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Our Best Words, July 1912, p 4 c 1, reprinted from Shelby County Leader July 4 Miss Ione Gregory, Beloved By All, Passes Away
Ione, daughter of Michael D. and Abigail Jane Gregory, born in
Shelbyville, Ill, April 7, 1842, died at her home in this city (which
was also the home of Dr. and Mrs. J. L. Hoover), June 28, 1912. Of the
seven children of her parents, her brother, Dudley B. Gregory of this
city, is the sole survivor, of that one among the earlier families of
Shelbyville.
Services of sorrow and hope were held at the home Sunday
afternoon at 4:30 p.m., conducted by Rev. J. A. Tracy, of the
Presbyterian church, pastor of the deceased, and Rev. J. L. Douthit,
her friend since they were first schoolmates in Shelby academy, over 50
years ago. A choir consisting of Mesdames Geo. D. Chafee, Edward
Tackett, and Messers. E. M. Hopkins and Irvin Douthit, rendered several
beautiful hymns at the home. Misses Estie Graybille, Effa
Steward, and Messers. Hopkins and and Douthit sang a beautiful hymn at
the grave as the body was being lowered to its final resting place.
In Rev. Mr. Douthit’s remarks at the funeral, among other things, he spoke in part as follows:
In the year 1854, where the beautiful building of the
Carnegie Library now stands, a happy group of more than 200 young
students with four teachers were together in the rooms and on the
playgrounds of Shelby academy, then the only institution of the kind in
this part of Illinois. The flood of years have swept away full
three-fourths of that group, so far as I can learn. I don’t know
of but two or three of these teachers now left on earth. The
first principal of that school is living yet in Washington, D. C., now
85 years of age. With feeble hand he sent through me the other
day love greetings to his few old pupils still living here.
Of the 20 young people whose names were on the program in the first
closing exhibition, August 3, 1854, only five are left on earth, three
of us are here today and the body of the last to go, rests in this
casket -- but she is not dead.
“She has but passed
Beyond the mists that blind us here
Into the new and larger life
Of that serener sphere.”
Those of us who have known, esteemed and loved Ione
Gregory so many years cannot think of her as dead. She was one of the
pure, tender, true and helpful women whose quiet, simple, home-like
Christian lives do so much to make this world more like heaven.
Without any family of her own she has been a devoted mother to a niece
left motherless when a babe, the dear “auntie” to others and a sister
of mercy in a sense. O, what a flood of grateful memories are revived
as we recall the 50 and more years of loyal friendship of this good
woman! The one happy valley of earth where many of us have seen her
oftenest for the past 20 years will ever be more sacred to memory,
because Miss Ione Gregory was always there during the annual chautauqua
assembly to give good cheer to all and encourage everything good.
Rev. Mr. Douthit spoke of the frailties of human beings, and
paid a high tribute to her virtues in the long years in which he had
known her. He said his first thought was, upon learning of her
passing to the great beyond, of Whittier’s verses, written on the death
of his sister, entitled “Gone to Heaven.”
