Appalachian Figures
When the Jackson Times printed the obituary of Wilson Edgar “Willie Bill” Terry in February 1968, it introduced him as the oldest native-born Kentucky veteran and as a familiar figure to readers in Breathitt and Owsley counties. The story traced a life that began in a small Crockettsville hollow in 1874 and ended at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Cincinnati after more than two years of war service, six decades of farm and church work, and a late-life move to Kings Mills and Mason, Ohio.
Across those ninety-three years, Terry’s path ran from Lees College in Jackson to the Philippine Islands, then back into the hill churches and farmsteads of Cow Creek, before finally following the same northbound routes that carried so many eastern Kentuckians into the industrial suburbs of the Ohio River Valley. His children became teachers, librarians, and writers. His daughter Berniece T. Hiser would publish one of the classic collections of eastern Kentucky folktales, Quare Do’s in Appalachia, drawing on memories from the same Cow Creek community where she and her siblings were born.
Reconstructing Terry’s story means reading that 1968 obituary alongside property records from Owsley County, FamilySearch and Find A Grave entries for his children, later newspaper features that celebrated him as the state’s oldest living war veteran, and even a memorial brick in Mason that still bears his name. Together they reveal how one mountain soldier bridged the Spanish American War, the Old Regular Baptist world of Cow Creek, and the mid twentieth century migration out of the eastern Kentucky hills.
Crockettsville beginnings and Lees College
According to both the Jackson Times obituary and later biographical summaries, Wilson Edgar Terry was born 7 March 1874 at Crockettsville in Breathitt County, the son of Isaac Terry and Sytha Caudill. FamilySearch’s compiled entry for “Wilson Edgar Terry (1874–1968)” repeats that birth date and places him in Kentucky, with parents named Isaac C. Terry and Cynthia or Sytha Caudill, confirming the obituary’s basic outline.
Crockettsville lay upriver from Jackson in what outsiders soon labeled “Bloody Breathitt,” a county better known for feuds and election day fights than for college graduates. Yet the Terry obituary notes that Wilson attended Lees Junior College in Jackson, sometimes remembered under its earlier name, Jackson Institute. Lees recruited heavily from the surrounding mountain counties and trained schoolteachers, ministers, and local professionals. For a young man from Crockettsville it also provided a path into the United States Army.
In 1899, as the Spanish American War shaded into a longer conflict in the Philippines, Terry left Lees and joined the volunteer forces being raised in Kentucky. The obituary states that he enlisted in Company G of the 44th Regiment, United States Volunteer Infantry, at Jackson on 19 September 1899 for a two-year term. The 44th was one of several short term volunteer regiments created after the formal end of the Spanish American War to fight Filipino independence forces in what historians now call the Philippine American War.
Hunting Aguinaldo in the Philippines
Terry’s obituary and his later Wikipedia biography agree that Company G of the 44th U. S. Volunteers sailed for the Philippine Islands and spent nearly two years in field service there. The Jackson Times writer, clearly proud of the local boy who went so far from Breathitt County, described his part of the campaign as “hunting Aguinaldo,” a reference to Emilio Aguinaldo, the revolutionary leader whose capture in 1901 effectively broke organized resistance to American rule.
The unit’s Philippine service falls within the broader pattern described in federal guides to U. S. military records. Volunteer regiments raised for the Spanish American War and its aftermath have compiled service and pension files in the National Archives’ nineteenth century Army collections, along with rosters and unit histories. Researchers who want to trace Terry’s daily movements would need to pair those federal records with the Jackson enlistment rolls for Company G and the 44th’s regimental reports from garrison posts and field expeditions.
The obituary gives a simple endpoint. Terry and his company were mustered out at San Francisco on 30 June 1901, their two-year term complete. He returned to eastern Kentucky with the experience of tropical campaigning and the status of a veteran in a county where most older men’s scars came from local fights, not foreign wars.
Old Regular Baptists and Cow Creek
Back in Breathitt County, Terry stepped quickly into roles that tied him to the churches and schools which knit together early twentieth century mountain communities. The Jackson Times obituary and Bowling’s modern transcription record that he reentered Lees College and married fellow student Ida Louise Kidd in 1902. Their brief marriage produced one daughter, Grace Elizabeth, before Ida’s death in 1904.
