Anonymous ID: 13058c June 5, 2020, 7:37 p.m. No.9495801   🗄️.is 🔗kun

The last American to collect a Civil War pension - $73.13 a month - has just died

 

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.

 

The jaw-dropping fact that someone in the year 2020 was still earning a Civil War pension was the result of two factors: First, Triplett suffered cognitive impairments, qualifying her for the lifelong pension as a helpless adult child of a veteran. Second, her father, 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.

 

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.

 

https://www.adn.com/nation-world/2020/06/05/the-last-american-to-collect-a-civil-war-pension-7313-a-month-has-just-died/