Some Interesting History Connected with
The Life and Death of Mary Maria Sprague
Continued from posting of June 2, 2016
A woman of courage to the nth degree, Mary, always ready to slave for her children, has been known to take a horse and cutter and travel over across the hill and through the woods to Stowell's on a sick call in a blizzardy night alone when it would have been tough for a strong man.
Frailties of age have been growing in Mary for several years. But work was her motto and work she did to the last hour of consciousness.. Just at dark, Thursday night, Oct. 25, 1945, at the close of an active day, the old machine broke down in a crash with a strong despairing "Oh dear." The only words that Fred could make out of her following talk were "Gon On." Camphor would not revive her this time. Soon her lights went out in her first born's arms, her daughter sat up all night of the 25th with her unconscious form and her youngest child was nearest to her when the last flutter of life ebbed away about eleven p.m. Oct. 26, 1945. Other members of the family and friends did their parts, big and little, most willingly.
Think of the changes on the Hill and elsewhere since Mary Sprague came to Smyrna eighty years ago. Gone is the old log cabin that she remembered on the Bartlett farm and gone from the Hill are all the first settlers and their descendants. Followed in line in the next generation by her first son, she, by her passing removes from Smyrna Hill the last member of her generation and Burt Taylor of Smyrna is the only one left who is known by the writer to have gone to school with her in the school of fifty at the Bartlett schoolhouse in the dozen years after the Civil war. Her life span took in the change from the tallow candle by which her mother read a letter from the soldier husband and father to the hovering children to the kerosene lamp and from the lamp to the incandescent bulb. She saw the coming of the garden strawberry, the advent of the potato bug which was to stay only a few years. She saw the coming to town of the railroad, the coming and passing of the rubber tired buggy, the advent of the horseless carriage and the automobile. She saw the pathmaster road system with little horse tools give way to the developing machinery system. She saw grain harvesting turn by degrees from the cradle to the combine. She saw weapons change from the muzzle loading gun to the atomic bomb. And what else did she not see?
Mary has now had her expressed wish. She has started down the long, long trail just as she and her friends could have wished. Everything seemed to have been mapped out by Providence to please everybody. Her friends rejoice that she has escaped from further suffering without a lingering bed sickness or terrible violence. Her son and her daughter-in-law no longer sometimes hear the shuffling tumbling footsteps or sometimes see "mother" step off like a girl of sixteen. Gone is the willing, loving help of the weakening body and hands, and gone are the irritations. Gone are the watching and the worry. But she is mourned by the ardor of fond memories. --F.B. Sprague
The End
Mrs. Mary Sprague
Utica NY Daily Press, October 1945
Mrs. Mary Sprague, 84, lifelong Smyrna resident, died Oct. 26, 1945, in her home following a critical illness of one day. Funeral services are to be held at 2 p.m. today from the Beecher Funeral Home in Earlville. Two sons and a daughter survive. They are: Fred Sprague of Smyrna; Herman of Tully and Mrs. Harlie Stowell of Smyrna.
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