HIGGINSVILLE, Mo. â Missouriâs last Confederate was born in Pike County and passed away seven decades ago.
John Thomas Graves left the rebel army due to illness, but ended up living longer than any of his Missouri comrades and just about everyone else who fought in the Civil War. He died of heart failure at age 108 on May 9, 1950.
Graves was born at Prairieville near modern day Eolia on Jan. 1, 1842. His father, James, oversaw a tobacco plantation.
At the outset of war, Graves joined a Confederate company commanded by Harvard-educated John Bullock Clark Jr., the son of a U.S. Congressman.