‘America’s Oldest Man’ is buried in this Florida town. But did he tell the truth?

BARTOW, Fla. – Most people have little reason to delve into the Wildwood Cemetery.

While there are plenty of plots where family and friends of the deceased may visit and pay their respects, the cemetery itself is largely unremarkable.

But tucked away in a small corner of the cemetery is a grave marker that claims to belong to “America’s Oldest Man” — 137-year-old Charlie Smith.

During the 1970s, Smith attracted national attention due to his claims that he was the oldest person alive in the United States.

HIS STORY

According to Smith, he was brought to the U.S. from Liberia at 12 years old by slave traffickers who tricked him into boarding with the promise of pancake trees in America.

Eventually, Smith claimed, he was sold at an auction in New Orleans in the 1850s to a man named “Jake.”

Smith also told an interviewer that he was taken back to Texas, where he was raised by a cattleman named “Charlie Smith” — the same name that was ultimately given to him.

You can listen to the full 1975 interview in the audio player below.

“He treated me just like he treated his children in everything...” Smith explained. “We ate together, we slept together.”

The cattleman “Charlie Smith” later died, and Smith went to work as a cowboy, though he later migrated to other parts of the country after the Civil War — at least, that’s according to Smith’s own account.

Of course, Smith also claimed that he and famed cowboy Billy the Kid had worked together as bounty hunters to nab Charles Guiteau, who assassinated former President James Garfield. But the assassination happened less than two weeks before Billy the Kid was killed in New Mexico, and Guiteau had been arrested at the scene.

And considering Smith claimed to be 144 years old during that same interview, the whole plot is highly suspect.

It turns out that The Guinness Book of World Records thought his backstory was pretty fishy, too, as he was never officially recognized as the oldest man alive.

THE TRUTH

So how did Smith get so many to buy into the idea that he was indeed the oldest person of his time?

According to journalists in the late 1970s, Smith was “discovered” by Social Security in 1955 after a grove owner in Polk County asked Smith to get a Social Security card while he was working as a fruit picker.

When Smith applied for the card, he listed his age as 113, which sparked an investigation by Social Security agents.

According to John Scarminach — then-head of the Lakeland Social Security Office — the agency was only trying to prove Smith was over 65 years old, as the agency had apparently lost Smith’s file.

The agency had reportedly confirmed records of Smith’s time in Texas, which Smith instead took as a validation of his supposed age.

Despite his newfound celebrity, researchers eventually discovered a marriage certificate belonging to Smith that showed he had been born in 1974 at the earliest. That didn’t stop the backlash when he was denied the title, though.

“Implying fraud when the only proof they have is a flimsy marriage record for someone named Charlie Smith?” an editor wrote in the Lakeland Ledger. “Well, I’m sure that if we all looked hard enough, we could find documents with the same name as theirs that they would have a hard time proving they had nothing to do with them.”

While there’s no way to go back in time to confirm, researchers have generally agreed that Smith was likely not 137 years old when he died, as he claimed. Instead, he would have been at most 105 years old.

But that didn’t stop him from claiming the mantle, anyway.

Whether it be out of respect for a long life lived, or whether people believed his tall tales, or whether the community simply enjoyed his stories, his grave is etched with that moniker:

“America’s Oldest Man”

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