died in 1922 at age 69 when Gertrude was 13
years old. Her old green eyes tear up as she recalls her father.

"He taught me how to walk," she says softly. "He would give me one end of

a piece of string. He would walk to the other side of the room and tell me
to bring him my end of the string."

Before she could walk, Tom Grubb carried his daughter piggyback

wherever they went.

After Tom Grubb died, Halley had four children to care for. Gertrude's

three brothers were 8, 6 and 1.

"Mama took to the wash tub," she says. Her voice wraps around the words.

Hal Grubb, a slender, work-worn woman with large hands, washed clothes
six days a week. She was paid 50 cents a day for an entire day's
work that involved boiling the clothes in a big black pot and then
scrubbing them on a scrub board.

Gertrude still has her mother's black pot. It's a reminder of those hard,

raw days. "We ate wheat bread and cornbread three meals a day,"
she says of those wash tub times.

Gertrude had to mother her three brothers, Arthur, Rubin and Barney,

the baby. She attended school when she could, but then that stopped.
"I got through the fifth reader," she says, but the fifth reader was far enough.
Gertrude is a big reader today. She loves reading the newspaper and
watching television.

The day John Janeway walked into her life, it was like someone opening the

door into another world. Here was the tall, lean and handsome Janeway.
Hal's mother had known the Janeways, and now one was knocking on her door
wanting to court her daughter.

"Mama said we'd have to court for three years until I was of age. We

courted for two years. We'd sit out back of the house in cane chairs and
talk for hours."

The day the talking stopped was June 9, 1927. That was the day John

Janeway married Gertrude Grubb in the middle of a dirt road at 9 a.m.
"He and all of his people came up in a Model T Ford owned by his friend,
Horace Maples. I'd never been in a car before," she says.

They drove to a farm owned by County Squire Joe Collins, who was in the

fields cradling hay. "It was a warm Thursday morning," Gertrude says.
Her green eyes gleam with emotion. One year later, her Civil War veteran, a man of the world, took his new  bride to Knoxville to People's Studio. The photograph they had made there and mounted in a round, wooden frame hangs on a wall beside her bed where she can look at it daily.
(A photo of the pcture was inserted here)

She was only 19 years old. Her husband was 81. In the photograph he sits

in a chair, stiff and straight, hands on his knees. He is wearing a hat.
Gertrude also sits in a chair, stiff and straight, hands on her knees. She
is wearing a hat. That was the first photograph she had ever had taken and she did not know
how one should act or what one should do in such matters.
"I did what he did," she says. "I guess I should have taken my hat off,"
says Gertrude, almost embarrassed. John was long-legged. My feet wasn't
touching the floor," she says.

After a few years of boarding with friends, Gertrude told John she wanted a

home of their own. They had been walking by a log cabin by the side of the
road. After the death of the old couple who had lived there, John and
Gertrude bought it and began paying it off.

Gertrude does not know how old the log cabin is. She remembers seeing it

when she was a child. The boards on a later addition are more than a foot
wide, and the rusting tin roof is the same one John put on when the wooden
shingles began leaking .

It is the only house Gertrude has lived in since she was 23 years old.

There is only one electric light in the front of the cabin. There are two
electric outlets and two more fixtures in the back.

She has talked on a telephone only once in her life and that was when she

was a child. She has never owned a driver's license or driven an
automobile. Neither did John Janeway.

Gertrude and John lived together as husband and wife for only 10 years.

During that decade she cooked on the black and white Mascot's Solitaire
wood stove that still crouches in a corner in the back kitchen.
Gertrude loved to cook cornbread, and she remembers her first batch.
"It crumbled. John said not to worry. You had to break it up before you
could eat it anyway.

"John was good to me," she says, turning to look at the photograph.

"I called him honey, and he called me Gertie. "I told him I wouldn't stay
with him if he drank. He never did drink or curse. John was a good man.
He helped my mama and took care of her."

Beginning in 1937, death came in bunches for Gertrude. First, John Janeway

died. Two years later her mother died in the same bed in which Janeway had
died at the age of 91. Then, four months later, her youngest brother, Barney, died.
"He just grieved himself to death over Mama. He kept saying that Mama
was in a hole. Mama was in a hole."

Moments before her mother died, Hal made Gertrude promise she would

take care of "the least 'uns." "She died a-shoutin' when I told her I would."

Another brother, Rubin, lived with his sister until he died at the age of 73.

He is buried in the New Corinth Baptist Church cemetery down the hill
about 200 yards from John's grave.

"I asked Rube where he wanted to be buried. He told me he wanted to be

buried beside me. John is buried there," she says, tears filling the
corners of her eyes. "There is space for one more beside my man. But Rube
asked me to be buried beside him, and that's where I'm going. Right beside
Rube."

