Muhlenberg County KyArchives History - Books .....XXI Charles Eaves 1913
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Book Title: A History Of Muhlenberg County

XXI 
CHARLES EAVES

AMONG Muhlenberg's men of the last half of the Eighteenth Century none was more
universally loved than the late Judge Charles Eaves.

   His father, John S. Eaves, was born near Roanoke River, Virginia, in 1783,
and after a short stay in Nashville and Russellville settled in Muhlenberg in
1805 and became one of the county's most influential pioneers. He located on
Pond River, near Harpe's Hill. He was an intelligent man and a thrifty farmer,
served as justice of the peace and sheriff, and in 1834 represented the county
in the State Legislature. He died in Greenville in 1867. John S. Eaves married
Lurena Ingram. She was a talented woman and like her husband very much
interested in the development of the county. They were the parents of seven
children, of whom Charles Eaves was the youngest son. [1]

   From early youth and through all the years of his life Charles Eaves was a
student not only of law, history, and literature, but also of the natural
sciences. During his boyhood and early manhood he devoted most of his winter
evenings to the reading of good literature, and in the warmer season spent much
of his spare time wandering through the Pond River forests studying Nature or
sitting under an old sycamore on the banks of Eaves Creek, near his old home,
perusing good books. To him the monarchs of the forest were philosophers and
friends. His poetical idea of the interpretation of the trees is beautifully
expressed by his personal friend, James Lane Allen, in "Aftermath." [2] Judge
Eaves recognized the great educational value of travel. At the age of twenty-two
he made a trip on horseback to Dakota and other Western sections, and later in
life visited some of the Eastern cities and the Southwestern States.

   A brief biography of Judge Eaves was published in J. H. Battle's "Kentucky, a
History of the State," twenty years before his death. From this I quote: Charles
Eaves was born January 20, 1825, nine miles west of Greenville. He was educated
chiefly at home. In early boyhood he became a voracious reader. He gathered
books and spun his own web of knowledge. On his father's farm his habit was to
read half the night, after working on the farm all day. At the age of eighteen
he took up the study of law on the farm, reading Blackstone, Story, Chitty,
Stevens, Starkie, Greenleaf, and numerous other textbooks, and after three
years' reading obtained license to practice law. He was admitted to the
Greenville bar in September, 1846. Since then he has devoted his life to the
study and practice of law and to the study of literature.

   He is now a ripe, thorough lawyer, ranking high in his profession. His
knowledge is encyclopedic. As a pleader he is skillful, accurate, thorough; as a
speaker, never rhetorical, but plain, direct, compact and clear; always fair and
honorable in the conduct of a case, and generally successful. If eloquence he
has, it is the eloquence of conviction and clearness. He wins his cases by
careful preparation, clearness of statement and fairness of argument. He served
Muhlenberg County one year as county attorney, one year as school commissioner,
and one term (1857-59) as representative in the Legislature.

   In 1865 he removed to Henderson, Kentucky, and after a residence there of
twelve years returned to Greenville, where he now resides in his quiet,
tree-embowered suburban home. At Henderson he was city attorney for three years.
The office was unsought, and he held it till he resigned it. From having
frequently presided as special judge in the circuit courts he is generally known
as Judge Eaves.

   Not old at sixty; six feet high, and though not obese, weighing two hundred
pounds, healthy and strong, with a memory like a chronicle, with a love of books
unabated, reading a new law book with as much zest as a novel, drinking in its
meaning as a sponge absorbs water, Judge Eaves is likely to survive the present
century as an active member of his profession, honored and respected by bench
and bar as well as by the people, and after his death his ghost may possibly be
seen by his old associates about the courthouse with a law book or bundle of
papers under his arm.

   In 1852 Charles Eaves married Martha G. Beach, of Greenville, formerly of
Rochester, New York. They became the parents of five children. Their first two
children, Rufus and Frances, died before reaching maturity. Their sons, Charles
and Ridley, left Muhlenberg in early manhood. Their fifth child, Miriam, was a
beautiful but unfortunate woman, highly accomplished and an excellent musician.
She made Greenville her home during the greater part of her life. She was
murdered in Louisville on November 12, 1892. This dreadful tragedy and the
circumstances leading to it was the great sorrow of Judge Eaves' life, the shock
of which left a deep and lasting impress on him.

