A Benefit Program That Ends After 155 Years

World War II is remembered by a dwindling number of Americans and World War I by almost no one (the last WWI veteran of any nation died in 2012). The last survivor of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake died in 2016.

Which makes it all the more remarkable that veterans' benefits from the Civil War (1861-1865) were being paid until this month.

Irene Triplett (1930-2020, WSJ)

Irene Triplett, the last person receiving a pension from the U.S. Civil War, has died at the age of 90.

Ms. Triplett’s father, Mose Triplett, started fighting in the war for the Confederacy, but defected to the North in 1863. That decision earned his daughter Irene, the product of a late-in-life marriage to a woman almost 50 years his junior, a pension of $73.13 a month from the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Mose Triplett (WSJ)

Mose Triplett fathered his daughter in 1930 when he was 83 years old. By all accounts he had an undistinguished life:

a civilian with a reputation for orneriness, [he] kept pet rattlesnakes at his home near Elk Creek, N.C. He often sat on his front porch with a pistol on his lap.

“A lot of people were afraid of him,” his grandson, Charlie Triplett, told the Journal.

If you live long enough, it's probable that you'll become famous. In the case of father and daughter, their combined longevity put them in the history books.