The Oldest Man in the World

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 ...