   No citizen was better versed in local traditions, and no man could tell the
stories of bygone days more interestingly and more accurately, than Judge Eaves.
He always showed a great and sympathetic interest in any legend he might be
reciting. He was a brilliant conversationalist. Few men in telling old
traditions, discussing literature, or explaining law could go so deeply into
minute details and yet hold their listener's uninterrupted attention as he did.
Unfortunately, he wrote nothing on local history and very little on any other
subject. A poem said to have been written by him, and one of his letters, are
quoted elsewhere in this chapter. On his death many oral traditions lost their
last narrator and much of Muhlenberg's unwritten history faded into the mass of
things forgotten.

   Judge Eaves loved Muhlenberg and everything associated with it. No hills and
valleys appealed to him more, and no county's future seemed to him brighter,
than Muhlenberg's. He often, and in all sincerity, told his friends that his
soul could not pass away peaceably in any other community, and that his bones
would not rest quietly in any other place than in this land where he had spent a
life of so many joys and sorrows. He was past eighty when the final summons
came. He died in Greenville on August 17, 1905, and was buried by the side of
his wife, who had preceded him to the Great Beyond on January 17, 1902.

   On September 23, 1905, these resolutions on the death of Judge Eaves were
passed by the members of the local bar and inscribed in the records of the
Muhlenberg Circuit Court:

   Resolved: That in the death of Judge Eaves we have lost not only the senior
of our bar and a revered and respected friend, but also the last member of a
distinguished number of lawyers who began the practice of law under that system
known as the Common Law Practice, which was in force in Kentucky prior to our
Code Practice.

   Resolved: That we revere his memory and cherish with grateful recollections
many favors bestowed by him, as well as many pleasant associations with him.

   Judge Eaves was a student all his life long. A volume could be written
relative to his instructive and entertaining conversations on the books he had
read. Judge Jeptha Crawford Jonson, one of the best-known attorneys in the Green
River country, who moved from McLean County to Greenville in 1892, where he died
April 10, 1912, aged seventy-nine, speaking to me of Judge Eaves, said: "During
the thirty-five years intervening between 1868 and the date of his death Judge
Eaves and I were intimately associated, and I esteemed him greatly. He was an
omnivorous reader and could describe vividly the characters in any story he had
read, discuss in detail any essay lie had perused, and repeat many and long
extracts from the better-known poets. His memory was excellent. His assimilation
and digestion of what he had read was perfect. He was thoroughly familiar with
the Bible and with many of the Greek and Latin authors, with Shakespeare,
Milton, and the Brownings; with Cowper, Scott, Bulwer, and Dickens; with Irving,
Cooper, and Hawthorne, and with a number of the French authors."

   Shortly after 1866, when General Buell made Muhlenberg his home, Judge Eaves
and the General formed a friendship that continued until the death of Buell in
1898. Judge Eaves and his family frequently visited General and Mrs. Buell and
their daughter, Miss Nannie Mason, at Airdrie, for many years. After the death
of the General, Judge Eaves continued his visits to "dear old Airdrie." During
all these years, upon his return home, the Judge invariably wrote his host a
letter of appreciation. All his letters were destroyed when the Buell residence
burned in 1907 except one which is addressed to Miss Nannie Mason, who after the
death of the General continued to live at Airdrie for a few years. Although the
Judge here expresses himself in the form of a letter, it is a good sample of the
style of conversation into which he often drifted. It is dated Greenville, June
26, 1902:

   I loved Airdrie from the first of my knowledge of it as the home of General
Buell and his family-admired it for its beauty-loved it greatly for its
dwellers-love it now for its old associations and its present owner.

   It was and is out of sight of roads and of people. A place where you may
spread yourself-your whole self-without disturbance; where you escape the dust
and smoke and folk; where you dwell in the presence of the beautiful river,
which is ever on its tranquil pilgrimage, bearing messages from the woods to the
sea; where you know every tree, every plant, every walk, every footpath, every
bird, every note of every bird; where, indeed, the birds have plenty of
hiding-places, and they must need tell of it to others, until it becomes their
summer garden as well as yours. You did not wait until Sunday to go to church;
but every morning in the week you and the birds had your orisons at four o'clock
and your evening benedictions at sunset. One who has never heard the birds from
four o'clock until six, of a summer morning, as I have done at Airdrie, has
never rightly heard God praised. You had your friends there. Some shaded you,
some fed you; the catbird chatted with you; the hens took food from your hands;
the roses never talked politics, but simply went on, clothing themselves with
more beauty and evolving sweeter fragrance for your sake. Often you got down to
the soul of things; for everything has a soul. Surely the bees and the
butterflies have soul-life-made up of taste, affection, fancy, will, and
hereditary instincts. The General's horse might have been immortal, without
injustice to other animals. Was there ever a genuine Anglo-Saxon cow there-a
great, rich, red-hided Durham? Such a cow would have become the place, and would
doubtless have had a clean, sweet yard, where the apple trees leaned across the
fence to shade her, and the moon looked in of nights to see her chew her cud.
Such a cow would have spoken to you in modulated tones and looked at you with
affection 

