Bates, Willie 1877-1897

BATES

Posted By: Volunteer Transcriber
Date: 2/18/2005 at 10:29:14

Last Friday morning across the wires came the message, Willie Bates is dead. While this was not wholly unexpected, as it was generally known he had been sick a long time, yet it cast a gloom over many hearts here where he was born and reared until his parents moved to Newton and since then he has kept up the acquaintance by frequent visits while able and tender messages after he could no longer come.

Willie would have been twenty years old the third of September, and passed to the life beyond June 10th, Thursday evening at 11 o’clock, knowing all his loved ones to the last, the weary spirit took its flight and the pain racked body was at rest. Sunday at 2:30 p. m. the funeral services were held in the Congregational Church of which he was a member. He said to his pastor that it was the sustaining power of God’s grace that had helped him in his long hours of suffering ­ that without it he could never have borne what he had. The floral gifts from friends, from his loved mandolin club and from the Woodmen of the World, to which he belonged, were beautiful and the profusion of these tokens showed the esteem in which he was held. The services were in charge of the Woodmen. Relatives and friends from Des Moines, Colfax, Kellogg, Monroe and Prairie City were in attendance to assist in these sad obsequies. ~ The Newton (IA) Record Friday, June 18, 1897
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Prairie City (IA) News, 1897

Wi11ie Bates died June 10, 1897, at the home of his parents in Newton.

He was the son of Photographer Bates and was born in Prairie City, September 3, 1877.