Carrie Boals was in bed by 7 p.m. on New Year's Eve. For her, going to bed early and dozing during the day have become a matter of routine.

Although she wasn't up at midnight celebrating with champagne and confetti, the arrival of the year 2000 was a personal milestone she had long anticipated.

“That makes three centuries that I've lived in,” she said proudly from her room at a Jackson retirement home Thursday.

Boals was born in Crockett County on Nov. 18, 1897. She was one of 13 children, five of whom died as infants. She was the oldest of those who survived – and she's outlived them all.

The Tennessee Commission on Aging estimates there are roughly 835 people statewide who are 100 years or older. Seventy-five percent are female. The change they have witnessed in their lifetimes – from horse-drawn carriages to cars, from letters and word-of-mouth to television and e-mail – are mind-boggling.

“Things have probably changed faster over the past 100 years than the previous 1,000 years,” said Randall Austin, a history professor at Lambuth University.

Around the time Boals was born, people were likely to live their entire lives within 50 miles of where they were born, and unlikely ever to see a foreign county. Contacting their friends and neighbors took more effort than the push of a button we're used to now.

“The way you communicated with people was you walked out the door and looked for them,” Austin said.

The deep lines on Boals' face are evidence of the years that have passed since that era. As technology has continued to quicken the pace of life, Boals has been slowing down. These days, she rarely moves beyond her bed and a tattered chair that faces a TV set, which she never turns on anymore. With her failing eyesight and hearing, she can't make sense of what appears on the screen.

But she has plenty of memories – mostly good ones – to entertain her. Some are confused and hard to place, like a grainy newsreel. Others are as vivid as a favorite old movie.

Her career is what drove her in her younger years. Until retiring at the age 67, she worked as a teacher and librarian and held jobs in Alabama, Kentucky, Pennsylvania and Oklahoma.

“She was like the modern-day career girl before her time,” said her sister-in-law Kathryn Boals.

Carrie Boals was raised on a farm two miles outside Gadsden on land her father purchased for $15 an acre. When she was about six, her father moved the family to Covington for two years, where he worked in a bakery that supplied bread to workers on the Illinois Central Railroad. He didn't care for the job and the family returned to Crockett County.

Boals went to high school in Bells. At the time, Bells was a good distance away, so she moved away from home and boarded with a family.

After graduating in 1916, she set her sights on becoming a secretary. Her father, who was protective of Boals and her two sisters, was against the idea because he didn't want her to work for a man.

So instead, Boals decided to become a teacher and enrolled in what is now the University of Memphis. She later earned a master's degree at Peabody College, today part of Vanderbilt University.

She was a student in Memphis on Nov. 11, 1918, when World War I ended. At 11 a.m., bullhorns and sirens sounded and Boals joined the throngs of people who climbed into streetcars to go to a celebration downtown.

Boals remembers walking up and down Main Street most of the day and not getting home until 3 a.m. The streetcars home were delayed because they couldn't move through the crowds in the streets.

When the Depression hit, Boals was a teacher at Alamo High School. The hard times forced the school to pay employees with notes, called scrip, instead of money. Businesses in the area recognized them but they weren't negotiable elsewhere.

At Alamo High School, Boals taught English and French and helped start the first school paper, the School Scoop, and the first yearbook, The Fort.

Boals stayed in Alamo 10 years, then set off for adventures outside of Tennessee, including a one-year stint as a teacher in the mountains of eastern Kentucky. Her curiosity about other places is part of why she never married, she said. She didn't want to be tied down.

“I just wasn't afraid to do what I wanted to do and go where I wanted to go,” she said.

In the 1930s and early 1940s she worked as a librarian at a school on an Indian reservation in Oklahoma. The school taught agricultural skills to high school boys and girls. Besides working in the library, she helped out on the reservation's farm, picking beans and raising chickens.

She went on to work for nearly 20 years as a Veterans Administration librarian in Tuscaloosa, Ala.

After retiring, she lived alone for 30 years in Memphis. She played bridge with her neighbors and was active in a nearby Presbyterian church.

It wasn't until she was in her 90s that Boals' independent lifestyle was challenged. She finally had to quit driving because she could no longer see the line in the middle of the road.

“The worst thing I ever had to do was give up my car,” she said. “I had a little Plymouth and it was the nicest little car.”

Shortly before her 100th birthday, she broke her leg and could no longer live on her own. Relatives helped her move to SunPoint Jackson Oaks, where nursing help is available if she needs it. She was named Resident of the Month in December, an honor for which she received two plaques that she plans to hand on the wall.

Among her older prized possessions is a gold locket her father gave her more than 90 years ago. It once held pictures of her suitors. Today, it sits empty in a jewelry box.

The locket is inscribed with her name in elegant script, although the spelling is different – “Carrye.” As a girl, she went through a phase where she spelled it differently simply because it struck her fancy, a move she now dismisses and “juvenile foolishness.”

Boals has planned for her death using the same no-nonsense approach she has taken to life. On her coffin, she wants a simple arrangement of fern and ivy with a single red rose.

“I don't want one of those big spreads,” she said. “I think it's a sin to use so many cut flowers that will wilt by sundown.”

She will be buried at the Salem Cumberland Presbyterian Church cemetery in Gadsden wearing a favorite pink dress she knitted herself.

[Note: Carrie Boals died Nov. 11, 2001, and was buried in the Salem Cemetery, wearing the pink dress that she knitted, and had an arrangement of fern and ivy with a single red rose, just as she wanted]