Jane Catherine Caldwell

JANE CATHERINE ADAMS CALDWELL (1841-1926) was born December 27, 1841, in the Crowder’s Creek section of Gaston County, North Carolina, a daughter of John Hope Adams (1811-1893) and Isabella Henry Adams (1819-1854), both of whose forebears were among the first Scotch-Irish Presbyterian settlers in the area and participants in the American War of Independence. She joined Bethel Presbyterian Church in adjacent York County, South Carolina, in her youth and received her education at the Yorkville Female College, a private academy that opened in 1854. She was a life member of the Presbyterian Church.

On April 4, 1861, at the age of nineteen, she and Robert Allison Caldwell, of Beersheba, York County, South Carolina, were married. “Within three weeks after the wedding the young bride was left alone while her husband went off to follow the Stars and Bars through the four years of the War Between the States,” quoted her obituary. They were blessed with three children. James Meek Caldwell, the first, was born in January 1862 while his father was away at war. Graduating with a medical degree from the College of Charleston in 1890, he became a prominent physician. Isabella Adams, born in May 1866, attended Columbia Female College, graduating in 1886. Bettie Gibson, the youngest, was born in June 1871 and graduated from Columbia Female College in 1891. In 1894, she married George Washington Ragan of Gastonia.

After several years’ residence in York County, Robert Allison and Jane Catherine Caldwell moved in 1873 to a plantation in the Crowder’s Creek section of lower Gaston County, where they made their home until their removal to Gastonia in 1900. At Crowder’s Creek, they were members of Olney Presbyterian Church and when they moved to Gastonia in 1900, they joined First Presbyterian Church. Caty, as her friends knew her, became active in the social and religious life of her adopted city.

Jane Catherine Adams Caldwell died in Gastonia on June 3, 1926, at the age of eighty-four, at the home of her daughter, Mrs. G. W. Ragan. An editorial in the Gastonia Gazette of June 4 reads as follows.

Mrs. R. A. Caldwell

"Truly it can be said of the late Mrs. R. A. Caldwell that a mother of Israel has fallen, a shock of corn, ripe unto the harvest, has been gathered home. Past the three score and ten by nearly fifteen years, she was truly a patriarch, a saintly mother, a jewel for the Master’s crown, and her entrance into the home above must have been the cause of much rejoicing from the Heavenly parapets. Long a sufferer, death must have come as a sweet surcease from toil, pain and misery.

Mrs. Caldwell was one of the few survivors of the old South whose representatives are fast disappearing from the presence of us of a later generation. We do not know the storm and strife through which they of that lustrous period lived. Mrs. Caldwell was married in April, 1861, at a time when the dogs of war were loosed upon the South and for four years she lived the life of a lonely, heartsick Southern heroine, with nothing but the courage and hope characteristic of the women of that day to sustain her. For months after the cruel war was over she knew nothing of the whereabouts of her young hero-husband.

Of a quiet, unobtrusive nature, she did not proclaim herself from the housetops and from the street corners. Hers was the more lowly service in the home, in the church, by the neighbor’s sick bed, in the home where death had entered, or disease stalked.

Wherever she was known she was loved and revered. A product of the old South, courage, kindness, hospitality, and patriotism, these were second nature to her. In her home she was the spirit of gracious hospitality. In the community she was greatly respected because of her superior wisdom and sound admonitions. In her church she was faithful, devoted, sincere, loyal.

Such a life of unselfish service, uncomplaining suffering as Mrs. Caldwell lived is a benediction to us who are left behind. Truly, her children and grandchildren can rise up and call her blessed. Certainly it can be said of her that she is not dead, but has been only transplanted from the mortal to the immortal, from the life limited to the life more abundant.”

Contributed by Robert Allison Ragan, her great-grandson.