Evening Republican, Volume 19, Number 67, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 20 March 1915 — TRUE TO HER LOVE OF 65 YEARS AGO [ARTICLE]

TRUE TO HER LOVE OF 65 YEARS AGO

Aged Woman Remembers First Beau With Greetings on Anniversary a Buggy Ride They. Took. San Francisco, Cal. —The saying that •'the constancy of a woman runs but three years and a day*’ has again been refuted, for out of the past there has flickered a message from Ohio to California that tells how an effection once planted in a woman’* heart never ceases to burn, though the winter of life weaves the frost halo in her hair and though vast mountains and numerous miles are thrust between the young emotion and the old. On a summer day in 1849 Stephen T. Gage, 18 years of age, took Mary Stevens, 16, for a ride along the beech and maple uplands of Ashtabula, Ohio, and boy and girl together they picnicked by a leaf-embowered stream. There was a spark that went with the glances of the two, but Fate swung their lives far apart A strapping, six-foot-three youth, he joined the pilgrimage to the west, while she remained in the comparative quietude of the old Ohio home. He went Into freighting over the big Sierra divide from Hangtown (Placer ville) into Nevada, and in 1856 was sent as an assemblyman on the Know Nothing ticket to represent his country, then the “Empire county of the state,’’ in the Legislature—the legislative session of which he is now the sole survivor. . .:

In his freighting he charged “all the traffic would bear** and he grew In influence and confidence In the transportation game. When it came Mme .to organize the building of the great transcontinental railroad, young Gage was a factor to be reckoned with, and he joined the Crockers, Stanford, Colton, Huntington, Hopkins and .Judah in carrying the project to its conclusion. Then he became a commanding figure In the politics of California and Nevada —the confidant and right hand of Stanford in carrying forward the railroad’s manifold policies. He made governors and judges, assessors, secretaries and controllers with a nod and unmade them with a wink. Men fawned lor his favor and scurried from his frown. He married, but not the girl of the picnic of Ashtabula in the far dim Ohio of his youth. Death made him a widower —twice. Age came, and with time the companions of his youth, his mature manhood and his achievements went their way. But that age left him ruddy and rugged—quick of eye, firm of step, patriarchal as to beard, but still such a figure that has made him called “the handsomest man in Californio.’’

But all these years in the far-away Ohio a woman remembered that picnic out of Ashtabula beneath the beeches and the maples, remembered a gleam in his eye, recalled the pressure of his hand. Three years ago Stephen T. Gage went back to Ohio and there he took Mary Stevens for a ride and picnic over the same old road out of Ashtabula—a ride under the beech and maple shade, a picnic by the same leafembowered stream. On the anniversary of that first ride in 1849 there came to Stephen T. Gage, 83 years old and a resident of this city, from Mary E. Stevens, aged 81, a telegraphed message reading: “To my first and only beau." “Happy returns of the day,” wired Stephen T. Gage in reply, and he hummed an old love tune.