Biography
Blanton was born as Susan Rebecca Clark near Beirne in Clark County, Arkansas, USA, on 3 February 1870 as the second child of William Walker Clark (1840–1873) and Barbara Ann Peters-Powell (1840–1916). Her father, a Confederate veteran of the American Civil War, contracted tuberculosis as a Union prisoner and eventually died when Blanton was three. She had three siblings: Nancy Elizabeth Wingfield (1866–1949), Julia Louise Marsh (1871–1978), and William W Clark (1874–1939), and two half-brothers from her mother’s second marriage: John Henderson Powell (1883–1972) and Charles Peters Powell (1885–1948). She worked on her parents’ farm from the age of 10.
On 1 September 1892, Blanton married her husband, Jeff Davis Blanton (1860–1930), in Nevada County, Arkansas, and later settled in the Arkansas town of Antoine. Two of the couple’s six children died in infancy; Blanton would outlive another two daughters in her middle years. She was widowed in 1930 after 38 years of marriage.
Blanton’s sister Julia lived to be 107 years old, making them, with a combined age of over 218 years, one of the oldest sibling duos of all time. Blanton died on 14 April 1981 at the age of 111 years, 70 days. She was survived by her two remaining children, Etna and Harry, as well as 13 grandchildren and many great and great-great-grandchildren.