The cemetery in the New Corinth Community is on Smith Hollow Road in

Grainger County. A slender, sun-bleached Civil War tombstone stands out
on the top of the hill. It says, "John January. CO E. 14 Ill. Cav."
Gertrude had it put there after struggling with the government for a few
years to get the headstone.

She receives a $70 monthly Civil War pension check. It still comes to her

mailbox in the name of John January. It has been a long day, and Gertrude is tiring. She loves to talk with the
people her nephew Duel Grubb of Athens brings to visit her and with the
home nurses who attend her twice a day.

The single question left for Gertrude is this one: Why did a pretty young

girl marry such an old man in the last years of his life?

Gertrude is quick to answer that one. She doesn't blink, she doesn't even

have to think about it. Her eyes flash and her face beams.
               "I loved him," she says. "I adored him."

Copyright c 1998, The Knoxville News-Sentinel Co. All Rights Reserved.

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • ***************************************

A second article was published by the Associated Press

A fragile link with history

 Woman is one of last widows of Civil War veterans

 By Duncan Mansfield, Associated
 Press writer

    BLAINE, Tenn. -- Gertrude Janeway looks up from her bed and extends a frail little

hand to greet a visitor entering her tiny log cabin.

    Her touch is a fragile link to an epic period in America's history. Mrs. Janeway, 89, is one of three surviving widows of Civil War veterans.  She still lives in the three-room

home she and her husband, John, moved into 66 years ago. Electricity came much later, a phone only recently.

    "It don't seem like it has been too long since I was playin' like a young 'un," she said.

"No, it don't seem like it has been that long." She is now just a few years older than Janeway was when, in 1927, he married her as family and friends gathered in the middle of a dirt road. He was 81; she was 18. This, of course, was long after his service in the military. He joined the Union Army as a 19-year-old farm boy from Blount County and served in the 14th Illinois Cavalry for barely a year before the war ended in 1865.

    He would rarely talk about that, or about the decades he spent in California before

coming home to Tennessee, just before they met.

    "We sparked for three years, starting when I was 16," she recalls of their courtship,

and of her mother's stubbornness. "Mother wouldn't sign no papers" to let her marry before 18.

      "So my man says, 'Well, I will wait for her until you won't have to."'

A half-million soldiers died in the four years of the Civil War -- still America's most devastating conflict. Of the more than 3 million who came home, the last were centenarians when they died in the 1950s. Now, only Mrs. Janeway and two other women remain who knew these men most intimately. Daisy Anderson of Denver and Alberta Martin of Elba, Ala., both in their 90s, also married much older men.

   "These three widows are something unlike anybody else," says Sarah Anderson of

Selmer, Tenn., president of the Tennessee Tent 2 Chapter of the Daughters of Union Veterans.

  Last year, two widows were recognized at a special ceremony at Gettysburg, but Mrs.

Janeway wasn't invited. No one outside her family knew her whereabouts.

    The Daughters searched for Mrs. Janeway for more than two years, looking for a black woman on a miscue from the organization's record-keepers. Then The Knoxville

News-Sentinel, tipped by the local Department of Veterans Affairs, wrote about her. Sarah Anderson brought Mrs. Janeway a birthday cake and made her an honorary member. She was delighted. But Mrs. Anderson says she deserves more -- both in recognition and federal benefits. She is "a figure that the nation should honor." Yet Mrs. Janeway hasn't sought attention from an encroaching and curious world. She worries "she doesn't have the answers people are looking for," Mrs. Anderson says. After all, the war ended 44 years before she was born. Bedridden from arthritis, Mrs. Janeway gazes fondly at a tinted photograph of her and her husband. It was taken in a Knoxville studio, about 20 miles southwest of Blaine, a year after they married. The couple sits stiffly, both wearing hats. Her feet strain to reach the floor.

    "I would have looked better if I'd a had my hat off," Mrs. Janeway says. "But I didn't

know. That was the first picture I'd ever had in my life. And I thought I had to do just as he'd done." Though Blaine is rural, it is not isolated. Just down the road from Mrs. Janeway's tin-roof cabin, a suburbanite father swings a golf club with his young son. But, in ways, time stopped at Mrs. Janeway's front door. She has never wanted to live anywhere else. "No, no. Lord, no," she says to suggestions that she move to a nursing home. "She has a hold on that cabin," says nephew Duel Grubb of Athens, Tenn., who visits regularly and arranges for caregivers. "I guess she feels like it is the only thing that ever belonged to her and she is not about to give that up." Mrs. Janeway and her husband bought the cabin in 1932, and it is where he died in 1937, at 91, from pneumonia. It is where she cared for her mother, Halley, until she died two years later, and for her handicapped brother, Ruben, until he passed away at 73 in 1989. Born with a crippled right hand and leg, Mrs. Janeway looked out for all of them. She accepted the responsibility willingly, while John Janeway lifted the burden. He was the love of her life.