   But the home, the dear old home. perched on the hillside, overlooking the
beautiful river, the house enriched by its tender and precious associations, is
by far the most interesting inanimate object at Air-drie, if, indeed, it be
inanimate. Tn this house a truly great man, of noble nature, lived and died; a
beautiful and lovely woman lived and died, and a no less beautiful and lovely
woman lived and loved to live and would again love to live. Of the walls of this
house where these beautiful lives have been lived, where so many precious
experiences have been passed through, might not one say exactly what Joshua said
about the stone that he set up in Shechem (Joshua xxiv, 27) : "They have heard
all the words of the Lord which lie spake unto you?" And indeed the parallel
goes farther. The words which your household walls have heard from God, and
which they are still uttering, are the same words which He had spoken in the
presence of the old stone at Shechem, and of which that stone was a perpetual
witness to the people. Think of this house which has become monumental. Its
walls have other and far deeper values than were paid the architect and the
carpenter for designing and building them. These walls are steeped in truth, and
each room speaks it in its owe peculiar voice-the old truth of Covenant between
man and God-the necessity and blessing of obedience. It is not put in the hard
old Jewish way as it speaks to you out of the walls of your Christian home. It
is richened and deepened. But it is the same old truth. The wondrousness of
life, the blessedness of life, and the tie between all life and Clod, who is the
everlasting and all-creating one; that man's life belongs to God, and that there
is no true life in man except in God.

   In these rooms you faced the awful mystery of death; you watched that slow,
sure, gentle, irresistible untwisting of the golden cord, and saw mortality fade
into immortality before your very eyes. Can these rooms ever be silent to you
again? God gave you there at once the keenest pain and the sublimest triumph
over pain that the human heart can know. There He taught you at once the
necessity and blessedness of submission.

   It was here that some of your most precious friendships grew and ripened. It
was here I first met you, your mother and the General, and learned to love you
and yours. It was here you met and loved my wife and my granddaughters, Mabel
and Bessie Reno. It was here in this auditorium of heaven, amid all these sacred
and inspiring associations, that you "heard the voice of the Lord which He spake
unto you," bearing "witness unto you lest you deny Him." He bore ever "fresh and
present witness" of Himself in your heart. Every morning His voice was new.
Every evening His voice pursued you to your rest. Besides this direct continual
presence He filled your world of association with utterances of Himself. The
world will become to you more and more full of monumental pictures of human
nobleness, patience, self-sacrifice, courage, meekness, so that you shall be
more and more sure that goodness and heroism are possible for man. Not that you
are lacking in any of these, but they will grow and ripen.

   The transforming power of association is wonderful. It is the greatest
enrichment of the world by man. Herod builds a temple at Jerusalem. With vast
labor he levels the rough places and hews the great stone blocks into shape.
When it is done, his temple shines like a jewel on its hill. But who cherishes
the memory of its builder? Jesus comes right across the little valley to the
Mount of Olives. He changes nothing outward. He sticks no spade into its
surface. He leaves each bush and olive tree as he finds it. But there He
ofttimes resorts with his disciples. There he lies prostrate in the struggle of
Gethsemane. There at last His feet touch the earth as He ascends to Heaven, and
ever since those days Mount Olivet burns in the dearest and most sacred memory
of man.

   Judge Eaves' life was filled with profound sorrows that would have crushed a
less philosophic nature than his. Keen and bitter disappointments in his life
followed one after another, leaving him a desolate and lonely man. What these
disappointments were are still fresh in the minds of his surviving
contemporaries and do not come within the scope of this sketch or of this
volume. He met sorrow uncomplainingly and without any appeal for sympathy.
Sympathy was universally felt, but nobody could invade the sanctity of the
burden of grief that the disappointed old man carried to his grave without
murmuring. His nature, which rose above resentment, and his philosophy, which
contemplaited with stoical endurance all the varying fortunes of life, were
shown by his voluntary appeal, in simple and direct words, to a jury about to
decide the fate of the murderer of his daughter. A plea of guilty had been
entered. The deed was without legal extenuation, and without hearing evidence
the court was about to submit the case to the jury. At that moment the
prosecuting attorney asked permission for Judge Eaves to make a statement. This,
although an unusual proceeding, was granted by the court. Judge Eaves, rising
and advancing toward the jury, and speaking slowly with solemnity and feeling,
said :

