STOKES, Henry

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Death of an Eccentric Man.

On Monday morning of this week Henry Stokes, a very eccentric man and usually known as the “Old Bachelor” died at the residence of Mr. Sturgeon, two miles east of Trafalgar. He was about sixty years old at the time of his death and had lived alone on his farm since a young man up to within a few weeks of his death, when Mr. Sturgeon, seeing that death was not far off, persuaded him to be taken to his house.

When quite a young man Stokes was disappointed in love affairs, and since that time has elected to live in seclusion as much as possible, not even allowing a cat or dog to find a habitation on his farm, and so averse was he to anything tending to make a farm cheerful, that he raised no stock, and only tolerated a few horses necessary to do the ordinary farm labor. His early disappointment had grown on him to such an extent that he seemed to doubt everything, even going so far as to affirm that the late war was only a trick of the money power to get high prices, and that in fact there was no war. He even suspected fraud when a brother visited him a few years ago, and ordered him off as an imposter. Many other evi­dences of a deranged mind are related, from which we infer that “it is not best for man to be alone.” It is not known that he had any living relatives, but as he has a nice little estate, they will, no doubt, be as numerous as Kansas grass­hoppers.

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Link to Henry Stokes’s grave

Submitted by Mark McCrady and Cathea Curry