Basil Spalding Elder

"For more than sixty years, and to the date of his death, there was not in the entire country a Catholic citizen who was more widely known or more deservedly esteemed, than the late Basil Spalding Elder, of Baltimore. From the days of Dr. Carroll to those of Dr. M. J. Spalding, there was not an occupant of the Metropolitan See of that city who did not recognize in him a power for the general good of the entire Catholic body of the United States. He was not alone an example for Catholics in the performance of specific duty, but he led them through his own earnestness to the heights beyond, where the virtues of the christian grow lustrous in the light shed from heaven. Like his father and grandfather, he sought to train his children in knowledge and virtue, to the end of their welfare for eternity. The survivors of these are scattered now, but wherever they are, not one of them is to be found who has abandoned his faith, or has ceased to walk in the self-same way of salvation that was traced by the feet of his fathers.

Basil S. Elder and his wife, Elizabeth Snowden, were the parents of thirteen children, three of whom died in infancy. One of his daughters, Eleonora, became a sister of charity. She still survives at the mother house of the order, Emmittsburg, Maryland. Another daughter, Mrs. Jenkins, died in Havana, in 1846; another, Mrs Baldwin, in Baltimore, in 1872. Of their male children seven survive to the present day, viz : Francis W., in Baltimore; Basil T., in St. Louis; James C, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Joseph E., in Denver, Colorado; Thomas S., in New Orleans; William Henry (late bishop of Natchez, and now archbishop of the See of his residence), in Cincinnati, and Charles D., in New Orleans. Basil S. Elder lost his wife in February, i860, when he had himself reached the eighty-seventh year of his age. He felt the bereavement keenly, and a little later, when the war of the rebellion was at its height, the old gentleman happened to lose the timepiece he had been in the habit of carrying for more than sixty years. While making an ineffectual search for the missing article, he was heard to exclaim: "I have lost my precious wife. I have lost my good old watch, and I have lost my country! It is time I was myself called home." His death, as stated elsewhere, took place on the 13th October, 1869.

One of their descendants tells me that immediately after their marriage the pair set out for the home that had been prepared for their reception, near the residence of the groom's parents. The cabin was new, but it had been neither finished nor furnished. Upon reaching their destination the husband thus improvised their bridal bed : Upon the bare earthen floor he laid three rough slabs, or puncheons, of the requisite length. On these he spread a layer of flexible withes, cut from the undergrowth of the forest by which the place was surrounded, and upon these he laid his tow-linen straw-filled bed. Their covering was a buffalo robe. On awaking in the morning, they found themselves under a mantle of white; two inches of snow having fallen upon them in the night."

Ben. J. Webb, The Centenary of Catholicity in Kentucky. (Charles A. Rogers, 1884; Reprinted by McDowell Publications)