EATON, Arial K., General b: c1810-1815

EATON, MCARTHUR, JARNAGIN

Posted By: County Coordinator
Date: 9/12/2011 at 00:20:26

General Arial Kendrick Eaton

Arial Kendrick Eaton was born in Sutton, New Hampshire on December 1, 1831* on a rugged, stony hill farm. Here he worked with his widowed mother, with few school advantages, until the fall of 1831 at which time he attended the select school of Silon Pillsbury, one of the ancestors of the Pillsbury family of Minneapolis, at South Sutton, New Hampshire. He taught school at Franklin, South New Market, and Claremont, New Hampshire. He afterward taught school in Massachusetts and Fayette County, Ohio until June 1840, during the most of the last four years of whic he taught a select school at Washington Court House. During this time he studied law with the Hon. Wade Loofboro, and formed the personal acquaintance of Governor William Allen and Allen G. Thurman.

June 3, 1836 he was married to Sarah Ann McArthur at Washington Court House, who died there June 15, 1840. He then moved to Winchester, Randolph County, Indiana in 1844. In June 1844 he resigned his office on account of ill health, and on December 7th was married to Sarah Jarnagin. In August 1846 he settled at Delaware County, Iowa, in a log house which was the secons house built on the town plat. He resided at Delhi until October 1855. During this period he was Prosecuting Attorney, Judge of Probate, County Judge, and was a member of the Houose of the Iowa Legislature from 1850 to 1852. It was during this period that the organization of the State largely took place. He was a member of the Committee on Schools, and took a great interest in the establishment of the public school system of the state.

March 1855 he was appointed by Frank Pierce Receiver of the public moneys of the Turkey River land District and moved to Decorah, Iowa in the following fall. With the Register, Hon. James D. Jenkins, he moved to Osage with the Land Office in the summer of 1856. He was one of the original proprietors of the City of Osage. He had been an active Democrat all his life, and a member of the party until within the last few years, when his sympathies were entirely with the Populists.

He was a charter member of Osage Lodge No. 102. In early days he assisted in founding Lodges in Iowa City and in Delaware County, Iowa. He was a member of Osage chapter No. 36. In December 1895 was made a Knight Templar.

The surviving members of the family are the General's widow, the devoted and kind wife and mother, and two sons of a family of five children born to them -- three having gone before -- Willard L. of the law firm of Eaton and Clyde, of this city, and Sumner Franklin, who resides on the farm near the city.

"Say nothing but what is good of the dead." We have no occasion for the exercise of this ideally beautiful precept in the instance before us; we feel not its restraint upon the hand that is moved by a 26 years unbroken friendship to draw this imperfect tribute. We are not compelled to lift the pencil at any point or move lightly over any feature of his spacious, open, unchallenged life! No shadows fall about for the relieving touch. Clear from dawn to dayspring and from "high and glorious noon" to the latest sunset ray was that life-course run.

Here charity finds nothing to suppress, history nothing to vindicate, friendship nothing to forgive, love nothing to delay its unqualified blessing! And the benediction of all men will descend upon his grave freely as the sunlight fell the day of the burial service. The memory of his virtues will be long cherished in the homes of men.

But "the strong hours conquered him" too, at last. Yet how reluctantly. The conqueror came gently, but came not until his life had ceased to be a promise and had become a rare fulfillment. Death claimed him at an hour most benignly, most lovingly deferred. It found him "only waiting, calmly waiting at the gate, with neither dread nor longing to depart."

And may we not hope with him that: "Gently and without grief the old shall glide into the new, and the eternal flow of things like a bright river of the fields of heaven shall journey onward in perpetual peace?"

"Were we not glad that he had lived so long?
And glad that he had gone to his reward?"
And could we deem that Nature did hom wrong
Softly to disengage the vital chord?
For when his hand grew palsied and his eyes
Dark with the mists of age it was his time to die."

