AMERICA'S OLDEST WOMAN

Manawatu Standard, Volume XLIV, Issue 1039, 11 June 1924, Page 12

AMERICA'S OLDEST WOMAN

FIRST VOTE AT 114 YEARS. MEMORIES OF THE CIVIL WAR. Smoking a corn-cob pipe and nursing her 50th great-grandchild, Mrs J. M. Power, born, according to tax records, 114 years ago, has been chatting about her early life. Mrs Power lives 17 miles from Fort Worth, Texas, with her daughter, Mrs Roberts, her granddaughter, and the hitter's family. She has secured a certificate entitling her to cast her first vote in the coming elections. "I think it is foolishness," she said, "but my granddaughter's husband thinks I ought to vote. Mrs Power, who has lived in her house 56 years, has seen tho Indians driven from lands where farms now flourish. She recalls when she drove oxen and broke land for new fields. "I was in those days," she says, "always up at 4 a.m. at my spinning wheel. Then I used to help with the ploughing and after that prepare supper." In the Civil War "we made 'coffee from parched potatoes. We got salt by taking up tho boards from the smoke-house floor and boiling out the salt that had dripped into them from tho meat." Once when Mrs Power's son lorn was fighting Indians an arrow hit him in the back. "He put the spurs to his mustang," she narrates, "and kept adding after reaching back and jerking out the arrow." Women in Mrs Porter's day never swore and rarely whistled. "We used to say a whistling girl and a crowing hen never came to any good. Mrs Roberts is the only one of her children living. Mrs Power has 44 grandchildren and 50 great-grand-children.