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Written of Sarah and Jehu Evans by Charles H. Gray October 19, 1988
I went today to Eewannans lands to the house that Jehu Evans built for Sarah Pegaus Hicks. The house still stands with sentinel chemnies at gables ends and a great central hall that welcomed me, as it has so many others since 1833.
But the flanking parlors sag and window panes have fallen out and the broken glass lies all about. The broad front porch has fallen too but for a piece of roof that swings in every wind, its numbered days are very few.
I went inside this hollow ruin, and hurt to see its empty rooms with doors half fallen from their frames and walls that bent with age and weight. I climbed to the chambers overhead for the front hall stair was sound and streight and I found my way from room to room until at last I found another stair with graceful curve descending, where I came down to the room below and faced a hearth whose embers glow must have warmed the heart of Sarah so.
I stood by the great front door where Sarah must have stood to watch her children play or to watch for Jehu's lantern in the night. I had no doubt that she was happy there for love still lingered so in the rooms of polished wood and muraled walls that rose from panneled work at chair-rail height. These ruined rooms once sheltered gentle folk against the winter's cold and summer's heat and held the cradles of the young and mourned the passing of the old.
Before the house and to the east, well hid amid the brush, a small and unkept terrace runs some length, then turns, and turns again, a third and yet another turn until it meets it end. Within this holy ground some rocks are gathered here and there to mark the spot where Jehu and his Sarah rest. No headstones tell who lies beneath this sunken ground but in my hand a old obituary says that Sarah does, and Jehu too and in the other graves, I guess the names of children who had lived upon this land.
It was raining when I left. Both rain and tears fell cold upon the ground. I was sad that they were gone but happy that they lived and loved and left a legacy to me and you. I will not go again but yet I hope that you will go and from the ruins that you may know that Sarah lived and Jehu too.