The First Death in Metaline
A young mother dies within hours of falling ill, and a brand-new village buries its first resident — by steamer, across the water, to the cemetery at Ione.
The first death in Metaline occurred when Mrs. Arthur Kirkland died at her home here, after an illness of only a few hours on Friday night. It came as a great shock and cast a pall over the whole village. The body, accompanied by the relatives and friends, was taken on the steamer Metaline Sunday to Ione, where funeral services were held in Blackwell hall and the body laid at rest in the cemetery at Ione. She had a mother and several brothers and sisters in Iowa, and leaves a husband and three small children here. Although she had lived here but a short time she had made many friends, and the bereaved ones have the sympathy of all.
“It came as a great shock and cast a pall over the whole village.”
In a town too new to have its own cemetery, the dead were carried by boat to the nearest consecrated ground — a detail that captures how thin the margin of life was on the early Metaline frontier. Today the same river route is a recreation corridor, but the isolation that made a sudden illness fatal, and a funeral a voyage, is hard to imagine.
From readers
No comments yet. If you know something about this story — a correction, a family memory, a source — it belongs here.