Butterfield, Benjamin 1795-1878

BUTTERFIELD

Posted By: Volunteer
Date: 3/17/2016 at 19:21:27

While looking for a different man with a similar name, I came across these newspaper clippings. The scans were posted on a family tree on "ancestry" I typed them up from the image of the clippings because the description of this man's funeral/burial is unlike any I've come across before.

Benjamin Butterfield, one of our earliest pioneers, and one of our oldest and best citizens, departed this life Sunday morning, 28th, inst., and Monday gray haired men laid his withered form and white locks in the cold, dark coffin and lowered him into his damp narrow house, and as the clods fell upon his coffin lid hundreds of our old settlers gathered around and mourned with his relatives, and sent up out of their hearts to Him who hath ordered all things, their earnest and fervent prayers for the well being of him who has gone and those who are going.

Mr. Butterfield was born in June, 1795, in Washington county, New York. Forty-five years ago he came and settled in Cook county, Illinois, when Chicago was scarcely largely [sic] than Hampton and twenty-three years ago he settled on a beautiful grass plat, surrounded with wild flowers, on the banks of the stream which divides Mayne's Grove in this county, where he resided up to the time of his death.

He had seven children, four of whom survive him, with twenty-two grand children and ten great grand children. He was a hard working, industrious, generous man, firm in his opinion and strictly honest. He leaves the world better by having lived in it.

"If there is a future he lives in bliss;
If there is none, he made the best of this."

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Bejamin Butterfield died at his residence in Reeve Tp., last Sunday morning, the 28th inst., aged nearly 84 years. Mr. Butterfield was one of the oldest inhabitants of Franklin county, having come here in 1855 from Bloom, Cook Co. Ill., of which locality he was also a pioneer. He was an honest man and leaves many friends to mourn his loss.