Laurentine F. Higbie

Private, 1st New York Light Artillery

Lauren Higbie

 

 

 

Wriiten by John Hogarth Lozier

Published by Loziers Publishing, Mt. Vernon, Iowa

Lozier was a personal friend of General John Logan and wrote the song as a tribute to Logan.

     Albert had enlisted as a drummer at the age of 17, research has shown that he was two years younger than stated, making him 15 when he joined, and only 107 when he died.

In July, Congress passed a law directing the Secretary of the Treasury to prepare gold medals with suitable inscriptions honoring the remaining veterans of the North and South. At the time of his passing, it was believed three Confederate Veterans remained. Their claim has proven to be erroneous. Representative John A. Blatnik of Minnesota, pushed for a quick award of the decoration to Mr. Woolson when the old soldier became critically ill, but the Treasury would be unable to get the medal finished before Oct. 1.

Mr. Woolson was the sole officially listed survivor of the more than 2,200,000 men of the Union armed forces. He also was the last survivor of the Grand Army of the Republic.

      As a boy in New York, it is possible that Albert could have spoken to Veterans of the Revolutionary War and War of 1812. He most likely served with Veterans of the Mexican War while in the Civil War, and had met with those who fought in the Spanish American War, World War One, World War Two and Korea.

Mr. Woolson fought in no Civil War battles, although he drummed to their graves many who had. When he was 106 he remembered it all pretty well. He recalled himself as a drummer boy of 17 in a rakish blue forage cap in the precise line of drummers who beat out the resonant slow step on muffled drums or, again, thudded the quick step--most likely "The Girl I Left Behind Me." "We went along with a burying detail," he said. "Going out we played proper sad music, but coming back we kinda hit it up. Once a woman came onto the road and asked what kind of music that was to bury somebody, I told her that we had taken care of the dead and that now we were cheering up the living."

      His father, was a carpenter in Watertown and apprenticed his son to this trade. The senior Woolson had, however, a second vocation. His father was a musician in the band of a traveling circus. Albert remembered "One day father and I went to the capitol building at Albany, N.Y. There was a meeting there and one man was tall, had large bony hands. It was old Uncle Abe, and he talked about human slavery."

      He also recalled: When I was nine years old, I went in with my father to Ford’s Theater. Two brothers, actors on the stage, the youngest one is the one that shot Lincoln, later on.

      When the war broke out his father enlisted and died as a result of wounds at Shiloh. Albert enlisted in the 1st Minnesota Heavy Artillery in late 1864, as a drummer and bugler. Company C already had its quota of one field musician. "I got the job by knocking his block off," Mr. Woolson recalled many years later.

      Albert was a Veteran of the Civil War as well as the Son of a Civil War Veteran, he was made Honorary Commander-in-Chief of the Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War at the 72nd National Encampment in Buffalo, New York, August 23-27, 1953.

      He and a friend formed a drum and bugle corps after the war, and most likely played in Des Moines at the 1922 Encampment. Woolson lived in Mankato and St. Peter, Minn., where he worked as a railroad fireman and a wood turner. He later worked as a grain miller and in a logging camp. In 1905 he moved to Duluth, at age 58. He worked as an electrician with the Duluth Carbolite Co. and for the Scott Graff Lumber Co. In 1925, at age 78, he went to work for the Hirschy Co., which manufactured washing machines. He retired in 1933 at age 86. It was at Duluth that he discovered he had a knack for storytelling to supplement his brisk bugle and drum. He would drop into a near-by school, tell a couple of fanciful tales, give a little lecture on thrift and pass out a few bright, new pennies.

"I love to play the drum and cornet. They’re about the only amusement I have left. When a man gets past a hundred, he’s got to be a bit choosy about what he does."

      President Eisenhower stated, “The American people have lost their last personal link with the Union Army.”