Last Living Confederate Soldier: Glenville NC History

Written By: Carol M. Bryson | Issue: 2021/04 – April

Elbert Frank Watson Sr. of Glenville had lived to be 99 years, seven months and two days old when he passed away on October 4, 1942.  

The death of the almost centenarian was announced in several local newspapers.  He was honored by a long article about being the last-living Confederate Civil War veteran in Jackson County.  This was true – however, the article failed to mention the many other community-minded services he performed and positions he held during his long life. 

Elbert was born in 1843 to John Hickey Watson and Lucinda Moss Watson in the upper Tuckasegee River Valley community known as Hamburg.  

Today, this original village is gone.  It’s under the waters of Lake Glenville.  

Elbert’s father opened up the first post office for Hamburg in 1856 when Elbert was 16.  After just turning 18, he answered the call to enlist with the N.C. 25th Regiment of the Confederate Army, “along with one of his first cousins and one uncle.” 

Elbert served as a private for three years, up to the time he was wounded in the left arm at Petersburg, Virginia, on July 30, 1864, during the deadly Battle of The Crater, when the Union Army dug out an old mine shaft to plant dynamite under the Rebel camping grounds, blowing the Rebel soldiers up into the air and leaving a huge crater. Elbert Watson came home on furlough to Hamburg to recuperate.  He was still at home when the war ended the following spring. 

In 1866, when Elbert was 23, he married a gal from South Carolina, Martha Alexander, who was 21. Like most everyone else, he was farming for a living and raising five children in the Hamburg village.  Elbert became a trustee of the first Hamburg Baptist Church.  

When the new county high school was to be built in 1891 in Hamburg, Elbert was a trustee for that school.  He was a member of a progressive group of citizens who wanted to incorporate the little village into a town.  They were successful in getting it done in the N.C. Legislature in 1891. As stated in the Act, Hamburg was to become known as the Town of Glenville and Elbert was designated as its interim Mayor.   There was much local resistance to the action and no further elections for officers took place.  

At 50, Elbert Watson settled down to being a postmaster for Glenville in 1893, just as his father had been.  He was appointed a Justice of the Peace for the community, serving for 33 years.   

A well-regarded Democrat, Elbert Watson was elected in a county-wide election as a County Commissioner.  He served from 1896 to 1898, at a time when horse and wagon were his only means of travel to the county seat of Webster. With no election districts in those years, it had been 24 years since someone from the upper end of the county had been elected as a county commissioner, which demonstrates he was well-known throughout the county.   

In their seventies when their children were grown and had families of their own, Elbert and Martha moved up the mountain chain to Burnsville to live with their son, John Alexander Watson, and his family.

During their stay there, Martha passed away in 1917. Elbert stayed in his son’s household until the summer of 1920, when he decided to move back home to Glenville.  

In Glenville, he started a new life by marrying the daughter of his good friend, Bennett Jasper Moody.  Sarah Sallie Moody had never married and was 42 at the time when Elbert was 77.  

In the last two years of his life, Elbert experienced a forced upheaval of his home place, and witnessed his other villagers experiencing the same.  They saw their village disappear during the construction of a dam to create Lake Glenville.  Elbert died just after the valley basin that was the old Glenville village filled with water for the first time.  Life as he knew it had ended.