For the last nine years of her life Irene Triplett was a jolly soul, spending her days sitting with staff in a North Carolina nursing home, chewing tobacco.
“She would sit between me and Christy Shew,” said Jamie Phillips, the activities director at the home in Wilkesboro, and they would try to look away as she dispensed of the juice.
Ms Triplett’s final days were unremarkable, but her death revealed something extraordinary. She was America’s last surviving civil war pensioner — receiving $73.13 a month from the Department of Veterans Affairs. With her death last month aged 90, the work that began with President Lincoln’s promise in 1865 “to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan,”