Annals of our ancestors; one hundred and fifty years of history in the ...

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ANNALS OF OUR ANCESTORS
Thomas Brown made a large collection of geological specimens
mostly from the blue marl along the Miami River and
its tributaries. I think his collection is now in the Smithsonian
Institution. He was one of William 's truest old-time friends and
the message he wrote after our brother's decease was indited
out of a pure, strong friendship and I insert it to make it more
plain how Brother William impressed his friends. This article
was written for the Waynesville (Ohio) Gazette-News and I
copy it entire:
Monday morning, December 19, 1898, the death angel crossed the
threshold of a happy home on DeKalb street, Dayton, Ohio, and the
spirit of the fond father and faithful husband, passed over the mystic
river. Warnings of the summons had confronted the deceased over
a year ago, and for the benefit of change of scene and climate he had
gone with his brother Joseph on a trip to California and other distant
places; the change did not have the desired effect, and while visiting
his sister, Mrs. Datus Myers, in California, he was dangerously
stricken with kidney trouble; and although the return trip to his
home was painful and distressing, he with his family cherished the
hope that by the help of his strong will power and robust constitution
he would triumph over and baffle the disease, but gradually his
strength failed until the end came, and when it came a great heart
ceased to beat and a great brain ceased to work.
We knew and learned to love William Watkins in his early manhood,
a strong friendship bound us together, and the friendship
ripened with years. We admired him for his giant intellect and
loved him for his great, noble heart, than which none more faithful
to the friends of his youth or of his maturer years ever throbbed.
It mattered not to him whether fortune continued to smile upon his
friends or they became victims of misfortune, he was always the same
friend, if his friends showed that their lives were actuated by honorable
principles.
As he went, step by step, from the position of a sub-district school
teacher to take his rightful place in the ranks of the foremost educators
of the day, we watched with interest his advancement and were
proud to call him friend.
Our meetings in later years were few and far between, but the tie
of friendship was never severed nor loosened; and as circumstances
favored us with more frequent meetings in the last few years, his
varied scholarship, his advanced ideas, his broadening of character
seemed but the rich maturity of the promise of earlier years. His
brain was busy with the problems of life, problems involving the
greater interests of humanity, with every thought modified by the