AMERICA'S OLDEST WOMAN.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXI, Issue 18711, 17 May 1924, Page 25 (Supplement)

AMERICA'S OLDEST WOMAN.

FIRST VOTE AT 114 YEARS.

MEMOETES OF THE CIVIL -WAS;

Smoking a cora-oob 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. • ' _ . lira. rower lives -li miles from Fort "Worth, Texas, , with her daughter, Mrf. Roberts, her granddaughter, and the lather's family. She has secured a certientitling 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 the 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 tjsed to help with the ploughing and after that prepare supper. In the Civil War . we made 'coffee' from parched : potatoes. Wo got salt by taking up the boards from the smokehouse floor and boilin? out the salt that had driped into 'them from the meat." v Once when Mrs. Power's son Tom was fighting Indians an arrow hit him in the back. "He put the spurs to his mustang," she narrates, " and kept a-riding after reaching back and jerking out the ■ arrow." Women la Mrs. Power's day never swore and rarely whistled. "We used to say - a whistling girl and a crowing hen . never came ,to any good." Mrs. Roberta is the only «ne of her children living. Mrs. Power has 44 grandchildren and 50