A Venerable Lady.

Calling at Maj. A. M. Foute’s, on Tuesday morning, we were lucky to meet Mrs. Charlotte Sylar, who will be eighty eight years old on her next birthday.  She sits more erect than the girls of the present time, and we found her making a quilt of little scraps not so large as a half dollar in silver.  The fine thread and needle would have tried our own eyes, which are somewhat younger than hers, but she seemed to experience no difficulty.  She has a quilt made and quilted with her own hands that contains over twenty thousand little pieces about the size of a nickel.

In response to inquiry she told us she was a native of Jefferson county, Tennessee, and born in the last century.  She and her husband moved to this Cherokee country in 1833 and settled in Cassville, when the town was in the unbroken forest, if such an explanation is proper to designate what was not there, until some years afterwards.  A pole cabin had been erected as a temple of justice, otherwise a courthouse, and Mr. Sylar’s family, and Mr. Isaac Anderson’s family, (the latter the grandfather of Mrs. Foute), lodged in the cabin until they were able to build a double log house for themselves.  That double log cabin, was afterwards removed to build Latimer’s hotel, a famous hostelry before the war.  The Indians were thick in this country at that time, and the new settlers bought fodder and connahany from them, and they also procured “greens” and such like from their Indian neighbors. Mrs. Sylar has seen the growth of the country, therefore, from the very beginning, so to speak.  She has two children, Mrs. Catherine Ward, of our city, and a son in Utah Territory.  Mr. Sylar died in 1871.  He had also a history.  When the “gold fever” broke out in California a large crowd went from Georgia to explore and try their luck on the Pacific slope.  He was one of the party.  They sailed from Charleston to Aspinwall, crossed the isthmus, and took passage on an English brig, at Panama, to reach California, for be it remembered there was no railroad to California until twenty years afterwards.  The journey was full of dangers and excitement, but Mr. Sylar reached Cassville in safety again.

He had a good property, comfortable home and surroundings, until the war desolated this country and the invader’s torch laid old Cassville in ashes.  He died in 1871, and to use Mrs. Sylar’s words, “he was not sick unto death with disease, he was ‘spirit-crushed’ with the ruin all about him.”

As we watched the nimble fingers of this aged lady, and listened to her reminiscences of the past, we decided that while the sterner sex have more physical strength, more muscle, and perhaps more brain, it is a fact that women have more physical and mental courage to bear affliction, pain and disaster.  Mrs. Sylar’s health is good, her industry is wonderful, and she bids fair to reach her hundredth birthday, without an accident.