MUSCATINE COUNTY IOWA REGISTER OF OLD SETTLERS BOOK ONE

Source: REGISTER OF OLD SETTLERS , BOOK One, page 413
submitted by Jo Ann Carlson, November 10, 2007

DEATH OF MRS. CLARA BLAYDES
Nov. 8, 1894 (hand written)

Mrs. Clara Blayes, one of the oldest residents of Muscatine, departed this life at 10:30 o’clock yesterday at the old home on West Fourth street where she had continuously resided for the protracted period of fifty-four years. The maiden name of deceased was Clara Dibble. She was a native of New Haven, Conn., and came to Iowa and Muscatine in 1839, residing here ever since.

Deceased had been an invalid for so many years as to have with drawn herself wholly from society and was known to her most intimate friends as a recluse who appeared to live within herself. Few who have remarked her strikingly pale face, delicate form and feeble steps as she appeared on our streets, and who have known of the solitary life she led, could believe that she was one of the belles of our pioneer society and the gayest of its circles. She retained in her feebleness and declining years much of the pleasant charm of her young womanhood, always greeting with a perennial smile and cordiality the few friends admitted to her later intimacy. She was a woman of large sympathies and though living in such retirement she kept herself by much reading en rapporte with the humanitarian and other progressive movements of the world, and delighted to talk of them with her closest friends. There are few lives that have been fuller of the sweetness of human kindness and human charity than her’s, or who have wished and prayed for higher and better things for humanity. She died as she had lived, at peace with all the world and with her Maker.

The funeral is appointed to take place from the residence, West Fourth street, Saturday, at 2 p.m.

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