2,000 pages and 40 years later, a Temple man wraps up a ‘guide’ on the longest-living survivors of The Irrepressible Conflict. He wants these men remembered.

They probably made a curious picture, the 101-year-old Civil War veteran lying there in bed and the 16-year-old boy from Rangeley who’d asked to meet him, sharing coffee.

Veteran James Lurvey, the last survivor of the Battle of Gettysburg, had once set eyes on Abraham Lincoln. High school freshman Jay Hoar had never been away from home before.

He traveled to New Hampshire alone, catching a ride from a tourist and hopping a train, after seeing Lurvey’s picture in a Life Magazine Memorial Day spread featuring what were thought to be the last 38 veterans of the Civil War.

“That was June 22, 1949, and the experience marked me for life,” said Hoar, now 76.

A retired University of Maine at Farmington English professor, he’s a year away from finishing a 2,000-page reference guide on the lives of those veterans and well over 200 more.

Twenty-two years after that first experience, Hoar decided he wanted to know what happened to those last 38, and not just the highlights of when they were born, injured and died. He wrote thousands of letters, collecting veterans’ stories from the widows, neighbors and friends who knew them. And he began to expand his research well beyond those featured in Life.

Some returned home to lead very long, ordinary lives. Others less so. One vet survived the Civil War only to be lost at sea three times, buried by avalanche twice and run over by a truck at 100 – and even that didn’t kill him. The man of misadventure escaped notice in Life’s last-surviving pictorial. The next-to-last Northern man to die, he could have been lost to history if Hoar hadn’t found him, and others.

Once he had hundreds of stories down, Hoar culled the decades’ worth of material for lists.

The biggest May-December gap between a veteran and his wife? 67 years. (The Texas couple, married 12 years, had a child together.)

The longest-living veteran? A Florida gent claimed to be 133.

“I have his death certificate. Where it says ‘usual occupation’ (it reads): ‘Soldier of fortune,'” said Hoar. “If he’d said 10 years younger, I could have believed it.”

His biggest surprise, he says: That in 40 years, no other author has beaten him to all this material. Now, with nearly all his sources dead, they can’t. With that knowledge comes the weight of responsibility. It’s kept him going, kept him working on the final proofs for his third and final volume, “The South’s Last Boys in Gray.”

He doesn’t want the mens’ stories to die with him.

“If I don’t do it, who’s going to?” Hoar said.

‘The old America’

Hoar taught at UMF for 33 years. He already had a lifelong interest in veterans when he found himself assigned a full slate of speech classes in 1971. That meant no more grading at night.

Suddenly, he had free time.

He remembered back to that Life spread and wondered if he could track down the order in which those last 38 men had died, if he could reach their children, discover the secret to their longevity.

It started with letters, ultimately more than 12,000, first to the libraries and newspapers closest to those veterans’ hometowns, looking for any information. More often than not, someone knew someone who knew someone.

He collected essays, death certificates and pictures. His late wife, Arline, helped him stay organized.

“These jokers, they were photogenic,” Hoar said, leafing through some of his book’s pages, the men and a handful of women, mostly nurses, arranged by order of death.

“What these are, they’re testimonials. … If you’re somebody that has lived with the old fellow, the veteran, for 40 or 50 years or more, the reader kind of has to believe what they’re saying. It’s a luxury to have sources that close.”

Hoar says he made hundreds of friends along the way and several times visited widows. Mattie Brown in Kansas City stands out. He can still rattle off her street address from memory. Mattie married Frank Brown when she was 41 and he was 91. Hoar visited her twice.

“It was a good marriage. A lot of these old veterans, their last wife would be the equivalent of a practical nurse,” Hoar said. “(Mattie) was just a lovely personality.”

She recounted to Hoar meeting Frank and carrying for his ailing wife, a woman she affectionately called mom. After she died, the two married. Frank lived to 100.

Hoar heard rumor time and again that the younger women just married the old vets for their pensions. That’s not what he found, Hoar said. And because of so many May-December pairings, a fair number of children of Civil War veterans are still alive, he said.

One man he chronicled had 24 children. Another married and outlived six wives.

“It’s just great material, and when you tell their life stories, it’s the old America,” he said.

‘Last, largest, best’

Hoar has authored 12 books so far, eight of them on the Civil War – he discovered at least 260 other names for the war, among them The Irrepressible Conflict, The Tragic Years and The Ruckus.

He’s become a specialist in superlatives for Civil War veterans: The youngest to serve, the oldest to serve, the last to die.

Albert Henry Woolson takes the honor as the last surviving Northern veteran, his story told at the end of Hoar’s first two volumes, “The North’s Last Boys in Blue.” Woolson, from Minnesota, lived to be 109, dying in 1956. (The North gets two volumes and the South one because the North had so many more soldiers in the war, Hoar says.)

There’s some controversy on the last surviving Confederate. Hoar’s leaning toward Hattie Cook Carter for his last entry in the third volume. She was a nurse-type who ran food and ammo into the battlefield, dying in 1956 at 122.

Hoar dedicated his second volume to Gladys Lurvey, the daughter of James, that lone veteran he interviewed in person. The senior Lurvey lived to 103. One secret to all that longevity, Hoar says: Devoted youngest daughters like Gladys.

While some libraries have picked up volumes one and two, Hoar said he’s not too worried that they haven’t flown off the shelves. That can come later. First, he has to get it all down.

“I promise that this is my last, largest and best book,” Hoar said.

He’s aiming for August 2010 for the publication of volume three.

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