This detail is an implicit argument against anyone who might speculate that she had died sometime in the intervening forty years and that the “Essie Dunbar” referenced in the article was a different person or that the longevity claim was itself a fabrication.

The account notes that she had “outlived the doctor who pronounced her dead forty years ago” — a pointed irony that serves the human interest purpose of the article while also confirming, incidentally, the basic timeline: she was alive in 1955, the doctor was dead, and the 1915 events were presented as established community knowledge.

She died on May 22, 1962, at Barnwell County Hospital in South Carolina.

She was approximately seventy-seven years old.