Appalachian Figures
In the hills of southern Lawrence County, Tennessee, the unincorporated community of Westpoint sits close to the Alabama line, a small place where farms and timber once defined daily life. In 1903 a boy was born there who would spend his adulthood in steel hulls under the Atlantic and Pacific, help test lifesaving submarine escape gear, and take part in one of the most famous undersea rescues in American naval history.
By the time Lieutenant Commander Floyd Huston “Skipper” Matthews died in 2008 at age one hundred five, newspapers knew him as the nation’s oldest surviving submarine sailor and Alabama’s oldest veteran. His story began on rough Lawrence County ground and carried him to battlefields from Normandy to the Pacific before circling back to the Tennessee Valley.
Westpoint, Loretto, And A Lawrence County Childhood
Modern maps list Westpoint as an unincorporated community in Lawrence County with a post office, a small footprint of less than one square mile, and a population that still numbers in the low hundreds. It lies in the hills of southwestern Lawrence County near the Alabama border, a landscape of creeks and ridges that has long tied families in Lawrence County to nearby Lauderdale County, Alabama.
Floyd Huston Matthews was born there on February 3, 1903, to John Huston (often rendered Houston) Matthews and Nancy E. “Nannie” Farris Matthews. His obituary in the Florence TimesDaily and its Pensacola counterpart both remembered him as “born in West Point, Tenn.” and later a resident of Lawrence County, Tennessee, at the end of his life.
Genealogical sources fill in some of the family background. A Find a Grave entry for his mother identifies her as Nancy E. “Nannie” Farris Matthews and notes that she married John Huston Matthews in Lawrence County on September 28, 1904. FamilySearch aggregates records that place her own birth in Giles County, Tennessee, around 1876, while John appears in related entries as a man born in Lexington, Lauderdale County, Alabama.
These cross–border ties fit the broader pattern of early twentieth century life in southern Lawrence County. County histories describe how families moved back and forth between north Alabama and the Lawrence County hills, buying timber land, cutting sawmills into the woods, and then turning cleared ground into cotton fields.
Floyd grew up in that world of small farms and rough roads. Later accounts mention nearby Loretto as another point in his early life, and the Associated Press story that profiled him at age one hundred one refers to him leaving Loretto as a teenager to enlist. Taken together, the sources suggest a boy whose childhood moved within the small towns and rural communities of southern Lawrence County as his family’s fortunes shifted.
Walking To Florence And Lying About His Age
Like many Appalachian veterans of the First World War era, Matthews entered military life young. His obituaries and submarine veterans’ memorials all agree that he enlisted in the United States Navy in 1919 at sixteen years old, in the months after World War I ended.
The Associated Press profile preserves his own memory of the day he left the hills. The reporter notes that Matthews left Loretto, Tennessee, and enlisted as an underage sailor in 1919; Matthews explained that he told the recruiter his birthday was February 3 but “left out the year,” letting the man assume he was nineteen instead of sixteen.
Other accounts from submarine veterans recall that he literally walked from the Westpoint area across the state line to Florence, Alabama, a regional center where recruiting offices and rail connections offered a path outward from Lawrence County. The TimesDaily obituary, published in Florence, describes him as a Lawrence County, Tennessee, resident at the end of his life and emphasizes that he had been an Alabama–based veteran for decades.
After enlisting, Matthews completed two months of training at the U.S. Naval Training Center in Gulfport, Mississippi. From there he went to sea on battleships such as USS Pueblo and USS Kansas, gaining experience on large surface ships before ever setting foot inside a submarine. That trajectory matches the way many early submariners came up through the fleet in the interwar years, learning traditional seamanship before moving into the new and dangerous world of undersea craft.
