“Happy birthday greetings from Colonel Walter Williams,” the wire said. For a week he lay quietly in his hospital bed, awaiting death.ĭown in Houston, old Walter Washington Williams had sent Woolson a telegram congratulating him on turning 109. “I thought he was looking very old,” she recalled. As she shut the door she glanced back at her patient. Just before he drifted off, he asked a nurse’s aide for a dish of lemon sherbet. But then on a Saturday in late July, 1956, he slipped into a coma. Luke’s Hospital in Duluth, his health deteriorating, he would sometimes feel his old self, quoting Civil War verse or the Gettysburg Address. Now Albert Woolson’s days were fading, the muffled drum of his youth a softening memory. With just a year left in the war, he enlisted as a drummer boy with the 1st Minnesota Heavy Artillery Regiment, rolling his snare as they marched south to Tennessee.īut that had been long ago, more than 90 years past. So, as the story goes, young Albert, blue-eyed and blonde-haired, a mere five and a half feet tall, took his father’s place. His grandfather had served in the War of 1812, and when guns were fired on Fort Sumter in 1861, his father went off to fight for Lincoln. (Courtesy of Whitman College and Northwest Archives, Walla Walla, Washington) And no one kept him from his half-ounce of brandy before dinner.Īlbert Woolson, the last in blue in the twilight of his old age, still could hit the drums like a boy sounding the march to war. He continued to smoke he had probably lit up more than a thousand cigars just since he had hit the century mark. His breakfast eggs had to be scrambled and his bacon crisp. The boys called him “Grandpa Al.”īut Woolson could be fussy. He was especially fond of children and enjoyed visiting schools and exciting the boys with stories of cannon and steel and unbelievable courage on the fields around Chattanooga. Though deaf and often ill, he was still spry enough that, even at 109 years of age, he could be polite and mannerly, always a gentleman. The Republic, a fraternal organization of Union veterans once nearly half a million strong, they erected a life-size statue of him on the most hallowed ground of that entire horrible conflict-Gettysburg.
Because everyone said he was the last surviving member of the Grand Army of Even the president wrote him letters on his birthday.
The city etched his name in the Duluth Honor Roll, and he was celebrated at conventions and banquets across the North. For Memorial Day in Duluth, Minnesota, he rode in the biggest car down the widest streets of his hometown. Serrano, published by Smithsonian Books.Īlbert Woolson loved the parades.