Fletcher, Martha Ann Megee

FLETCHER, MEGEE

Posted By: Ken Wright (email)
Date: 4/9/2007 at 01:14:14

A beautiful life ended. Mrs. D.A. Fletcher, a prominent resident and pioneer, passed away Saturday evening. Martha Ann Megee was born in Tennessee on the fourteenth day of February, 1834; she died at Maquoketa on the fourteenth day of March, 1914, exactly eighty years and one month later. She was married to Dean Adams Fletcher near Winchester, Tennessee, Dec. 26, 1854. He was the principal of an academy near Winchester, in which she was a teacher, when they became acquainted, and the two currents of their lives met, and mingled, to flow together in an unbroken stream for nearly sixty years. Her father was a Kentuckian of Scotch-Irish ancestry; her mother a Virginian. Her father was a mill builder and constructed in the neighborhood of Winchester, one of the largest cotton mills at that time in the South. She was graduated from a female college at the age of nineteen, and was only twenty when she was married. Her husband was graduated from the University of Vermont in 1852, and almost immediately after their marriage he took his young bride back to the old home in Essex, New York, on the shores of Lake Champlain. After a year spent in study of law he came west, leaving his wife and baby, their only daughter, in Essex, while he sought a new home in the new state of Iowa. He found that home in Maquoketa, sent for his family, built a home in the village and from that day till death parted them, their life has been spent here. She with her husband, united with the Congregational church in Maquoketa, about the year 1857, and the two were at her death the two members in longest standing in that society. She was never in robust health. About 1877 she was threatened with tuberculosis, and was taken by her husband to Colorado Springs in the hope that the high altitude would restore her strength. A summer's sojourn among the mountains together with an unconquerable spirit and a faith that never for a moment lost its hold upon the Divine hand wrought almost a miracle of healing and she came home refreshed and reinvigorated to survive almost every one of the old friends of pioneer days. Five children were born to her, of whom her second, Willie, a boy of five years, died in 1862. Four survive her with her faithful husband and a whole multitude of loving and devoted friends lament her loss. The Civil War swept over and ruined that part of the South in which her youth was spent. Her only brother was dead, the friends of her youth were scattered and lost, and she never returned to the Southland. She was a typical Southerner and she brought with her to her Northern home a spirit so warm and cordial, so hospitable to friendship, so true and loyal, so filled with charity and love, that she conquered every heart that came within the circle of her influence. She sustained a serious accident about the year 1889, which made her a cripple for the remainder of her life; but instead of embittering her spirit or causing despondency, it refined whatever of alloy there may have been in her soul into pure gold. She seemed to enter upon a new and finer period of her life. Every friendship took on a higher value, every blessing became more precious, the world became more beautiful, and life more noble, and aspirations more of fulfillment. She had a militant soul in a fragile body. Her outlook on life seemed to grow loftier and more serene with every passing year, and while her strength in recent years grew more and more delicate, no one ever noticed any weakening of the judgment, or any dulling of the mental vision or any letting down of the splendid courage with which all her life long she faced every trial. Indeed, the foliage of her tree of life took on a richer coloring as the autumn grew on. It is one of the sweetist memories of her husband and children, that she passed on before Winter came. She died with every faculty in full power, with the consciousness of being upborne on the hearts of troops of friends, and with a childlike trust in the Divine Love that never knew a moment's doubt or fear. She lifted the tapestry and passed into another room, into the nearer prescence of the Heavenly Father. (The Excelsior-Record, March 19, 1914.)