The check arrived every month: $73.13.
Irene Triplett, who lived in a North Carolina nursing home, rarely talked about the source of the money. She was the final American to receive a pension from the Civil War — $877.56 a year from the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Mose Triplett, who'd served as a private in the Confederate Army before defecting to the Union, was on his second marriage when she was born in 1930. He was just a few weeks away from turning 84.
Four months after the war ended in 1865, Mose was discharged and eventually moved back to his native North Carolina, settling on farmland in Wilkes County. Twenty years later, the Journal article said, he applied for his Civil War pension. He and his first wife Mary had no children.
After Mary died in the 1920s, Mose married Elida Hall. He was 78. She was 27. Their 1924 marriage, according to the Journal, was rough. They lost three babies. Then Irene was born on Jan. 9, 1930, but had mental disabilities, according to the newspaper. She was 8 when her father died on July 18, 1938, at the age of 92. His headstone reads: "He was a Civil War soldier."
On Sunday, Irene Triplett died at Accordius Health, a long-term care facility in Wilkesboro, N.C., at the age of 90. A relative said she'd broken her hip a few days earlier and died of complications. She never married, and her only brother had died in 1996.
