As a prelude to his sermon Sunday morning Rev. J.W. Cochran, of Christ Presbyterian Church, taking as a topic “One Life’s Ministry,” paid a fine tribute to the late Mrs. Alice Waterman. He said:
“Thirty years or more ago there came into this community a woman beautiful in feature and of wonderful grace and gentleness. She came bearing no introduction except those attached to personal character and high-born dignity. Claiming naught of herself except the right to work for her maintenance, unlike the many who seek friends for the sake of what they may coax from them, this woman found a place which for years she maintained through efficiency and devotion to duty. Having laid up through previous years of hard labor a comfortable competency against the time when her powers should fail, she sought investment in an unprofitable venture and lost her all through the mismanagement of one in whole she had reposed confidence. Besides this grievous disappointment she was involved in ruinous debt to the extent of several thousand of dollars. But again, unlike the many, this woman began to struggle anew to clear herself of these obligations. While others sought refuge in bankruptcy, she disdained the debtor’s subterfuge and for years thereafter lived in what to others would be bare poverty to again be free and pay all that she owed. At the end of this time she was released from her calling, for she was of no more use in paying debts. And then she came to be known by many of you. She found a home among you. But though dependent upon that friendship which she had so richly earned, she did not lose heart nor become embittered and morose, as many of those who have been wronged by the world’s treachery and selfishness. She enriched the hearts of those about her with a passing sweetness of disposition, and if ever tears fell, wrung from a heart whose fairest ambitious had been crushed ands from which the nearest and dearest had been torn, they fell only in the midnight watches. Always that rare smile lit that gentle face upon which sorrow had put its refining touch.
“All through these sad years she had been asking herself how she might leave behind some love token, some link that should bind her to common, struggling humanity, ‘How she might deepen but a little of the sea of human affection, that men might look up and bless God,’ And this was her answer: Out on the hills lay the silent city, where stretched away the narrow houses to which we all shall come. Green sward and flowers, marble shafts and weeping willows lent grace and solemnity to almost every grave. Hardly a mound but bore some sign of the affection of the living for the dead. But unwept and unhonored lay scores of dead in their tattered gray, the prisoners of the north who had sickened and died in a lost cause. They had been carefully identified as they were buried, but weeds will grow in a potter’s field, and if friends will not care for graves--will strangers? Time and again the South was asked to pay respect to their soldier boys, but politics courts sentiment for revenue only and there came no response.
“The southern blood of this woman had been aroused, ‘They are mine,’ she said. ‘I belong to them and they to me.’ ‘They are my boys.’ With the wreck of her little fortune she under took the sacred task. The underbrush of years was cut away, and great boulders rolled aside. For whole days she worked on her knees about the graves pulling the weeds and grasses from between the low mounds. She would be taken out in the morning and left all day among the graves. Modest headboards were erected bearing names and regiments. a stone coping was constructed about the plot, With her own hands she planted trees, shrubs and flowers for ‘her boys.’
“And now she, too, has gone. Within a few days we laid her beside them, according to her wish long ago expressed. She sleeps beside her boys, not one of whom she ever knew or saw. That worn and lovely soul rests in peace.”
Mrs. Alice Whiting Waterman, who for so many years made her home at the residence of Major and Mrs. F.W. Oakley, died Monday morning, following a stroke of paralysis, aged 77. She had long been bed ridden as a result of the attack of paralysis, and dissolution, when it finally came was not unexpected. Mrs. Waterman was born at Baton Rouge, La., October 18, 1820, and there she resided with her parents until ten years of age when she moved with her family to New York City. At an early age she was married to Charles Waterman of the latter city, but was soon left a widow. She passed a number of years in the east and finally came to Chicago, where she was for eleven years matron of the Briggs house, also serving at a later period in the ill-fated Newhall house, Milwaukee. From there, in about 1868 she moved to Madison where she occupied the same position in the old Vilas house until it was closed in 1883. Since that time she has made her home with Major and Mrs.Oakley, having, as she had often said, no relatives either on the side of mother, father or husband. Some twenty years ago she became associated with P.B. Parsons, an old manager of the Vilas house, and together they obtained control of the Cliff house property at Devil’s Lake. By long years of industry and economy Mr. Waterman had saved some $16,000. or $18,000. and it was all used in rebuilding, remodeling and refurnishing the Cliff house, the completed structure as it stands to-day representing her life-time savings. The venture was a failure and her earnings were all swept away, the entire property soon passing into other hands. Mrs. Waterman being of southern birth, took a very tender and touching interest in the plot occupied by the hundred or more confederate dead in the Madison cemetery at Forest Hill. She beautified the spot, encircled it with shade trees, had the graves suitably marked and year after year toward these southern soldiers laying so far away among strangers she unceasingly performed a most sweet and charitable labor of love. At her own request and on the exact spot long since designated by her, she will be laid to rest with her “boys,” as she so fondly called them. Mrs. Waterman was a woman of the old school, refined in manner and singularly gentle.
The funeral will occur from the residence of Major Oakley at 4 o’clock this afternoon.
