In an oral history recording in 2018, Jackson said she never spoke of the wedding to protect Bolin’s reputation as well as her own. She also realized the stigma and potential scandal of a teenager wedding a man in his 90s, regardless of her reason. She never remarried, spending decades “harboring this secret that had to be eating her alive,” Inman said.Īfter Bolin’s death in 1939, she did not seek his pension. She never told her parents, her siblings or anyone else about the wedding. Throughout their three years of marriage there was no intimacy and she never lived with him. They wed on 4 September 1936, at his home. Jackson agreed in large part because “she felt her daily care was prolonging his life,” Inman said. To pay back her kindness, Bolin offered to marry Jackson, which would allow her to receive his soldier’s pension after his death, a compelling offer in the context of the Great Depression. Jackson’s father volunteered his teenage daughter to stop by Bolin’s home each day to provide care and help with chores. Bolin, a widower who had served as a private in the 14th Missouri Cavalry during the civil war seven decades earlier, lived nearby. Jackson grew up one of 10 children in the tiny south-western Missouri town of Niangua, near Marshfield. “It was sort of a healing process for Helen: that something she thought would be kind of a scarlet letter would be celebrated in her later years,” Inman said. Yet in those final years, Inman said, Jackson embraced the recognition that included a spot on the Missouri Walk of Fame and countless cards and letters from well-wishers. Several civil war heritage organizations have recognized Jackson’s quiet role in history, one that she hid for all but the final three years of her life, said Nicholas Inman, her pastor and longtime friend.
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