She's Going To Be 100 — Gets to Bed Early, Doesn't Dance

Syracuse, NY, 1918

Go to Bed Early, Don't Dance and Don't Worry and Live to Be 100

Mrs. Ann Land, Who Will Celebrate 100th Anniversary Next Saturday Says People To-day Are in Too Great Haste.

Says Too Many People Get to the Other Side of the Hill Without Any Reserve to Hold 'em Back.

Mrs. Ann Land of No. 1210 Grape street will celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of her birth next Saturday.

"All my life I've followed a set of rules," said Mrs. Land. "They are: Go to bed early. Eat carefully. Don't dance. Don't worry. It's because I've followed them that I'm going to have a birthday it is given few women to have.

"Young folks in this country live in too much of a hurry while they are young. Then when they get onto the other side of the hill they haven't anything in reserve to hold 'em back. They just slip down and get to the bottom quick."

Mrs. Land wasn't born in this country. She came here when she was 35, a bride. Her husband had a brother in this city and Mr. and Mrs. Land came directly here. She has lived in the little house in Grape street sixty-five years.

For thirty years she has been an invalid. Stepping from a street car in the days when the motive power was horses instead of electricity, the car started too soon. She was thrown violently to the pavement and her spine was injured.

But the fact that her legs have been helpless all these years has not impaired her usefulness. She does all the mending for herself and daughter, Mrs. Sarah Henry, who lives with her. She sews rags for carpets and makes ironing holders.

She has never worn glasses and just of late she has confessed to a growing dimness of sight.

"I'm only bothered in threading needles," she added hastily when she told of this affliction. "Sarah threads a lot of them for me and when I've used 'em all I call her to thread more."

She has been a widow since 1864, when her husband, John Land, was killed in the Battle of The Wilderness. She had four children, but all have died excepting Mrs. Henry.

It has always been a source of grief to her that she did not receive sufficient education in her youth to enable her to read extensively.

"In the old country large families educated their boys in those days, and let their girls shift for themselves. I had eight brothers," she concluded simply.

Mrs. Land likes to talk of the days in the old country, when, as she grew old enough, she filled positions as cook in the homes of various personages of high degree, lords and such.

She likes to tell of her trip across the Atlantic, which was her wedding trip, and attended by so many disagreeable occurrences that she never wanted to go back.

"In the first place I was seasick every inch of the way until we got near enough the shores of New Jersey to smell the peach orchards, which were in bloom," she explained.

"There was mutiny on board. A lot of sailors had been shipped at Liverpool and paid full wages for the trip. A day out we ran into bad weather and they made trouble. My husband saved the captain from being shot by knocking down a man who had a pistol pointed at his head. Those men made the remainder of the trip in irons. Maybe a trip isn't so difficult now, but I don't want to take it."

She doesn't understand why the world is at war.

"War is bad business," she said shaking her head. "It makes so much unhappiness and is so useless. It made a widow of me."

She hasn't any ambition to "live to a great age," she declares, but "rather expects she will."

My grandmother was 104 years old when she died. My father was nearly a hundred. All my people lived to be old, so I may as well be resigned," she said.

—The Syracuse Herald, Syracuse, NY, June 23, 1918, page 17.