Did you know Lawrence County’s last Revolutionary War veteran died less than ten years before the Civil War began?

By the early 1850s, there were few Revolutionary War veterans left in the United States. Indeed, on the 1850 census, only 67 Lawrence Countians were left who said that they had been born before 1776, and only six of those people had been 15 or older when the Revolutionary War began.

But Lawrenceburg resident Samuel Thomas was one of them. In fact, he was the last surviving veteran of the Revolutionary War in Lawrence County.

Born on March 10, 1759 in Dinwiddie County, Virginia, Samuel was 19 years old in August 1778, when he marched off with his militia company from Anson County, North Carolina, to fight for American independence. As his obituary states, “he served his country faithful, and at the close of the war was honorably discharged, and retired to private life, to enjoy, in common with his co-patriots of the revolution, the fruits of his toils and privations.”

His obituary, however, only tells part of the story.

In his pension application testimony, Samuel tells tales of fighting Tories, marching through the backwoods of South Carolina, doing battle with redcoats, marching with George Washington’s army, and being present at Yorktown on the day that the British surrendered.

Samuel was 90 years old when he applied for his pension in Lawrenceburg. At that time, he said that he had lived in Tennessee since 1816.

Samuel died in Lawrenceburg on December 14, 1853, at the home of prominent citizen George H. Nixon. According to his obituary, he was the last surviving veteran of the Revolutionary War to live in Lawrence County. Samuel was buried with full military honors. The local volunteer militia company of Captain Burkett escorted Samuel’s body to the grave.

The Methodist minister Reverend Noah Parker preached ‘an appropriate Divine service,’ followed by a stirring patriotic eulogy from H.H. Rose. Some excerpts of that eulogy are as follows:

“It is needless for us to ask, why this array of arms around the peaceful grave? Why that banner, with its time honored stars and stripes, is now waving over this ‘city of the dead?’ We are around a soldier’s grave, and these are the fit emblems of a soldier’s burial….

“To day we have conveyed and laid in the silent grave the last soldier of of the Revolution in our county. He has been blessed with long life. He lived to see his country great and happy; extending the blessings of freedom, from the Atlantic to the golden shores of the Pacific ocean…

“We should be thankful that he has lived to enjoy the fruits of his own toil, and to see its blessings extended to a mighty nation–we should be thankful that he has lived to see that tree of liberty, which in youth he assisted in planting in freedom soil, extend its branches from the Atlantic to the Pacific ocean, and from the frozen north to the burning sands of the Rio Grande of the south…we should be thankful that he has lived to see that flag in the hands of his descendants, waving victorious upon the battlements of Monterey, Vera Cruz and Mexico; we should rejoice that he has lived to see his country one of the most powerful nations upon earth–the land of the free and the home of the oppressed of every country.”