Stone Gardens: The last Civil War veteran from Arkansas is buried in the Boyd Cemetery in northern Pope County
On the night of June 11, 1951, in a house on the old Civilian Conservation Corps ground at Camp Victor, a farmer who had enlisted at sixteen died at the age of 103. His name was John Greene Chisum.
A newspaper notice dated June 14, 1951, said he was one of two Confederate veterans still living in Arkansas, and that his death left only William M. Loudermilk of Jonesboro
. Chisum was the last surviving Arkansas-born Confederate veteran, and the next to last Confederate veteran to die in the state.
He is buried at Boyd Cemetery in Sand Gap, in Pope County, beside both of his wives.
He was born on February 19, 1848, at Calico Rock, in Izard County, to Bill Chisum and Mary Artimes Lewallen. Records sometimes shorten the middle name to Green. Almost nothing is known of the childhood. The family farmed in country the war largely passed by until he was old enough to leave it.
In 1864 he went to Newport, in Jackson County, and joined a command under Major General Sterling Price. He was sixteen. For the rest of his life he remembered the company and not the regiment. He said he had served in Company G. Surviving papers never supplied a regimental number, and the military marker on his grave stops at the same place: Company G, Arkansas Infantry, Confederate States Army, served 1864 to 1865.
The service covered the Red River campaign in Arkansas and Price's raid into Missouri. The 1951 obituary said he had been "in the camp with General Price in Jackson County, just below Newport," and that he was with Price's army when it surrendered near the end of the war.
On April 14, 1931, in Pope County, he filed Confederate pension application number 30042. That filing is the firmest official trace of a soldier whose own memory of the unit had already faded.
He went home to Izard County and spent the next decades farming and raising livestock. The years in between are thin in the record. By the late 1880s he had married Nancy Morris. A compiled family record places the marriage on November 22, 1882, in Searcy County. They had nine children before her death in 1907: Liddie, also recorded as Lydia, Molly, Johnnie, Nancy, Tommie, Mary, Annie, Bill, and Ollie.
On October 17, 1908, at Danville, in Yell County, he married Sarah Elizabeth Goswick. He was sixty. They had two children, Bob and Josie. The second was born in 1912, when he was sixty-four. Both wives lie in Boyd Cemetery with him.
By the late 1930s or early 1940s, John and Sarah were living near Ben Hur, on the Pope-Newton county line, in a house on property that had been Civilian Conservation Corps Camp Victor 1706.
The obituary calls the place Camp Victor and puts it in Pope County. Later reference works put the house at Ben Hur in Newton County. The names belong to the same ridge-country n
eighborhood
. The grave is on the Pope County side, at Sand Gap.
In those last years he was an active member of the United Confederate Veterans and a regular at local reunions. In 1938 he was one of fifty-one Arkansas veterans who went east for the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg. Jay S. Hoar later included him in The South's Last Boys in Gray, published in 1986.
The same year he died, two other Arkansas Confederate veterans had already gone. Sam Bennett Russell, age 106, died on March 9, 1951, at his home in Heber Springs, in Cleburne County. John A. Marcum, age 97, died on May 25, 1951, in the Birta community of Yell County, near Ola.
Chisum's death on June 11 left Loudermilk alone in the state. Loudermilk had been born on October 27, 1847, near Murphy, North Carolina, served in a North Carolina unit, and moved to Jonesboro in the late 1880s.
He died on September 18, 1952, at the age of 104, and was buried with military honors at Keller's Chapel Cemetery in Jonesboro. His stone calls him Arkansas's last
Confederate veteran.
He was not Arkansas-born. At the time of Chisum's death, the old soldier from Calico Rock was also counted among roughly the last thirty Civil War veterans still alive anywhere.
Boyd Cemetery is a country ground at Sand Gap in northern Pope County. Chisum has a family stone and a military marker. The marker reads CSA, Company G, Arkansas Infantry, February 19, 1848, to June 11, 1951, age 103 years, served 1864 to 1865.
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He is not the cattleman John Simpson Chisum, born in 1824 in Tennessee, who died in 1884 at Eureka Springs and is buried at Paris, Texas.
The Pope County man was a private, a pensioner, a father of eleven, and, for a little more than a year before Loudermilk's death, the last Arkansas-born soldier of that war.
