Sarah (Coffee) Eskew (1905)

COFFEE, ESKEW

Posted By: Treva Patterson
Date: 3/10/2007 at 15:01:48

The Winterset Madisonian
Winterset, Iowa
Thursday, October 5, 1905

Eskew

On Wednesday, September 27, occurred the death of one of the oldest citizens of Madison county. At her home in Scott township five miles east of Winterset, where she had been a resident for about forty years, Mrs. Sarah Eskew passed away, at the remarkable age of ninety-three years, seven months and one day. She was born in Adair county, Kentucky, February twenty-sixth, 1812, at a day that state was a wild, and unimproved frontier. She saw frontier life both in Kentucky and in Iowa. Her maiden name was Coffee. In Cumberland county, Kentucky in 1833, she married to John Eskew. She became the mother of seven children, six of whom survive her.

At the outbreak of the Civil War, Mrs. Eskew and her husband and children were one of twenty-five families comprising a United Brethern church in that community. They were compelled on account of their anti-slavery views to give up their belongings for almost nothing, crossed the Ohio River in imminent danger of being captured by the secessionists and made their way over the plains across the Mississippi to the fertile prairies of Iowa and found a home in Madison county.

For more than forty years thereafter Mrs. Eskew was spared to lead a quiet, peaceful Christian life in the land of her new home. She lived to see her children's children unto the fourth generation"was gathered to her fathers, and was buried in a good old age." She leaves her children, fourteen grandchildren and twenty-six great-grandchildren. They miss her, but they are comforted in her going, for she lived and died in the faith of Christ the Savior. On her death-bed she exhorted her children and those around her to put their trust in the Lord. In her last days she often repeated this little stanza:

"Let us join to sing His praises

And hand in hand go on

Till we arrive in Canaan

Where we no more shall mourn."

The funeral services were held Thursday at Blair Chapel and interment was made there beside the last resting place of her husband.

Gravesite
 

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