EPILOGUE
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By
the turn of the twentieth century, Sneden's financial problems pushed
him toward an unappealing decision. He wrote the commissioner of
pensions that he could "see nothing in view to help me financially
but to go to the 'Soldiers Home' at Bath, N.Y. unless you grant
me an increase of pension. I do not want to go to the 'Home' if
I can possibly help it." But there was no livelihood to sustain
him in Monsey, "this miserable slow town."
On June 22, 1905, he finally made that move to the Soldier's and
Sailor's Home at Bath in Steuben County. There he joined nearly
two thousand other Union veterans in the idyllic Finger Lakes district
of western New York, far from the bustling metropolis of his young
adulthood. The move did not spare the pension office in Washington
from Sneden's long letters importuning the commissioner for increases
in his meager monthly check. Clerks who opened the mail at the pension
bureau, as well as the commissioner himself, would readily have
agreed with Sneden's great niece, Elizabeth Phelps Sneden. Years
later, she remembered the veteran in old age, his dark hair intact
but now faded to iron gray. He was, she recalled, a cranky old man,
peculiar in his ways, still very much the solitary survivor.
He seems to have had little to do with his siblings-a brother and
three sisters. At least he mentions them only in passing in the
few letters that survive from the turn of the century. It is tempting,
nevertheless, to speculate about his relationship with his brother's
son. Arthur Durant Sneden graduated from New York University and
was attracting favorable comment in the architecture section of
the Paris Salon the same year that his uncle made the unwanted move
to the Soldier's and Sailor's Home. Could it really have been only
a coincidence that the relative who inherited the watercolors and
memoir was Arthur Sneden, the nephew who built the successful architectural
career that had always eluded his uncle?
• • •
In 1917 America joined the European conflict that people called
the Great War. By the next summer, the last German offensive exhausted
itself, and the Allies dared to hope for victory. At home, the worldwide
influenza epidemic threatened to overshadow even the titanic struggle
on the Western Front. In Bath the Farmer's Advocate gamely promoted
the annual Steuben County fair that September. But side by side
with stories of prize bulls and blue-ribboned pies, the paper was
compelled to announce, week after week, the deaths of local doughboys
far from home and of flu victims across the country.
Transfixed by these dramatic events, county residents paid little
notice to the death in their midst of an aged veteran of another
war. On September 18, 1918, at the Soldier's and Sailor's Home,
Robert Knox Sneden finally succumbed at the age of eighty-six. He
had survived Confederate bullets on half a dozen battlefields and
endured starvation rations in as many southern prisons, even the
squalor and anarchy of Andersonville. They laid his bones to rest
in the neat rows of graves that compose the national cemetery at
the Home, in section J, row 11, grave 4.
A bachelor all his life, he once told a local historian inquiring
about the Sneden family that "I leave no posterity, but a good WAR
RECORD."
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END
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