And yet we hardly realized he was aged except in the physical frame. The mental, moral, social forces were not abated. What man of near unto 83 years, have we seen who kept his heart so young, his pulse of spirit up to the full beat--mind so sustained in all its powers -- so alive, so alert upon th ecurrent events, his thoughts so fully abreast with the evolutions of things?

He seemed not to retire unto the past, not to fall out by the way, or lag superfluous behind. He was not left upon the shore, but he was ever in the channel's stream -- battling in its living flow -- with the seal of youth, the strength of manhood's prime and the wisdom of the final years -- to the last. Witness the recent articles from his pen in our local papers. What a sharp metalic ring, what a virile force they have -- not for an old man, but for any man! though we may not accept as one-half true the presented thought, the advocated view. How he grappled in with the Cuban struggle, the Armenian horror, the overshadowing British power, the Monroe Doctrine. How he showed here the ardor of patriotic youth, the large humanities of his own nature and his exalted Americanism.

What an illustration in him of the wintry years made fruitful and blessed by the gathered stores of the years before? How amiable and intersting he was at 82? How much of the green leaf, the bright flower, the precious fruit he carried into the dying period. How many of the present American day will come into these barren years to "bring a mind unfurnished and a withered heart?"

And because he went out ever after the true knowledge and sought wisdom's ways according to the light given him. Because he cultivated though and improved opportunity was his last ripening fruit almost as choice as the first.

Truly when the night came wherein no man can work was "length of days in his right and in his
left hand riches and honor."

But we must remember his was the burden, the narrow meager opportunity of th epioneer always or near to it. His youth a sharp manful struggle with its hard circumstances in early New England. He remained there until the pioneer had come up into the modern civilizer. Then at the age of 23 he moved to Ohio, the threshold state of the prairied west. Next to Indiana, a frontier state later born, then to our Iowa -- Delaware county then Winnesheik, last Mitchell. He loved the pioneer life for he never turned back from it. He kept faceward to the west sometimes in the lead, always abreast of a westward moving civilization. He did not idly drift or take up any forced march. With him it was a direction from choice, not accident or necessity.

And so he passed through three civilizations, each distinctive, cumulative. He helpfully laboured to build each in a more or less conspicuous way. He held many offices of local trust and honor, along the line. He loved to help organize society, he loved to administer any public or private trust; he was proud of their honor an dkept his own therein. And he kept up to the civilizations in which he took hand with an equal place in his own development.

A gentleman of the antique American type but quite modernized -- up to date. The ancient pattern somewhat, with many of the modern improvements. Young with the young, mature with the mature, and old with no one.

He was more suggestive than demonstrative. More thought-awakeing than conclusive-leading.

The light he shed upon a question was often the oblique collateral ray -- yet it was light -- and it sometimes fell in floods -- more level and direct. He touched no subject he did not
set men, common men at least more to thinking about, and leave them the wiser and not the worse. And what a command of sinewy Saxon-English he had for a man whose learning and training were picked by the hard way!

Some of his sentences had the abrupt startling, smiting force of the electric bolt. The bearing of some, you did not see or feel -- perhaps in some manner your own fault.

I think his mental bias was to grapple with great questions, not petty, trivial ones. Generalities, not details. Small things he had not much to do with. He had the Coleridge stream of talk, but not the MaCauley exclusiveness in his conversation. For he was a patient deferential listener as well. But he had reasons for the faith within him, which he gave instantly. There was always some clearly marked highway to his own conclusions that satisfied him. He was always a logical process of some sort, according to his own mental laws, and moral principles.

[ NOTE: The article was redacted considerably from what the original manuscript had. It was just to verbose and fluffy to type the whole thing up. If you want to see it all, make a trip to the Osage public library. ]

*The manuscript said he was born in 1831, but that must be in error, based on his resulting age for various other events such as marriage.

Mitchell Biographies maintained by Sharyl Ferrall.
WebBBS 4.33 Genealogy Modification Package by WebJourneymen