Rensselaer Republican, Volume 26, Number 36, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 3 May 1894 — IN MEMORIAM. [ARTICLE]

IN MEMORIAM.

Griswold Van Rensselaer. The great grandson of the founder of this town, and the last in his direct line who bear the name of Van Rensselaer passed away suddenly at Colorado Springs, on Sunday morning, April, 22. The many friends of the late Gen. John Cullen Van Rensselaer, who so deeply sympathized with him in the death of his only son, Schuyler, will regret to hear of the untimely end of that son’s only child. Brilliant and gifted, his college career at Harvard University was cut off in the beginning of the Sophomore year by the developement of a pulmonary affection. He was ordered to Colorado Springs for the winter, where he appeared to make a rapid recovery. Permitted by his physicians to return east for a visit, he was to have started for New York on the 23rd of April when the sudden and fatal attack occurred. He had passed his nineteenth birthday two months previously. He was born in New Brunswick, N. J. on Feb. 11th, 1875, and was the only child of Schuyler Van Rensselaer and his wife Mariana Griswold, the daughter of the late George Griswold, Esq.,of New York. He was partly educated in Dresden, Germany, and then prepared for College in New -York City.ll is brilliant gifts secured an easy entrance into Harvard where he took high rank in his class. Gentle, noble, high minded and regardless of self, he was from boyhood on through youth to this dawn of early manhood, one of whom it might well be said, “without fear and without reproach.”

He was a worthy son of noble parents. For the mother who has never left him and who is bringing on her son to rest beside his father and grandparents in Greenwood, all hearts who know the depth of her bereavement (must bleed with pity. Her name is widely known through the land from her literary achievements. It was given to her to mould the intellect of her son in a way possible to few mothers and the devotion of the two was unto death and will endure unto eternity. The only surviving children of Gen. Van Rensselaer are Mrs. OlepbantVail of New York and Mrs. Alan Hartwell Strong, of New Brunswick, N. J. One grandson remains, the only child of an elder daughter, by name Cullen Van Rensselaer Cogswell, aged twenty-five and residing in the cityof New York. The only surviving child of Mr. James Van Rensselaer, the founder of this town, is Mrs. Cornelia Kenton Van Rensselaer, the sister of Geo. Van Rensselaer, who resides in New Brunswick.