M.B. Gibson Books

The elderly gentleman sat on his cabin’s porch wearing a white apron and the jacket he claimed was given to him by General Ulysses S. Grant.

“So you see, I ain’t really the oldest man in the world, as some people try to say. I’m just the oldest man in America.”

Born on Christmas Day in 1820, Mark Thrash, affectionately known as Uncle Mark, died on December 18, 1943, one week before his 123rd birthday. A short time before that, Roscoe E. Lewis, who worked collecting slave narratives with the Writers’ Project, visited him at his home at Georgia’s Chickamauga National Military Park.

“You see,” Uncle Mark explained, “my brother, Mark Anthony, is a missioner in Africa.”

Apparently, his twin, Reverend Mark Anthony Thrash, left for South Africa at the improbable age of 114. It is reported the brothers met once more in 1938.

I don’t know which movie to compare Mark Thrash’s life with—Little Big Man or Forrest Gump. Uncle Mark seemed to be everywhere and meet anyone who mattered in his day.

Born into slavery in Virginia, his master, Dr. Christopher Thrash, moved everyone to Georgia when tobacco wore out the land. Uncle Mark helped clear 500 acres there to build a new plantation. He recalled feasts of wild game, berries, and fruits shared with local Native Americans.

At age seventeen, he married his first wife in the traditional “jump the broom” ceremony. They had nine children. Perhaps unsurprisingly, she died young. He then married a woman who gave him twins, followed by a third wife who bore eight or nine children. He couldn’t fully recollect. After the war and the death of his third wife, he married once again. Seven more children resulted. She died during the Spanish-American War.

He married for the fifth and final time in 1926. To a woman named Jessie in her late twenties. No children were conceived once he’d reached 106. All told, he had 29 children and more grandchildren than he could count. Literally.

Uncle Mark was in his early forties when the Civil War touched his life. He claims he was working in the fields when foraging Rebels came and scooped him up with the other goods. He was taken to Mississippi, and after a defeat in Jackson, ended up with General U. S. Grant in Vicksburg and beyond.

He worked with horses and the cooking—just about anything asked of him. But Uncle Mark refused to fight. Even though the Yankees gave him a gun, he made himself scarce when bullets flew.

As an aide to the Yankees, he was at the famous battle of Chickamauga which later became his home. The battle went badly for the Yankees, and he was made prisoner along with them. Amazingly, his master’s son, Lt. Elmo Thrash, arrived with his “waiting boy,” his own son Chris. Finding him, Lt. Thrash had him released.

He was ordered to help bury the dead with Rebels in one trench, Yanks in a second, and horses in a third.

“They said (General) Longstreet had ordered it that way, ’cause he didn’t want the Blues and the Grays to rise up and fight the battle all there together.”

One reporter who visited his house in 1935 was shown the coat from General Grant hanging beside a faded gray jacket of the best material, lined with heavy satin and decorated with three stars. The reporter claimed the old man’s hands trembled as he touched the garment, given to him, he said, by Robert E. Lee. Uncle Mark held the horse (Traveler?) of the famous general at some point.

He also told her he contacted Woodrow Wilson when, I assume, he was nearly 100 years old. “I wrote to him and tried to get him to send me to France in the last war, but he wrote back and said I had done enough for my country.” Tactfully put.

He also claimed to have seen Abraham Lincoln at one point, waited on a table where Andrew Jackson sat, and led Teddy Roosevelt around the park during the Roughrider’s visit.

Longevity ran in his family. His mother lived to 115 years of age, and his father reached 112. His oldest son survived 99 years when last reported, likely more in the end. Naturally, everyone wanted to know his secret. Uncle Mark had more than one answer to this.

“I have been seriously ill once. That was when I had yellow fever, but I got over it. I’m all right now except for a touch of rheumatism. I had the same trouble sixty-five years ago and I hope to master this.”

“I treated everybody right and lived obediently.”

He told Lee and Grant when the fighting started, “I would make myself scarce. I kept my word and that is why I am here now.”

“I attribute my years and good health to the kind treatment I got from my master and mistress. They was the best marsa and mistress that ever lived, God bless them.”

This last one was during talks with visitors encouraged to leave tips.

Is this all too much to believe? Many people have felt the same. Records for enslaved people are difficult to find or verify since most slave schedules did not use names. But the descendants of Uncle Mark’s owner, Dr. Christopher Thrash, were contacted. The results of an interview and the owner’s records verified the man’s claim. His age has been officially authenticated by the Federal Civil Service Commission. Case closed. Don’t ask any more questions.

 Uncle Mark Thrash was the oldest man in the world. Except for his twin, Mark Anthony. He was born sixteen minutes earlier.  

RESOURCES

Lewis, R. E. (1959). The Life of Mark Thrash. The Phylon Quarterly, 20(4), 389–403. https://doi.org/10.2307/273135

Family of Former Owners Assert “Uncle Mark” Thrash Really is 116. (1937, August 20). Chattanooga Daily Times, 16. https://www.newspapers.com/article/chattanooga-daily-times/130982141/

Routh, Mrs. J. (1942, June 28). Georgia Negro, 122, Has Twin Even Older page 18. Newspapers.com; The Atlanta Constitution. https://www.newspapers.com/image/384679873/?terms=uncle%20mark%20thrash&match=1

The Chattanooga News 25 Dec 1935, page 3. (n.d.). Newspapers.com. Retrieved August 31, 2023, from https://www.newspapers.com/image/603451045/