Simon Douglas
Simon Douglas was a former slave who lived to become the last American Civil War soldier in the state of New Jersey.
Douglas was born on January 25, 1843 as a slave on a plantation in Fairfield County, South Carolina. In 1862, during the US Civil War, he went to the front lines as a body servant for his masters' son, in the Confederate Army. Douglas became free by 1864 and moved north as a blacksmith and bummer of Maj. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman of the Union Army.
In 1866, Douglas settled in what was to become Fairview, Bergen County, New Jersey. He married a local resident, with whom he had a son and daughter. He ran his own blacksmithing business into his 90s. He lived there until he died on March 8, 1950.
He is interred in Hackensack Cemetery.