Learning The Boats: S-Class Submarines And Knoxville Recruiting
By the mid 1920s Matthews had transferred into the submarine service, a small and still experimental branch of the Navy. Submarine veterans’ magazines remember him qualifying in submarines aboard USS S-44 in 1925. A Charleston Base newsletter of United States Submarine Veterans, Inc., records that one hundred five–year–old Floyd “Skipper” Matthews qualified on USS S-44 (SS-155) that year and that he was the organization’s oldest member in 2008.
The same veterans’ notice and related summaries list a string of early boats that Matthews served on. Many were known only by letters and numbers, including O-6, S-12, S-4, R-13, O-4, R-14, S-43, and S-46. They were small, cramped, and mechanically temperamental, the kind of submarines that still relied heavily on crew skill and luck.
In the late 1930s Matthews briefly stepped away from the boats to work topside as a recruiter and trainer. Newspaper references cited in his later biographies point to Knoxville coverage in March 1939, when the Knoxville Journal ran a story titled “Navy recruiter to leave city for sub duty” and the Knoxville News–Sentinel noted his work with submarine escape training. These contemporary clippings show him as a familiar naval presence in an Appalachian city, the local recruiter who was about to return to the front lines of undersea experimentation.
From Knoxville he went to New London, Connecticut, the Navy’s main submarine base, where he would join a small team working with one of the most important lifesaving devices in naval history.
Working With “Swede” Momsen And The Momsen Lung
The AP feature that profiled Matthews at one hundred one preserves a rare first–person window into his relationship with Charles “Swede” Momsen, the officer whose name became synonymous with submarine rescue.
Momsen, a Danish American graduate of the Naval Academy, pioneered two different technologies for saving trapped submariners. One was the McCann rescue chamber, a diving bell that could be lowered from a surface ship, mated to a submarine’s escape hatch, and used to ferry sailors up and down. The other was the “Momsen Lung,” a rubber rebreather that allowed individual submariners to make free ascents, recycling their exhaled air through soda lime, buying enough oxygen to reach the surface.
Matthews was there for both the development testing and the operational debut of the Momsen Lung. In the 2004 interview he recalls that he was among the first to try out the device in the YMCA pool at New London, wading into deep water with extra weights to prove that a man could breathe off the bag and still surface safely. He also remembered test dives at Key West, Florida, where he and others used the gear at one hundred feet, a depth that pushed the limits of the era’s escape training.
In the feature he calls Momsen “a genius” and “an innovator” who kept searching for new ways to keep submariners alive. The article notes that Matthews remained close to his mentor’s legacy years later, attending the 2003 launching of the destroyer USS Momsen in Bath, Maine, and planning to attend its commissioning in Panama City, Florida, where a Naval Diving and Salvage Training Center honors Momsen’s work.
The Squalus Disaster And A Famous Rescue
On May 23, 1939, Momsen’s devices faced their first real test. USS Squalus, a new submarine, sank during a test dive off the New Hampshire coast when a valve failure flooded her aft compartments. Dozens of men were trapped on the bottom in more than two hundred feet of water.
The Navy rushed a rescue ship and divers to the scene, and Momsen, now an experienced diving officer, directed operations. Over thirty–nine hours a McCann rescue chamber made four trips down to the wreck, docking with the Squalus and bringing up the surviving men. Historical summaries agree that thirty–three crew members were saved, while twenty–six perished in the initial flooding or remained in compartments the chamber could not safely reach.
Matthews’ own role in the rescue appears in both secondary accounts and veterans’ recollections. The English–language Wikipedia entry on him, drawing on Navy articles and veteran interviews, notes that he was one of the first to use the Momsen Lung and that he used it in the Squalus operation to help bring trapped submariners up alive. A submariner blog that summarized his career likewise emphasizes that he supported the rescue by working with the rescue chamber team and the breathing gear that Momsen had spent years perfecting.
Decades later Matthews appeared as himself in the BBC Four documentary “Hanging by a Thread,” part of the Voyages of Discovery series, where he spoke on camera about submarine escape and the Squalus effort. The episode’s credits list him as a former submarine escape instructor, and viewers can see an elderly man from Appalachia recalling cold Atlantic water and desperate men in a steel tube, connecting Lawrence County to one of the most studied rescues in naval history.
