L. D. Filson's 100th Birthday

Title

Date

1957-11-10

Description

Newspaper article, titled "Worked Hard All My Life, Says County Man, 100," with a photograph subtitled "L. D. Filson, at, 100, Recalls His Youth." The article reads,

"Lot of Attention Given L. D. Filson On Birthday.

'I worked hard all my life and I don't regret that - it kept me out of meanness.'

An old gentleman was talking-L. D. Filson of the Mount Pleasant community in Roanoke County. The time was last Thursday night and Filson was getting plenty of attention-and for a good reason:

It was his 100th birthday.

People had been coming and going all day. They brought him candy, socks, a shirt and a sweater, and there was a big cake with '100th Birthday' outlined in green on the white frosting.

Filson lives with his wife, Annie, and his youngest son, Charlie, Charlie and his wife, in a white frame house off the Mount Pleasant road, near the Roanoke city limits.

Mr. and Mrs. Filson observed their 55th wedding anniversary last August. He was 45 and she was almost 32 when they were married in 1902. The house they moved into then is the one they are living in now.

Asked why he thought he had lived to be a 100, Filson observed:

'I lay it all to the Lord.'

One gathers, too, that Filson thinks hard work had something to do with it.

Most of his life he had farmed in the Mount Pleasant Community, but there was a time - half a century ago- when he worked several years in the Norfolk and Western shops.

And there was a spell of wanderlust in his early manhood. When hew as 21, Filson went off to Williamstown in northern Kentucky, where he worked on a farm and in a sawmill.

One of the attractions was higher wages. The best farm hands were getting $9 a month in Virginia in the 1890s, Filson recalled. Out in Kentucky he could earn $18 a month.

Filson said his parents were worried about his being so far from home- he was the youngest of 12 children.

'They wanted me to get away from that crows' he remarked, (referring to the sawmill gang) 'they were a hard lot, but I never had any trouble with them.'

Filson had an idea he'd like to go out to Oregon and then maybe on to California, but a brother back in Virginia persuaded him to come home.

'My brother said my mother and father were old and needed me, and I couldn't stand that, so I came back and stayed with them until they died,' he

Most of Life He has Farmed At Mt. Pleasant

explained, 'and I never regretted it!'

Filson has never smoked more than occasionally, but he did chew tobacco most of his life.

'I chewed tobacco from the time I was 14 until 10 years ago,' he remarked Thursday night.

Asked why he stopped then, he remarked tartly:

'I didn't want to chew that nasty old stuff.' Alcohol, too, seems never to have been much of a problem for Filson. He recalled a trip by wagon to Lynchburg to deliver a load of tobacco. He and his companions stopped overnight at Bedford on the way back, and one of the boys had some wine.

'I didn't know what it was,' he recalled, 'the next day I thought my head would bust open.'

He has a heart condition now, which prevented him from getting to the polls last Wednesday, and which keeps him from walking much. Until two or three years ago, he had a garden every summer and worked it himself.

He's lost a lot of weight in the last year or so. He used to weigh 170. Now he's down to about 130.

'But I've never been bedfast in my life,' he remarked sharply, 'and I never been in a hospital overnight.'

The Filsons' three children are Charlie, with whom they live, Clara, who is Mrs. W. C. Cundiff and Oscar Filson.

Charlie works at the American Bridge Works and Oscar is at American Viscose. There are four grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. All of the clan live in the Mount Pleasant community."

Creator

Sears, Robert B.

Format

image/jpeg

Type

Image; Text

Publisher

The Roanoke Times

Coverage

Roanoke County, Virginia

Rights

In Copyright http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Item