In the same year, 1902, the obituary notes that he joined the Old Regular Baptist Church at Cow Creek, a congregation in Owsley County rather than Breathitt. Old Regular Baptist churches emphasized plain preaching, lined out hymn singing, and conservative discipline. They also gave respected men a way to move from lay membership into licensed ministry through years of observed service. Terry followed that pattern. Twenty four years after he joined, in 1926, the Cow Creek church licensed him to preach.
His move from Breathitt to Owsley was sealed by a second marriage. County marriage indexes and the obituary agree that on 24 December 1906 he married Ruse (often rendered Rose) Wilder of Owsley County. This marriage eventually produced seven children. The obituary lists two sons, Oakley L. and Howard C., and five daughters, Bernice, Viola, Arlie, Audrey, and Doris, most of whom would later be associated with addresses in Mason and Kings Mills, Ohio, or with Richmond, Washington.
By this point Terry’s story is firmly anchored in Cow Creek rather than Crockettsville. Reference works on the community state plainly that “Wilson Edgar Terry lived there until 1927” and note that his daughter Berniece was born there in 1908. In other words, the Spanish American War veteran became one of the anchor figures in a small Owsley County hollow. He farmed, served as a notary public, and sang folk and religious songs that neighbors remembered for decades.
Children of Cow Creek and paths into Perry and beyond
The most vivid evidence of Terry’s years at Cow Creek lives in the records for his children. The FamilySearch entry for Viola Frayne Terry reports that she was born 3 March 1914 in Owsley County, Kentucky, to Wilson Edgar Terry and Ruse Wilder. A similar entry for Arley Fern Terry gives a birth date of 10 December 1919 at Cowcreek, Owsley County, with the same parents and notes that her father was already in his mid forties. These scattered genealogical notes match the obituary’s list of children and fix the family on Cow Creek through the 1910s.
Find A Grave memorials for Arley and for another daughter, Berniece Iona Terry Hiser, add later chapters. Both women are identified as daughters of Wilson E. Terry and Ruse or Rose Wilder Terry, with birthplaces at Cow Creek, Owsley County, and death notices that place them in Ohio or northern Kentucky. Arley’s obituary, as quoted in an Owsley County historical compilation, calls her “nee Terry” and emphasizes her deep Kings Mills and Mason connections, confirming the obituary’s picture of a family that moved north but kept its Kentucky roots.
Grace Elizabeth, Wilson’s daughter by Ida Kidd, left a narrower paper trail but a rich oral one. In a comment on Bowling’s “Breathitt’s Oldest Vet Dies” post, Sanford Logan Jones identifies himself as Wilson’s grandson and Grace’s son. He explains that his mother went from Athenia Academy at Cow Creek into teacher training at Berea College and then into Perry County’s schools in 1921, returning to the classroom in the 1950s after raising her children. That comment situates the Terry and Wilder children inside the same Appalachian education networks that produced so many county teachers and, eventually, scholars.
Berniece’s story best illustrates how the family’s Cow Creek memories traveled into print. Born in 1908 at Cow Creek to Wilson Terry and Ruse Wilder, she earned degrees from Berea College and the University of Kentucky, taught school, and later worked as a librarian. In 1978 she published Quare Do’s in Appalachia: East Kentucky Legends and Memorats, a collection of ghost stories, family tales, and local legends that reviewers in Appalachian Journal and Kentucky Folklore Record praised as a rare glimpse of eastern Kentucky oral tradition from an insider. Many of those stories revolve around her parents’ and grandparents’ generation, including Wilder family traditions that reach back to the Civil War.
Taken together, the children’s records show how a Cow Creek preacher and farmer raised a generation that stepped into classrooms, libraries, and publishing houses while carrying their home community’s stories with them.
Land, work, and the move north
The Jackson Times obituary describes Terry as a farmer and notary public in Kentucky and then a merchant in Ohio for more than thirty years. Owsley County deed abstracts help fill in the middle of that story. In September 1926, Deed Book 3 page 233 records that Mat and Rachael Behymer and Georgia Eller Allen, heirs of G. W. Behymer, sold their undivided interest in thirty acres on Indian Creek to “Wilson E. Terry of Cow Creek” for two hundred dollars. Six months later, in March 1927, Deed Book 3 page 235 shows Wilson E. Terry and his wife Rose of Cow Creek selling twelve acres of that same tract back to Robert Behymer of Ricetown.