    "He treated me like a baby. You know how an old person, sometimes they will speak

ill or something? Well, I would go crying. I couldn't speak ill back to him to save my life. "And he would say, 'Well, honey, I didn't mean to hurt your feelings," she recalls, with a crackling giggle. Over time, Mrs. Janeway learned bits of his war experience. He was doing chores, riding to a grist mill, when he met a group of Union horse soldiers who persuaded him to join up. He sent the family horse home and enlisted under the surname January because, his widow says, "he was afraid his people would come and claim him." Barely two months in uniform, he was captured near Athens in August 1864, during the Georgia campaign. He was paroled at Savannah four months later and discharged the following July. "He says the nighest he ever got to gettin' killed was when they shot a hole through his hat brim," she says. But he never told her where it happened. Mrs. Janeway still gets a $70 check each month from the VA for John January -- the name on his slender military tombstone in the New Corrinth Baptist Church cemetery a few miles away. "After he died, why it just seemed like a part of me went down under the ground with him," Mrs. Janeway says. But she never let go. "He is the only one I ever had," she says. "There wasn't anybody else."

1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. ##########

OBITUARY....KNOXVILLE NEWS...JANUARY 19, 2003

Tennessee's last widow of Civil War veteran dies at 93.

January 19, 2003

Gertrude Janeway, Tennessee's last known widow of Civil War veteran, died Friday. She was 93.

Mrs. Janeway was a founding member of Green Acres Baptist Church in Knoxville, and was an honary member of the Daughters and Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War.

On June 9, 1927, a month shy of her 18th birthday, she marries John Janeway, a Grainger County man who left home in 1864 to join the Union Army.

Two months after enlisting, Mr. Janeway, who went by the name of John January during his stint with the army, was captured in a battle against the Confederate soldiers near Macon, Ga. After being paroled, he rejoined his unit until the war ended four months later.

He dies in 1937.

Mrs. Janeway, who was profiled in a 1998 News-Sentinel story, has been receiving a $70 monthly Civil War pension check since then.

She is survived by many nieces and nephews.

The family will receive friends today from 6 to 8 p.m. at Smith Funeral Home in Rutledge. Funeral services will follow, with the Rev. Leonard Goins officiating.

Burial will be held 11 a.m. Monday at the New Corinth Cemetery.

1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. 1. ###########

Hendersonville, NC TIMESNEWS January 20, 2003 by Duncan Mansfield....The Associated Press

LAST WIDOW OF A UNION VETERAN DIES AT 93.

    Blaine, TN....Gertrude Janeway, the last widow of a Union veteran from the Civil War, has died in the three room log cabin where she lived most of her life..  She was 93.
    Bedridden for years, she died Friday, more than six decades after the passing of the man she called the love of her life, John Janeway, who married her when he was 81 and she was barely 18.
    "She was a special person," said Rev. Leonard Goins, who officiated at her funeral Sunday.
    She was to be buried Monday near her husband's slender military tombstone at tiny New Corinth Church cemetery.
    An honorary member of the Daughters of Union Vetereans of the Civil War, Mrs. Janeway was the last recognized Union widow.  She received a $70 check each month form the Veterans Adminstration.
    Still alive is Confederate widow Alberta Martin, 95, of Elba, Ala.
    Mrs. Janeway, who lived her whole life in Blaine, about 30 miles north of Knoxville, was born 44 years after the Civil War ended.
    In a 1998 interview, she said her husband rarely spoke about the war.
    Her husband was a 19-year-old Grainger County farm boy who ran away to enlist in 1864 after being encouraged by a group of Union horse soldiers that he met on his way to a Blount County grist mill.
    He sent his horse home and signed up under the surname January because " he was afraid his people would come and claim him," Mrs. Janeway said.
    Two months later, he was captured by Confederates near Athens, GA. He was released and rejoined his unit, the 14th Illinois Cavalry.  After the war, he spent many years in California before returning to Tennessee and meeting then 16-year-old Gertrude.
    Mrs. Janeway said her mother refused to sign papers to let her marry him before she turned 18.  So my man says, "Well, I will wait for her until you won't have to," she recalled.  "We sparked for three years."
    She remembered getting married in the middle of a dirt road in 1927 with family and friends gathered around.  He bought her the cabin in 1932 and it was there he died in 1937, at 91, from pneumonia.
    "After he died, why it just seemed like part of me went down under the ground with him," she said in the 1998 interview.  "He was the only one I ever had. There wasn't anyone else."