Eliza D. Stewart
**update at the bottom of page.
MOTHER STEWART
A Birthday Offering to One Who Was Born
In Piketon, April 25, 1816.
A Famous Woman with a National Reputation.
To mark the spot in commemoration of the deeds of one who was born in Piketon, Ohio, on April 25, 1816, a monumental pile should be raised.
In that town Mrs. Eliza D. Stewart began her eventful life. Motherless at 3 and orphaned at 12, the early lessons of bereavement and endurance were fitting her to feel for and sympathize with suffering humanity.
From childhood her heart was ever drawn to those who suffered either in body or mind, and she was always most happy when she could alleviate their distress. She has ever felt for the poor, because she had learned the harder lessons of self support and self sacrifice. A nature sensitive ,refined and loving, the buffetings of the world had a tendency only to enlarge her sympathies and soften a more than usually tender heart into one of intense love and kindness, that has gone out and on, until the whole civilized world has known Mother Stewart.
Converted at fifteen, she began active church work wherever duty called. Later she took upon her the responsibilities of Sunday School and common school teaching, and to her, both of these meant a rounding out of moral and Christian character, as well as intellectual development. She was always an advocate of temperance. When the civil war began she was ready. Husband and step sons were at the front while her energies were given to helping with supplies until the "boys in blue’ all along the line said, "God bless Mother Stewart."
The crusade against rum brought every latent gift into recognition, and with the courage of a Daniel and trusting in his God, she went forth for home and humanity against the hosts of rum. During the crusade she spoke in a hundred towns and cities in the first six months. When this movement was chrystalizing into the W. C. T. U. she was one of the foremost in working for it.
Because of the great amount of work she had been instrumental in having accomplished at her home in Springfield, the first W. C., T. U. convention was called to that city. In 1876 she carried the message of the crusade to Great Britain, and as a result of her work, she had the satisfaction of seeing, before she left the kingdom, the organization of the British Woman’s Temperance Association. She has since crossed the seas twice in that great work. She took the work into the south and did more than any other woman to dispel the bitterness remaining after the war. Mother Stewart is honored Good Templar and an adopted sister of the Sir Knights in the Masonic order. She stood all one night on picket duty when Morgan’s guerrillas went through Southern Ohio. She has taken the place of a lawyer and plead the cases of drunkard’s wives and children and never lost a case. Eighty full years of earnest Christian toil can be known only "when the mists have rolled away and our comprehension is enlarged and radiated by the light of eternity. But with all her public work, she has been a faithful mother, a true wife and not only a tidy housekeeper but a model home-keeper as well. She demonstrated that a woman may be intelligent in all lines even as men are, and yet be womanly and refined as the most critical standard demanded by men. The great world recognizes at this eightieth birthday, that Mother Stewart’s sphere of usefulness is without limit to our mortal view, we hope that the sunset glories of life’s resting time may be commensurate to the heat and burden borne in its meridian. Move, a labor is sweet, but may the resting after it, be sweeter than the toil.
[if anyone has additional information on Mrs. Eliza D. Stewart would you please mail to us and we will add it to another newsletter and on this web page.]
**update note - In 1848 - Eliza Daniels (Mother Stewart) married Hiram Stewart - soon widowed.
April 1896
Waverly Newspaper
Copyright © 2004
Pike Co. Genealogy Society a Chapter of O.G.S.
P. O. Box 224, Waverly, Ohio 45690