Those land transactions confirm several details from the obituary. They show that by the mid 1920s Wilson and Rose were still based at Cow Creek. They document Rose’s name in records as “Rose” rather than “Ruse,” aligning with the spelling used on later grave markers. They also hint at economic ties that already linked Owsley County to Warren County, Ohio. On the same page of the Owsley abstracts, W. B. Huff and his wife Liddie Huff of Kings Mill, Ohio appear as grantors in another land sale, suggesting an established pipeline between Cow Creek and the Little Miami River valley where Wilson would later live.
By the 1950s and 1960s, newspapers and local records place Terry firmly in Warren County. The Warren County, Ohio entry on Wikipedia lists “Wilson E. Terry, Spanish American War soldier” among its notable residents. A Western Star notice from 1959, preserved in regional newspaper indexes, mentions “Wilson E. Terry of Kings Mills” among local residents, while the city of Mason’s MemorialBricks file includes a brick labeled “WILSON E. TERRY, US ARMY 1898, SPANISH-AMERICAN WAR.”
The obituary adds further detail. It states that Terry served as a merchant in Ohio for more than three decades, that he was a “staunch Republican” for over seventy years, and that Governor Bert T. Combs commissioned him a Kentucky Colonel on 24 April 1962. When his health failed, he was living with his daughter Berniece in Logan, Indiana, and entered the Veterans Hospital in Cincinnati on 11 November 1967. He died there on 15 February 1968 and was buried at Rose Hill Cemetery in Mason beside his second wife, Ruse, with full military rites by the Fort Ancient post of the Veterans of Foreign Wars.
Even in death, the mountain context never entirely fell away. Bowling’s transcription notes that at the time of his death Terry was remembered not only as a Warren County figure but as “the oldest native-born Kentucky veteran,” a phrase that anchored his identity back in Breathitt and Owsley even as his grave overlooked an Ohio town.
“Oldest war veteran” in the public eye
Terry’s long life and visible service made him newsworthy well before 1968. His biographical entry cites a 1956 Dayton Daily News piece titled “Congratulations” that highlighted him in Warren County society pages, probably in connection with his age or his Spanish American War service.
In August 1965 the Lexington Herald ran a feature with the eye catching title “Lost Turkey Track Silver Mine is Not A Legend, But It Sure is Lost.” Terry appears there not as a soldier but as a bearer of local lore, offering details about an eastern Kentucky silver mine story that had fascinated readers for generations. The piece situates him as both a veteran and a tradition bearer, an elderly Kentucky Colonel whose memories bridged frontier legends and modern newspaper culture.
When he died three years later, newspapers picked up the same themes. The Lexington Leader ran a story under the headline “State’s Oldest War Veteran Dies at 93,” while the Lawrenceburg Press in Indiana published a notice titled “Oldest War Vet Dies; Father of NDHS Librarian,” emphasizing his daughter’s local role as a school librarian. Both stories reinforced the obituary’s claim that at the time of his death he was the oldest living war veteran born in Kentucky.
Those snippets demonstrate how a man who began as one of many volunteers in the 44th Infantry became, over time, a symbolic link to the Spanish American War for readers in both Kentucky and the Ohio River Valley. In the 1890s he was simply one of the boys “hunting Aguinaldo” with a rifle on his shoulder. By the 1960s he had become the last living Kentucky born veteran of that conflict, a status that newspapers and local officials were eager to celebrate.
Remembering Wilson Edgar Terry
Today, most visitors who encounter Wilson Edgar Terry’s name do so far from Crockettsville or Cow Creek. They might find him in the Warren County Wikipedia article, in an online photo of the Rose Hill Cemetery footstone marking his Spanish American War service, or on the list of memorial bricks in Mason’s civic spaces.
