REAL SON H.V. BOOTH Part II

H.V. Booth, at about age 3, is pictured with his father, who lived until 1934. HV was 15 when his dad died.

“He didn’t believe in schooling,” Booth recalled from his living room in Elberton in northeast Georgia. “He believed in working. He said a poor man didn’t need anything but a burial plot.”

It was a message from a man who knew early on that life was hard.

Isham Booth was born in 1847 and joined the Confederacy when he was 16. There was a mustering field near Elberton, where the army took in new recruits. “They’d say, ‘We need 400 men to send to Virginia. We need 100 men in Alabama,’ ” Booth said.

At the time, Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s army was bearing down on Georgia, and young Isham Booth, it is believed, stayed in state. At some point, he was assigned to Camp Sumter (now known as Andersonville), which started holding Union prisoners in early 1864... 

Times were tough in the rural South early in the past century, and the pensions made aging Confederates attractive, said Ben Sewell, national executive director of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. “The old veterans received pensions and younger women married them for the pensions,” he said.

H.V. Booth, who was 15 when his father died, doesn’t know much about how his parents came to marry. His mother, who had been widowed, was 38 when H.V. was born. His father was 72. H.V. was his 12th and final child.

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