War Service From Normandy To The Pacific
Matthews stayed in uniform as Europe and the Pacific slid into war. According to his Navy biography as summarized in later references, he served during World War II as an executive officer aboard a salvage vessel during the Normandy landings in June 1944, helping to clear damaged ships and keep the invasion beaches open. He later transferred to the Pacific theater, where salvage and towing were just as crucial to moving fleets across vast distances.
By the later stages of the war he had risen to lieutenant commander. Postwar accounts and the AP photograph that accompanies the 2004 feature show him standing in his Pensacola retirement home in front of a painting of USS Chickasaw, an ocean tug he once commanded. In the article he is described as a retired lieutenant commander who had moved from battleships to submarines and then to command of the Chickasaw.
When he retired from the Navy in 1949, Matthews had logged three decades in uniform, a span that ran from the tail end of World War I through the immediate post–World War II era. Veterans’ obituaries note that he served on at least seven submarines before the war and on multiple surface ships afterward, an unusually long and varied career even by the standards of his generation.
Pensacola, Lawrence County, And The Oldest Submariner
After retirement Matthews settled into civilian life but never entirely left the submarine community. He lived for years in Pensacola, Florida, where he became active in local submarine veterans’ organizations and was a familiar face at base events. Newspaper coverage from the early 2000s notes that submarine veterans gathered to celebrate his one hundred second birthday in Pensacola and refers to him as a “fellow sailor” whose life linked younger submariners to the era of early diesel boats.
By his one hundredth birthday in 2004 Matthews had attracted national attention. A newspaper piece titled “Submarine Veteran marks 100th birthday,” cited in multiple biographical summaries, described him as one of the oldest surviving World War II veterans and one of the few remaining World War I era veterans still living in Alabama or Florida.
The Veterans Legacy Memorial of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs lists his full name as FLOYD HUSTON MATTHEWS, with service during the World War I and World War II periods, rank of lieutenant commander, and service branch as U.S. Navy. That memorial and its linked Barrancas National Cemetery entry confirm his birth and death dates as February 3, 1903, and February 24, 2008, and record his burial at Barrancas, the national cemetery at Naval Air Station Pensacola.
Find a Grave, which mirrors details from his obituaries and VA records, adds that he died in Florence, Lauderdale County, Alabama, and that he had been preceded in death by his wife Vena Yocom Matthews and his son Floyd William Matthews. The same entry repeats that he was the nation’s oldest surviving submarine sailor and Alabama’s oldest veteran at the time of his death.
His Florence TimesDaily obituary, reproduced on Legacy.com, emphasizes his family ties as much as his naval record. It names his surviving children and grandchildren, notes that he was a member of Florence First United Methodist Church, and describes the memorial service in Florence followed by a military honors funeral at Barrancas National Cemetery. The Pensacola News Journal obituary carries almost identical language, underscoring how both his Alabama home and his Florida submarine community claimed him as their own.
A Lawrence County Story In A Global War
Seen from the perspective of Lawrence County, Floyd “Skipper” Matthews embodies several overlapping Appalachian stories. He was a child of a small, unincorporated community whose parents bridged Tennessee and Alabama. He grew up in a county shaped by the same early twentieth century timber cutting and cotton planting that touched communities across the Appalachian South. As a teenager he did what many rural young men did: he walked to the nearest town large enough to hold a recruiter and stepped into the military as a way to see beyond the ridges.
Unlike most, his path led under the sea. His work with Charles “Swede” Momsen tied an Appalachian recruit to cutting edge engineering in New London and Key West. His presence at the Squalus rescue linked a boy from Westpoint to an event that naval historians still describe as one of the great submarine rescues in history. His later command of the ocean tug Chickasaw and his service at Normandy and in the Pacific placed him on the maritime front lines of World War II.
