Field Trip: Albert Woolson Gravesite

In a quiet hillside cemetery in Duluth, Minnesota resides the final encampment of the Grand Army of the Republic, situated on an unassuming grave marker for the last confirmed veteran of the American Civil War.

Henry Albert Woolson was born on 11 February of 1850 in New York, where the family lived until his father, Willard, a soldier in the Union Army, was seriously wounded at the Battle of Shiloh in 1862. Willard was sent to an Army hospital in Minnesota, where he succumbed to his wounds, and two years later the now fourteen year old Albert enlisted as a drummer boy in the Minnesota Artillery. He would not see action before the collapse of the Confederacy in the spring of 1865, but would remain a member of the prominent veteran’s organization the Grand Army of the Republic until his death in 1956.

With his death the Grand Army of the Republic officially dissolved, although its lineage is carried on this day by the Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War and its auxiliary.

Woolson was the last fully verified veteran of the American Civil War, although there were other claiments that were not proven, or were even debunked.

Woolston (front, center) with veterans from the Spanish American War, First World War, and Second World War at VFW Post 690 in Ashland, WI
Courtesy Chequamegon Veterans Center