Person Page 2,896

OBITUARY - The Kingsport Tennessee Times ; Monday, 31 August 1970; page 4, column 3; (Ancestry.com):

Mrs. Sarah DeVault

Mrs. Sarah (Sue) DeVault, 82, of 2729 Princeton Road died Saturday at 10:30 p.m. in Holston Valley Community Hospital after an illness of about one year.

She was born in Sulllivan County and had lived in the Kingsport area all her life. Mrs. DeVault attended the Horse Creek Freewill Baptist Church.

Survived by one daughter, Mrs. Hal Churchwell of the home, one sister, Mrs. Rose Hillard of New Jersey. Also survived by five grandchildren, six great-grandchildren, and five great-great-grandchildren.

Hamlett-Dobson is in charge.

(NOTE: Hal Churchwell was boarding with Sudie in the 1930 census & sister Rose is shown with Sudie in the 1910 census - cac.)

Note by William Bruce Gillmore

The only one of the Duncans that I ever saw was Martin. He visited us in Kansas City in the fall of 1900 and again in 1903 or 1904. He had a large family, about all grown, and his wife had left him prior to 1900. He filed on a homestead in Texas County, Oklahoma beside the one my Father had filed on, but he never returned to it and eventually released it to my sister, Nora Gillmore. She proved up on it prior to her marriage to Mr. Brooks. Martin Duncan was about Mother's age. I think Susan and Joseph were married in Tennessee and went to Illinois about 1850 with the Hunts and Michael Devault and other kin-folks.

Headstone inscription:

JENNIE DUNCAN

BORN

APRIL 26, 1852

DIED

OCT 14, 1892

A PRECIOUS ONE FROM US HAS GONE

A VOICE WE LOVED IS STILLED

A PLACE IS VACANT IN OUR HOME

WHICH NEVER CAN BE FILLED.

Myrna (Brooks) Hood wrote (given to Tracy Devault by Valerie M. Hudson):

Mary Sanders Duncan, who lived into the 1940s, (she died on 18 Dec., 1947) of course I did know --- as did most of my cousins, I'm sure. I remember "Cousin Mary" as an exceedingly prim and proper old lady, whose Victorian sensibilities I was forever being warned not to offend with my tom-boyish ways. As a result, I seemed to always be terminally tongue-tied in her presence. I seem to recall that I never saw her dressed other than in elegant black, usually an ankle-length gown with a white lace collar. Her legs, what one could see of them (and she would have called them "limbs" if she called them anything at all!) were always encased in black silk stockings. She had a rather mournful way of speaking and her accent that of pure New England. She had one stock comment in her conversation which inevitable came out in response to anybody's relating any kind of negative news --- from a cut finger to a total crop loss for the year: "Wa-al," she would drawl -- "Thaht's tooo bahd," in tones as sadly melancholy as a mourning dove's. There's no question but that she was the "grande dame" of the neighborhood; to commit even the slightest impropriety in her presence was unthinkable.

As mentioned elsewhere, Mary did have a husband, rather briefly. She married Robert Duncan (said to have been a minister) on 15 October, 1890. Robert died of typhoid fever on their wedding anniversary four years later. Some nine years after Robert's death, Mary took into her home a nine-year-old niece of Robert's, Donna Duncan. Donna was born on 9 Aug., 1894, in Findlay, Ill. Her father, Martin K. Duncan, had separated from her mother when the couple's four children were young. Lillie, her mother, had gone to California with the two youngest --- Donna and her sister, Pansie. By 1903, the mother's health failed and she sent Donna back to Illinois to live with her relatives. Donna's father was remarried by this time, so Mary Duncan, his sister-in-law, kindly took charge of Donna. Gwen Duncan, who married my father's first cousin, Malcolm Stewart of Moweaqua, was an older sister of Donna's. Malcolm Stewart's mother, born Typhena Brooks -- a sister to my grandfather Charles Brooks -- married as her second husband (and his second wife) the same Martin K. Duncan who was the father of Donna as well as Gwen Duncan, who became Tryphena's daughter-in-law after being her stepdaughter! I know I shouldn't try to describe relationships of this complicated nature - on paper, they never seem to come out right. Suffice it to say, this Martin K. Duncan, brother of Mary Sanders' husband Robert Duncan, father of Gwen and Donna, and second husband of my great-aunt "Pheenie", has been described to me by my father as an utterly despicable character -- "A mean old buzzard", I believe is how he described Duncan. When I inquired as to why Aunt Phennie ever married him, my dad said he didn't know and added, "Anyway, she got rid of him --- divorced him, you know!" [Chalk up two more 19th Century divorces!]

At any rate, Donna Duncan grew up into a spirited and beautiful young lady; no doubt she found the atmosphere of the Garwood-Duncan establishment a bit of a "gilded cage"; it must have been thick with Victorian repression, as well as overstuffed elegance. Perhaps she was happier during her teen years, when she was sent away to school at Monticello Lady's Seminary. Donna died rather suddenly on the 19th of December, 1915, allegedly from and undiagnosed brain tumor. My father, Carl Brooks, who knew Donna very well (they were close to the same age), states that Donna had developed a severe infection of the sinuses in the fall of 1915 --- an infection that quickly worsened, apparently spreading to the lining of the brain, and proved to be incurable in those days before antibiotics. A specialist was called in from Decatur, but he, too, was helpless to find a solution; the solution was still 30 years in the future in the form of penicillin. It's said that the two attending doctors operated on the dying patient as the she lay on her little bed in the downstairs bedroom, as a last desperate measure to locate the suspected brain tumor. As eyewitness, (as I have heard the story, a girl who was hired live-in help at the time) later described the scene as "Blood everywhere -- the mattress was entirely soaked with blood and we later took it out and burned it. It was terrible!" This same young lady was later to hint darkly that Donna's death was a suicide, but I believe she may have been letting her imagination run away with her. My father remembers the occasion very well, and it certainly does appear that Donna died from a raging infection. The death-bed operation, of course, was not only futile, but barbaric when viewed from a present-day perspective.

Although such scenes of horror were not uncommon in those days, I suppose, it must have been nothing short of ghastly for the dying girl and her anxiety-stricken family. Such a sudden and tragic end to her beautiful young niece must have been a cruel blow to the aunt who had raised her. Small wonder I remember as always speaking in melancholy tones.

Roger and Mary's oldest son, Jake Vangeison, now age 12, confided in me during my latest visit to this house (which, of course is his home) that he doesn't like to be in the "front part of the house". "Have you seen ghosts?" I asked him. "Well --- I don't think so," he said, "but I got this creepy feeling when I'm near that bedroom where she died." I have to agree with the lad --- that small front bedroom where Donna Duncan died, which still contains the same little painted bedstead that was hers, is quite capable of eliciting a very strong emotional response from anyone who is more than usually sensitive to such things. If ever an old house was tailor-made to harbor ghosts, this one surely must answer the description.

Note: Lydia (Ayars) Duncan took three of her daughters to California: Gwen, Donna and Pansie. Gwen and Donna returned to Illinois shortly after the 1900 Census was taken. Gwen married Malcolm Stewart and Donna went to live with Mary Elizabeth (Sanders) Duncan. Pansie remained in California where she lived and died.