Last Civil War vet called Duluth home

The young teenager picked his perch in front of the Granada Theatre on Superior Street in the heart of Duluth. It was around 1950 and either July 4th or Decoration Day, as Memorial Day was originally called in the 1860s when soldiers' graves were decorated with fresh May flowers.

The parade rolled through Duluth 85 years after the Civil War ended, but there — waving from the back of a convertible — came a century-old veteran from that bloody conflict.

Albert Woolson, a teenage drummer from Minnesota, wound up the last of more than 3 million Civil War veterans when he died at the reported age of 109 and was buried in Duluth's Park Hill Cemetery 60 years ago this month.

"I vividly remember Albert sat in the back of a late 1940s Ford or Mercury convertible with the top down," recalled Dick Norberg, the parade-watching teenager who's now 79. "He sat up on the back with his feet on the back seat. I think he had on a uniform but I won't swear to that."

He will swear to the power packed into that memory.

"It was always exciting to see him," Norberg said. "As the last surviving veteran of the Civil War, it made a great impression on a young boy."

The son of a carpenter, Woolson was born in the upstate New York farm town of Antwerp. Most records list his birthday as Feb. 11, 1847 — the same as Thomas Alva Edison's. But a 1905 census log suggests he was born in 1849 and the findagrave.com website says he was born in 1850.

When the Civil War erupted in 1861, Woolson's father, Willard, enlisted with other members of his musical band. The elder Woolson suffered a leg injury at the Battle of Shiloh and was sent to a military hospital in Windom, Minn., where his leg was amputated before he died.

Minnesota men of fighting age were stretched thin during the early 1860s, with their service needed both in Southern battlefields and back home after U.S.-Dakota War of 1862. To fill quotas, teenagers such as Albert Woolson were recruited to sign up. He was either 17 or a few years younger when he enlisted in October 1864 — with his mother's consent — as a rifleman with Company C of the First Minnesota Volunteer Heavy Artillery. He was soon assigned to be a drummer and bugler as his company marched through Tennessee. With the war winding down, Woolson and his unit camped near Lookout Mountain near Chattanooga. His regiment was sent home in August 1865 and he was discharged Sept. 7, 1865 — having seen no combat, but listed as a veteran of the war nevertheless.

Woolson worked as a carpenter after the war and was twice married — 33 years to his first wife, Sarah Jane Sloper and, after her death in 1901, 45 years to Anna Haugen. He had eight children and joined five other veterans at the last national encampment of the Grand Army of the Republic in Indianapolis in 1949 when he was 102. In 1953, at 106, he was named senior vice commander-in-chief of that band of Civil War veterans.

Woolson often regaled reporters with historic tales, like firing his first cannon. "One day the colonel handed me the end of a long rope. He said, 'When I yell, you stand on your toes, open your mouth, and pull.' First time the cannon went off, I was scared to death."

Waging war against fellow Americans was troubling. Said Woolson: "We were fighting our brothers. In that there was no glory."

"One man was tall, had large bony hands," he said. "It was old Uncle Abe, and he talked about human slavery." Woolson also said he attended a play at Ford's Theatre in Washington — about a week before Lincoln was assassinated there.

On his 107th birthday, Woolson told Life magazine it was lonely being the last Civil War veteran: "It seems sad, all those friends gone. It's hard to realize, of all those two and a half million [Union] men I am the only one left … But don't you count me out yet, I'm going to be around for three of four of these birthdays."

When his lungs wore out two years later, he was buried in Duluth with full military honors on Aug. 6, 1956. President Dwight Eisenhower issued a statement, saying: "The American people have lost the last personal link with the Union Army. His passing brings sorrow to the hearts of all of us who cherished the memory of the brave men on both sides of the War between the States."

Duluth directories show Woolson living at 215 E. Fifth St. in the 1940s, with his second wife, when he was in his 90s. That's only a half-mile up the hill from where, as a teenager, Norberg watched the aging veteran ride by the Granada Theatre in a parade.

That theater became an adult bookstore before being demolished in 1987. But memories of the last Civil War veteran, waving and smiling, burn on. And south of Gettysburg, Pa., on Hancock Avenue in Ziegler's Woods, a statue was dedicated in 1956, a month after his death, showing Woolson sitting with a walking stick and Civil War cap. The engraving says simply: "Albert Woolson of Duluth, Minnesota. The last survivor."