Findagrave (
visit link) indicates that this remarkable man was still practicing medicine at age 100, and he lived not far from here in Pilot Point. His grave is marked not only by a pre-Great War Confederate headstone, but also by a more modern gray, granite headstone, with the following inscription below the family name:
Dr. John S.
1813 ~ 1915
Co. G. Wall's Texas
Legion, C.S.A.
Martha Ann
1830 ~ 1909
No precise dates of birth and death are available, so we know he was at least 101, possibly 102, when he died. The years of his life saw the following transpire:
1813 - James Strang, future "King of the Mormons," is born in March.
1823 - Strang's predecessor, Joseph Smith, Jr., claims to have had his vision of golden plates and an angel this year.
1833 - The British Empire abolishes slavery, but the law won't go into effect for another year.
1843 - Both Poe's "The Telltale Heart" and Dickens's "A Christmas Carol" are published. Future high school English students probably will take some years to appreciate both.
1853 - U.S. Commodore Matthew Perry arrives in Edo Bay with a request for a trade treaty with Japan.
1863 - The Emancipation Proclamation abolishes slavery in the United States.
1873 - The Great Depression begins, tapering off by 1879. Today, it is known as "The Long Depression" in light of what came later in the 1930s.
1883 - The Brooklyn Bridge opens, and not long after, twelve people are crushed in a stampede after a rumor spreads that the bridge's collapse is imminent.
1893 - Lizzie Borden is acquitted of taking an axe and giving her parents forty whacks.
1903 - Pope Leo XIII, elected as a stopgap pope in 1878, dies at age 93.
1913 - Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring" triggers a near-riot at its premiere in Paris.
1915 - Typhoid Mary Mallon is quarantined for life.