The Republic
Columbus, Indiana
Tuesday, July 1, 1879
Page 4

Obituary

DIED-At the residence of Silas Thompson, Columbus, Indiana, on Wednesday, June 25, 1879, Mrs. Polly Lane in the eighty-sixth year of her age.

As life after life passes away it seems fit that one should pay the tribute of at least a few words of kindly mention to the memory of those who have tried to live worthily. Mrs. Lane was the widow of Col. Jacob Lane, well and favorably known as one of the earliest settlers of this county. Her maiden name was Guernsey. She was the daughter of Daniel and Hulda Guernsey, formerly Hulda Seymour, and was born at Watertown, Conn., in 1793. Her father removed to the State of New York in 1807, where Polly married Jacob Lane in 1813.

Jacob Lane came to Clark county, Indiana, in 1818, remaining there three years, when he removed to Bartholomew county, where he died in Wayne township in 1855.

Since his death his widow's home has been with her son-in-law, Silas Thompson. There was little that we call eventful in the life of Polly Lane. Such privations as were incident to a change of home from farm life in New England to one here fifty-eight years ago, were here of course, but they were the lot of all who came from old and well settled counties to the wilderness, and among those early settlers there may have been some whose hardships were greater than hers. Physically large, her mind and heart were correspondingly so. Unfriendly gossip about her neighbors adn acquaintances was repugnant to her nature. It was her practice for many years to read the Bible through twice a year. She attached herself to the Methodist Episcopal church in the year 1835, under the ministration of Williamson Terrell; perhaps not so much from an entire accord with peculiar tenets as from a sense of duty to connect herself with some Christian organization, and that one was most convenient to her.

Even tempered to a remarkable degree, warm hearted yet undemonstrative, quiet, dignified, unassuming, having a large fund of reminiscences and anecdotes laid away in the storehouse of an excellent memory, ready for use when called for, a mind active to get as well as give, in habit never idle or folding her hands with nothing to do, knitting, sewing and reading she passed the days of her declining years still engaged in something-always something of use to herself or those about her, professing, but living rather than professing, the life of a truly good and Christian woman, bearing the trials of her last-almost her only sickness-with becoming patience and fortitude. She was not only not afraid to die, but she was anxious to go and meet the loved ones who had gone before. An older sister, a son and two daughters survive her.
E.G.H.