   "By permission of the court I wish to state that I am the father of Miriam
Wing. I wish also to state that it will be satisfactory to me if the jury will
sentence Bert Wing to penal servitude for life. I have reasons for this. I, who
am sixty-eight years of age, can not afford to act against any man from mere
resentment. I can not help but feel some pity for a man with whom drinking was
such a disease. Gentlemen, it will suit me, if it will suit you, to say in your
verdict that his punishment shall be confinement in the penitentiary for life." [3]

   After the death of Judge Eaves the following poem was found among his
personal papers. The words were in his own handwriting and not in quotations.
This fact, coupled with the subject of the poem, makes it appear that he may
have been the author. He was a man of poetic temperament, but no one knows of
his having written or published any other poem. On the other hand, it may be one
of those stray waifs of impressive and solemn inspiration that sometimes find
anonymous publication and which he had found in print somewhere, adopted in his
heart, and copied in his own hand. It so faithfully portrays the sorrow that
fell upon his old age that it would naturally appeal to him as a full summary of
human fate under sorrow. Nevertheless, many of his friends think that he wrote
these lines out of the fullness of his own heart:

GOD'S PLOW OF SORROW.
God's plow of sorrow!   Sterile is
   The field that is not turned thereby; 
And but a scanty harvest his
   Whom the great Plowman passeth by. 
God's plow of sorrow!   All in vain
   His richest seed bestrews the sod; 
And spent for naught the sun and rain
   On glebes that are not plowed of God. 
He ploweth well, he ploweth deep,
   And where he ploweth angels reap.

God's plow of sorrow!   Gentle child,
   I do not ask that he may spare 
Thy tender soul, the undented,
   Nor turn it with his iron share. 
Be thine his after-rain of love,
   And where his heavy plow hath passed, 
May mellow furrows bear above
   A holier harvest at the last! 
He ploweth well, he ploweth deep,
   And where he ploweth angels reap.

God's plow of sorrow!   Furrowed brow,
   I know that God hath passed thy way; 
And in thy soul his heavy plow
   Hath left its token day by day. 
Yet from the torn and broken soil,
   Yea, from thy loss and from thy pain, 
He hath due recompense of toil,
   Be sure he has not plowed in vain. 
He ploweth well, he ploweth deep,
   And where he ploweth angels reap.

God's plow of sorrow!   Do not think,
   Oh careless soul, that thou shalt lack. 
God is afield, he will not shrink-
   God is afield, he turns not back. 
Deep driven shall the iron be sent
   Through all thy fallow fields, until 
The stubborn elements relent
   And lo, the Plowman hath his will! 
He ploweth well, he ploweth deep,
   And where he ploweth angels reap.


ENDNOTES

     [1] Mr. and Mrs. John S. Eaves were the parents of: (1) Sanders, who
married Jane Short; (2) William, married Sarah Walker; (3) George W., sr.,
married Mary Peters; (4) John S., jr., married Miss Turbiville; (5) Charles,
married Martha G. Beach; (6) Mrs. Mary (Reverend Isaac) Malone; (7) Mrs.
Caroline (Felix J.) Martin.


     [2] "How sweet that smoke is! And how much we are wasting when we change
this old oak back into his elements-smoke and light, heat and ashes. What a
magnificent work he was on natural history, requiring hundreds of years for his
preparation and completion, written in a language so learned that not the wisest
can read him wisely, and enduringly bound in the finest of tree calf! It is a
dishonor to speak of him as a work. He was a Doctor of Philosophy! He should
have been a college professor! Think how he could have used his own feet for a
series of lectures on the laws of equilibrium, capillary attraction, or soils
and moisture! Was there ever a head that knew so much as his about the action of
light? Did any human being ever more grandly bear the burdens of life or better
face the tempests of the world? What did he not know about birds? He had carried
them in his arms and nurtured them in his bosom for a thousand years. Even his
old coat, with all its rents and patches-what roll of papyrus was ever so
crowded with secrets of knowledge? The august antiquarian! The old king! Can you
imagine a funeral urn too noble for his ashes? But to what base uses! He will
not keep the wind away any longer; we shall change him into a kettle of lye with
which to whiten our floors."-From James Lane Allen's "Aftermath."


Additional Comments:
Extracted from:

A HISTORY OF MUHLENBERG COUNTY
BY

OTTO A. ROTHERT
Member of The Filson Club. Kentucky State Historical Society, American
Historical Association, International Society of Archaeologists, etc.

JOHN P. MORTON & COMPANY
INCORPORATED LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY
1913

File at: http://files.usgwarchives.net/ky/muhlenberg/history/1913/ahistory/xxicharl222gms.txt

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