LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — Maudie White Hopkins, who grew up during the Depression in the hardscrabble Ozarks and married a Confederate army veteran 67 years her senior, died Sunday. She was 93.
Hopkins grew up in a family of 10 children. She did laundry and cleaned house for William Cantrell, an elderly Confederate veteran in Baxter County whose wife had died years earlier. When he offered to leave his land and home to her if she would marry him and care for him in his later years, she said yes. She was 19; he was 86.
“After Mr. Cantrell died, I took a little old mule he had and plowed me a vegetable garden and had plenty of vegetables to eat. It was hard times; you had to work to eat,” she told the Associated Press in 2004. In the interview, she referred to her first husband as “Mr. Cantrell” and described him as “a good, clean, respectable man.”
Hopkins later married Winfred White and started a family. In all, she was married four times.
For decades, she didn’t speak about her marriage to Cantrell, concerned that people would think less of her.
“I didn’t do anything wrong,” she said. “I’ve worked hard my whole life and did what I had to, what I could to survive. I didn’t want to talk about it for a while because I didn’t want people to gossip about it. I didn’t want people to make it out to be worse than it was.”
Hopkins is survived by two daughters and a son.
