Philip Sharp

BIOGRAPHY

Philip Sharp was born in St. Tammany Parish, Louisiana, USA, on 21 December 1909, to parents Robert W. Sharp (1883–1978) and Della L. Revere (1892–1977). He had 11 siblings. He was raised on a farm and, as a young man, purchased an adjacent 70 acres where he would eventually raise his own family. He attended Middle Road School, a small two-room schoolhouse, completing up to the seventh grade and walking three miles to get there each day. He grew up planting corn and other crops, including sweet potatoes and sugarcane for making syrup. The fields were plowed with a horse or mule.

In the 1930s, he worked as a saddle herder for the Tung Oil Company in St. Tammany Parish. He rode on horseback whenever he worked cattle, saddling up each morning before heading out into the fields. Even later in life, he kept the roping saddle he had purchased for that job in the tack room behind his house. At some point, he married Beatrice Jenkins (1912–1969), with whom he had a daughter, Shirley. Over the years, he also raised sheep, hogs, and mules on the farm. His grandson, Kevin, later continued the tradition, raising cattle on the same land. When he stopped raising his own cattle in 1995, he had a herd of 50 cows and 51 calves, which he later sold.

In 2013, he participated as an honored guest in the Bicentennial Parade in Covington. After a fall in the summer of 2019, he moved from his home to a nearby house that his daughter and son-in-law had built on the farm. As of July 2019, at 109 years old, he was still able to drive and lived independently. He could walk unassisted until a fall shortly before his 110th birthday and continued to get around with the help of a walker as of 2020. In February 2021, at age 111, he received his second dose of the COVID-19 vaccine.

Philip Sharp passed away in Covington, Louisiana, on 2 March 2021, at the age of 111 years, 71 days. He was survived by his daughter Shirley, grandson George Kevin, great-granddaughter Samantha, and two great-great-grandsons.