Grayson County TXGenWeb

Henry B. Nichols died at the City hotel in Whitesboro February 26, 1907, age 59 years. He was attacked suddenly on Saturday night and grew gradually worse from violent hemmorhages until the end came Tuesday morning at 8:30, surrounded by his friends, among whom were ladies who had hastened to his bedside to offer aid and sympathy.
Funeral services were held at the residence of G.W. Hughes, and the body was buried in the Oakwood cemetery at 9 o'clock a.m., February 27, 1907.
The subject of this sketch came to Whitesboro near a third of a century ago and was a member of a large body of immigrant Missourians who settled in Grayson county soon after the war. From his long residence in Whitesboro, he became acquainted with all the older residents of the town, among whom he had many friends, and to whom he was much attached, by ties of the warmest friendship. During the many long years he has lived in the town he has performed a part, and lived the life of a citizen, trying to do his duty and to make himself useful in the community. He was a man strong and pronounced in his likes and dislikes; and though persistent in his ruling passions and appetites, he was governed by a kind and generous heart, full of the better and nobler impulses. He was always ready to help a friend in need, and to lend a helping hand to those in distress.
In his younger days he was ever on hand when sorrow came to the homes of his people, especially to his own Missourians. He loved his old state and its people. When the hand of death was laid on their stricken homes, Henry was the first to lead the way to the graveyard, to dig the grave, and bury the dead. When most of the old citizens of the town had passed away and their children were growing up around him, he could call the name of each and all of them, and never ceased to love, admire and remember them as the idols of the parents and friends whom he had followed to the grave. He always regarded it as a priviledged pleasure in his daily duties on the express and transfer lines to kindly offer and aid them in their goings and comings, to and from school, visiting and returning to their happy homes; they in return rewarded him with a smile and a cheerful expression of gratitude for his labor of love. Though his afflictions from his boyhood and his physical imperfections from his birth weighted heavily upon him, he never was heard to complain.
With the ever present and disheartening conviction of his inability to meet and wage the unequal contest against the rude contacts of his life, he never esteemed his existance any craving desire to preserve or prolong it. But he was honest, generous and truthful. He loved company, companionship and amusement, and was a man of sound common sense, with an ample fund of native mother wit. But he had his periods of reflection and remisence - times when morose and melancoly, he would look back over the waste of the past, without a beacon light ahead, or a plan devised to shape the ends of an undefined future.
He confessed that he could not control his own destiny by his own will, in his own hands. He confided to his best friend that he was sorry he had not lived a better life, desired his Christian friends to pray for him in the last trying hour. His Christian friends not only prayed for him, but covered his faults into the grave with his body, to be remembered no more, praying that any wicked word or deed he may have spoken or committed, will be forgiven, and hope that "the accusing spirit who bore the message to heavens chaucery blushed as he gave it in, and that the recording Angel as he wrote it down, dropped a tear upon it, and blotted it out forever."