[Lead
Belt News/Flat River, St. Francois County, MO/Friday, March 6, 1931] --
MARY
CAIN DIED AT B. T. HOSPITAL
THURS. NIGHT --
Miss Mary Catherine
CAIN of
Bonne Terre, passed away last Thursday night at the hospital in that city, at the age of 88 years, following an illness of several weeks of pneumonia. Funeral services were conducted Sunday afternoon at one thirty o'clock by her pastor, Rev. William
Stewart. Interment was in the cemetery at Caledonia.
Miss
CAIN has made her home at
Bonne Terre since the earliest existence of the town, living all alone. She had no living relatives. She was the last remaining charter member of the
Bonne Terre Methodist church, being faithful in her attendance as long as her health permitted. She had planned all the arrangements for her funeral, to the minutest detail, and they were faithfully carried out by her pastor and friends.
Each town has its eccentric characters, and Mary
CAIN was certainly that in
Bonne Terre. Good hearted, sympathetic, she had within her brain a queer twist of aloofness which led her to live alone. Her home gave her little concern insofar as the bother of keeping it spic and span was concerned, or at least this was true during the latter years of her life. She was content with very little, and exhibited almost uncanny smartness, or cunning, in managing her personal affairs. As an instance, it is stated that she carried insurance policies on the lives of various persons, without their knowledge, and that she collected on a number of such policies. These policies were of the industrial variety, none of them large enough to call for a physical examination of the insured. One such policy, fully paid up, was found in her personal effects after death.
Perhaps the most noticeable trait which she exhibited publicly was her habit of attending all funerals in
Bonne Terre. It is safe to say that she did not miss a single one for a long period of years, until immediately prior to her death, when her own illness became so acute that she was physically unable to get out. As a result, it is small wonder that her own funeral was one of the largest ever held in
Bonne Terre, for the citizens of our neighboring city, through long years of personal contact, had long since penetrated the outer shell of their eccentric neighbor and learned to know her inner heart as it really was. Through the idiosyncrasies which surrounded her life they saw clearly the basic goodness which guided her, and most of them could look back over the years that are gone and recall a period of bereavement in their own family circle, the memory bringing to mind the figure of Mary
CAIN as a member of the band of friends who had gathered to help them through their crisis.