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Widow of Confederate soldier dies

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — Maudie White Hopkins did what she had to do as a young girl living a hardscrabble life in the Ozarks during the Depression.

In a family of 10 children, she did laundry and cleaned house for an elderly Confederate veteran in Baxter County whose wife had died years earlier.

When he offered to leave his land and home to her if she would marry him and care for him in his later years, she said “yes.” She was 19; he was 86. The couple was married only three years before he passed away.

For decades, Hopkins didn’t speak about her marriage to William M. Cantrell, concerned that people would think less of her. Four years ago, she came around after a Confederate widow in Alabama died amid claims that she was the last widow from that war.

Hopkins died Sunday at age 93, the mother of three children from a second marriage who loved to fry peach pies and applesauce cakes. Other Confederate widows are still living, but they don’t want any publicity, Martha Boltz of the United Daughters of the Confederacy said Tuesday.

“I didn’t do anything wrong,” Hopkins told the Associated Press in a 2004 interview about her first marriage. “I’ve worked hard my whole life and did what I had to, what I could, to survive. I didn’t want to talk about it for a while because I didn’t want people to gossip about it. I didn’t want people to make it out to be worse than it was.”

Military records show Cantrell served in Company A, French’s Battalion, of the Virginia Infantry. He enlisted in the Confederate Army at age 16 in Pikeville, Ky., and was captured the same year and sent to a prison camp in Ohio. He was later exchanged for a Northern prisoner, and after the war moved to Arkansas to live with relatives.

In the interview, Hopkins referred to her first husband as “Mr. Cantrell” and described him as “a good, clean, respectable man.” She recalled one description he gave of life as a Civil War soldier, how lice infested his sock supports and “ate a trail around his legs.”

Baxter County records show the couple received a marriage license Jan. 29, 1934, and were married four days later by a justice of the peace. She said Cantrell supported her with his Confederate pension of “$25 every two or three months” and that Cantrell left her his home when he died in 1937.

“After Mr. Cantrell died I took a little old mule he had and plowed me a vegetable garden and had plenty of vegetables to eat. It was hard times; you had to work to eat,” she said.

Pension benefits ended at Cantrell’s death, according to records filed with the state Pension Board. Hopkins remarried and started a family.

Born Dec. 7, 1914, Hopkins was living in Lexa in east Arkansas when she died at a hospital in nearby Helena-West Helena. Survivors include her three children, Ida Mae Chamness of Manassas, Va., and Opal Byrd and Melvin Lee White, both of Helena-West Helena. Graveside services will be Wednesday at Sunset Memorial Park in Lexa.