PHILLIPS. - At age 90, John Phillips’ daughter, Katie Hazlett, told this story of her father.
John Phillips was born Oct. 18, 1829 in Georgia. He was still living at home at the outbreak of the Civil War. He and another man got into a fistfight and thinking he had killed the man, he told his mother and she told him to get on his horse and keep riding. He never saw his mother again.
He went to Atlanta and enlisted and was mustered into Colonel John Singleton Mosby’s Partisan Rangers on Jan. 28, 1864 in Fauquier County, VA. He and his fellow soldiers suffered many hardships while fighting the war on horseback. They faced starvation many times. Mosby’s men were known for being deadly accurate with their Colt pistols while firing from horseback.
Mrs. Hazlett said that her father spoke highly of Confederate Commander, Robert E. Lee. He said that Lee was good to his men and treated them all alike.
John Phillips stayed in the Confederate service for several days after Lee’s surrender to Grant. He signed a parole at Winchester, VA., on April 27, 1865.
Mrs. Hazlett said that her father did not like President Lincoln and when he saw a picture of Lincoln her sister had hung on the wall, he tore it down and told her to never again put a picture of him on the wall. The war also shaped her father’s politics. At election time, he would work hard trying to get people to vote for the Democrats.
Mrs. Hazlett does not know how or when her father came to Kentucky, but on Nov. 21, 1887, he married Minnie Rousey of Parksville, who was 24 years younger than he. Her mother called him, “the old man.” She said he never did say a cross word to her and he treated her good. They spent the first few years of their marriage in Boyle County. They later moved to the Neals Creek area of Lincoln County, south of Stanford near the foot of Halls Gap. The family attended the Neals Creek Methodist Church where Mrs. Hazlett is still a member.
The couple had 13 children. In addition to Katie Hazlett, they had: 1. Elzie; 2. Reed; 3. Willie; 4. Edd; 5. Molly Shearer; 6. Ellen Hale; 7. Mack; 8. John; 9. Wheeler and 10. Georgia Ann Hazlett. The above all lived to adulthood but a boy and a girl, Vemie and Luetta died as children.
Mrs. Hazlett remembers her father as a hardworking man who was greatly loved by his children. He would tell them stories of the war with a child on each knee. He died of pneumonia on Sept. 14, 1917. The family rode in a hearse drawn by two white horses to the cemetery at the Fairview Baptist Church where he was buried.
His wife died on Dec. 20, 1954 and is also buried at Fairview. In 1930, she began receiving a Confederate widows pension with the help of Stanford attorney Kelly J. Francis. Records at the Harvey Helm Memorial Library indicate she was the last Civil War pensioner in Lincoln County.
Source: Lincoln County, Kentucky, by the Lincoln County Historical Society, published by Turner Publishing Company, 2002; Pg. 249
