Maudie White Hopkins | Confederate widow, 93

Maudie White Hopkins, 93, who grew up during the Depression in the Ozarks and married a Confederate army veteran 67 years her senior, died Sunday at a hospital in Helena-West Helena, Ark.

She grew up in a family of 10 children. She did laundry and cleaned house for William M. Cantrell, an elderly Confederate veteran in Baxter County whose wife had died. When he offered to leave his land and home to her if she would marry him and care for him in his later years, she said yes. She was 19; he was 86.

She later married Winfred White and started a family. In all, she was married four times.

For decades, she did not speak about her marriage to Cantrell, concerned that people would think less of her. Four years ago, she came around after a Confederate widow in Alabama died amid claims that she was the last widow from that war.

Military records show Cantrell served in Company A, French's Battalion, of the Virginia Infantry.

He enlisted in the Confederate army at 16 in Pikeville, Ky., and was captured the same year and sent to a prison camp in Ohio. He was exchanged for a Northern prisoner, and after the war moved to Arkansas to live with relatives.

- AP