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Pension Project: Kirby Smith

Kirby Smith reads from the pension of Robert Bolling. Smith is a U.S. Army Reserve Lieutenant Colonel and former Army aviator. Bolling was a Virginian who served various stints as a cavalry officer. His pension application included an order he was given by Thomas Jefferson, wartime governor of Virginia. Beginning in 1818, the United States government created new pension acts meant to guarantee monthly payments to aging Revolutionary War veterans. Many of these former soldiers, though, had no evidence of their service, so they instead went to their local courthouses and magistrates and recorded detailed oral histories of their Revolutionary War service. More than 80,000 veterans applied for pensions, far more than the government imagined would even still be alive. This amazing trove of oral histories of the nation's first veterans sat largely unutilized in federal archives for over a century. By pairing those detailed Revolutionary War pensions with today's generation of veterans, the Museum's Pension Project asks veterans to reflect on similarities and differences between their service and that of people over two centuries ago.