Charlie Coulberson Jackson
United States Army ~ World War I ~ Private
162 Transportation Corps
July 27, 2026 - In the piney woods of Shelby County, Texas, where the Joaquin & Center Road wound past farm clearings and the red clay clung to every boot, Charlie Coulberson Jackson was born on April 15, 1896. His parents, Thomas Washington Jackson and Sarah Ann Rachel Jackson, had come from Alabama stock and built a life on land they owned free of mortgage. Charlie grew up the youngest son in a household of five children—brothers James Walter and Thomas Lee, sisters Mollie Hester and Alice L.—learning the rhythms of farm work, the value of a day’s labor, and the quiet strength of a family rooted in East Texas soil. By 1910, at fourteen, he was already listed as a wage-earning laborer on the home place, able to read and write, still attending school when the seasons allowed.
On Christmas Eve 1912, at just sixteen, Charlie married Gennie Melvina Hinton. Their life together was brief and tender. A daughter, Mary Ann, arrived the following year. Then, on October 24, 1915, Gennie died at eighteen. She was laid to rest in Pine Ridge Cemetery. Charlie, only nineteen and already a widower with a small child, carried that loss with him into the uncertain years that followed.
When the United States entered the Great War in April 1917, Charlie registered for the draft in Shelby County two months later. The card recorded a young man of medium height and stout build, black hair and blue eyes, single with one dependent—his little daughter. He claimed no exemption. On May 27, 1918, he was inducted at Center and sent to Camp Travis for training. By early August he was in Hoboken, New Jersey, boarding the USS America as a private in Company D, 34 Infantry Regiment, 7 Division. The ship carried him across the Atlantic into the final months of the war. After arrival in France, he was transferred to the 162 Company or the Transportation Corps—one of the many logistics units that kept the American Expeditionary Forces supplied and moving. He served through the Armistice and the long, grinding months of demobilization that followed, helping process the return of an army. On June 28, 1919, he sailed from St. Nazaire aboard the US Army Transport Marcia, arrived in Brooklyn on July 9, and was processed at Camp Merritt, New Jersey. Honorably discharged on July 25, 1919, with no wounds and no disability, Private Charlie C. Jackson—service number 2063073—came home.
The 1920 census found him back in Justice Precinct 4, living once more under his parents’ roof, still a widower, working as an oil-field laborer, his six-year-old daughter Mary Ann beside him. Tragedy struck the family again in May 1927 when his older brother Walter, a Shelby County deputy sheriff, was killed by the accidental discharge of his own pistol. The Jackson community gathered for the funeral, as it always did.
Charlie’s second chapter began on June 11, 1936, when he married Annie Lee Cruse in Cass County. They built a new household. By 1940 they were living in a rented house on St. Vincent Street in Shreveport, Louisiana, where Charlie worked as a lineman. A daughter, Charlie Sue, was already one year old. The “Old Man’s Draft” of 1942 still listed him among the men of the Fourth Registration, a middle-aged veteran whose skills remained useful to the home front. By 1950 the family had returned to Shelby County, living along Highway 84. Charlie was self-employed in the sawmill and logging trade—long hours in the East Texas timber economy that had shaped so many lives around Joaquin and Haslam. With Annie he raised a son, Charlie C., and several daughters who would carry the family name into the next generation: Sue, Phronie, Era Bell, Mae, and Mary Ann from his first marriage.
Charlie Coulberson Jackson died suddenly of a heart attack on November 20, 1973, at Eddie’s Service Station in Haslam. He was seventy-seven. Funeral services were held two days later at the Jackson Baptist Church, with burial in the Jackson Cemetery under the direction of Mangum Funeral Home of Center. His wife Annie applied for the military headstone that still marks his grave—a quiet recognition of the private who had crossed the ocean in 1918 and come home to the same pine woods that had raised him.
He left behind a widow, a son, five daughters, a sister, eleven grandchildren, and six great-grandchildren. More than that, he left the steady example of a man who had buried a young wife, served his country without fanfare, worked the oil fields and the timber, and raised a family through the long decades of the twentieth century in the heart of Shelby County. His story is one of ordinary endurance—the kind that built East Texas and still echoes in the red clay and the tall pines. Day is done, God is nigh.
This story was written with creative support from SuperGrok by xAI. While Grok contributed ideas, dialogue, and scene drafts, the final narrative, characters, themes, and all revisions are the work of the author, Larry E. Hume, VFW Post 8904, Center, Texas, July 25, 2026.
Sources:
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9. Year: 1940; Census Place: Shreveport, Caddo, Louisiana; Roll: m-t0627-01388; Page: 9A; Enumeration District: 9-86A
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