In retirement he became a living bridge between generations. Younger submariners who visited him in Pensacola or traveled to celebrate his birthdays could look into the face of a man who had known S-boats, Momsen lung trials, and wartime salvage operations. For people in Lawrence County, reading about their native son in distant newspapers reinforced the idea that someone from a place as small as Westpoint could help change how the Navy thought about saving lives underwater.
Matthews’ life also reminds us how Appalachian histories run through national institutions. County genealogical fact sheets, cemetery records, family–history sites, and small town obituaries combine with naval archives and BBC documentaries to tell the story of one man. For researchers tracing the intersection of Appalachia and military service, he offers a case study in how a rural Tennessee upbringing could lead to a career at the center of twentieth century naval innovation.
Sources & Further Reading
Associated Press, Bill Kaczor, “101-year-old Navy retiree recalls days with submarine hero,” Lake City Reporter (Lake City, Florida), August 22, 2004, reprinted via University of Florida Digital Collections, including interview and photograph of retired Lt. Cmdr. Matthews in his Pensacola retirement home. UFDC Images
Florence TimesDaily (Florence, Alabama), obituary “Floyd H. Matthews,” February 26, 2008, via Legacy Remembers, and Pensacola News Journal obituary “Floyd Huston Matthews,” February 27, 2008, both summarizing his life, family, and status as the nation’s oldest surviving submarine sailor and Alabama’s oldest veteran. Legacy.com+2Legacy.com+2
Veterans Legacy Memorial, U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, digital memorial page for FLOYD HUSTON MATTHEWS, confirming his dates, rank as lieutenant commander, service in the U.S. Navy during the World War I and World War II periods, and burial at Barrancas National Cemetery. CEM
United States Submarine Veterans, Inc., Charleston Base newsletter, March 2008, section “105 yr old Floyd ‘Skipper’ Matthews, Departing!” noting his qualification in USS S-44 (SS-155) in 1925, his status as the oldest member of USSVI at age one hundred five, and his long list of early submarines. USS VICB+1
Find a Grave memorial for “Floyd Huston Matthews” and related memorials for Nancy E. “Nannie” Farris Matthews and Viola Estella Matthews Slagle, which tie the family to Westpoint and Lawrence County and record the parents’ names, marriage date, and children. Find A Grave+3Find a Grave+3Find a Grave+3
“Floyd Matthews,” English-language Wikipedia entry summarizing his early life in Westpoint and Loretto, Tennessee, his enlistment in 1919, his work with the Momsen Lung and the USS Squalus rescue, his World War II service, and his later recognition as the oldest submariner; includes references to Knoxville newspaper coverage, Navy biographies, and birthday articles. Wikipedia
“Westpoint, Tennessee,” and “Loretto, Tennessee,” entries in modern reference works that outline the geography and history of southern Lawrence County communities, helping situate Matthews’s birthplace within the broader Appalachian borderlands between Tennessee and Alabama. SOS Tennessee+3Wikipedia+3Wikipedia+3
Naval Undersea Museum, “Submarine Rescue Chamber” and related resources on the Momsen Lung and the 1939 USS Squalus rescue, providing technical and historical background on the devices Matthews helped test and use. U. S. Naval Undersea Museum+2Submarine Force Museum+2
Peter Maas, The Terrible Hours: The Man Behind the Greatest Submarine Rescue in History (HarperCollins, 2000), a narrative biography of Charles “Swede” Momsen that includes discussion of the Squalus operation and the development of the Momsen Lung and rescue chamber, offering wider context for the work Matthews supported. AbeBooks+1
BBC Four, Voyages of Discovery, “Hanging by a Thread,” documentary episode on submarine escape and rescue, featuring Matthews as himself near the twenty–minute mark, tying his oral testimony to archival footage and dramatization of the Squalus rescue. IMDb+1