Researchers who start with those traces and follow the trail back into Kentucky find a richer story. The Cow Creek article that notes he “lived there until 1927” also points to his daughter Berniece, whose Quare Do’s in Appalachia preserves family legends that reach back into the lives of his Wilder kin and beyond. Owsley County deed books and Breathitt County obituaries show how his farm, his church, and his extended family linked together communities along the Middle Fork and the Three Forks region.
At the same time, Terry’s path illustrates a broader Appalachian pattern. Thousands of eastern Kentucky men fought in the Spanish American War and the Philippine American War, then returned to the hills to farm, teach school, or preach in small churches. In the mid twentieth century their children and grandchildren followed new roads and rail lines to Ohio and Indiana, carrying both their skills and their stories north. Terry simply stayed in the public eye long enough, and moved to a visible enough Ohio suburb, that newspapers and civic groups began treating him as “the last” representative of that cohort.
For Appalachian historians, his life offers an unusually well documented case study in how military service, religion, landholding, education, and migration intersected in the lives of one extended family. For descendants and local readers in Breathitt, Owsley, and Warren counties, he remains both a grandfather figure and a reminder that small places like Cow Creek have always been connected to global events.
Sources and further reading
Jackson Times (Jackson, Kentucky), 22 February 1968, obituary under the headings “Hunted Aguinaldo” and “Oldest Kentucky-Born War Vet Claimed,” p. 5, reprinted and transcribed in Stephen D. Bowling, “Breathitt’s Oldest Vet Dies,” Bookie on the Trail (2024). Bookie on the Trail
Owsley County, Kentucky, Deed Book 3 entries 233 and 235, summarised in Three Forks Regional History and Archives land abstracts for Owsley County, documenting land purchases and sales by “Wilson E. Terry of Cow Creek” and his wife Rose on Indian Creek in 1926 and 1927. Three Forks Historical Association
FamilySearch compiled records for “Wilson Edgar Terry (1874–1968),” “Viola Frayne Terry (1914–1994),” and “Arley Fern Terry (1919–2011),” which list births in Kentucky, identify parents as Wilson Edgar Terry and Ruse or Rose Wilder, and link to census and draft card indexes. FamilySearch+2FamilySearch+2
Find A Grave memorials for Arley Fern (Terry) McComas and Berniece Iona Terry Hiser, which name their parents as Wilson E. Terry and Ruse or Rose Wilder Terry and give birthplaces at Cow Creek, Owsley County, Kentucky, with later residences and burials in Ohio and northern Kentucky. Find a Grave+2Find a Grave+2
City of Mason, Ohio, “MemorialBricks.csv” file listing “WILSON E. TERRY, US ARMY 1898, SPANISH-AMERICAN WAR,” which documents his inclusion among veterans honored in Mason’s public memorial program. Imagine Mason
“Wilson Edgar Terry,” Wikipedia entry summarizing his Spanish American War service in Company G, 44th U. S. Volunteer Infantry, his membership and ministry in the Old Regular Baptist Church at Cow Creek, his occupations in Kentucky and Ohio, his appointment as a Kentucky Colonel in 1962, and the contemporary newspaper articles that described him as the oldest living veteran born in Kentucky at the time of his death. Wikipedia+1
“Cow Creek, Kentucky,” reference entry noting that Cow Creek is an unincorporated community in Owsley County and that “Wilson Edgar Terry lived there until 1927” and “Berniece T. Hiser was born there in 1908,” tying the Terry family to that specific place. Wikipedia+1
“Warren County, Ohio,” Wikipedia entry that lists “Wilson E. Terry, Spanish-American War soldier” among notable residents, situating him within the county’s public memory. Wikipedia
“Berniece T. Hiser,” Wikipedia entry detailing the life and work of Berniece Iona Terry Hiser, including her birth at Cow Creek to Wilson Edgar Terry and Ruse Wilder, her teaching and library career, and her publications Quare Do’s in Appalachia and The Adventure of Charlie and His Wheat-straw Hat. Wikipedia
Julissa Gomez-Granger and Anne Leland, Military Service Records and Unit Histories: A Guide to Locating Sources (Congressional Research Service, various editions), a practical guide to locating compiled service and pension records at the National Archives, including files for Spanish American War volunteer units such as the 44th U. S. Volunteer Infantry. Naval History and Heritage Command+1