Mrs. Lydia. A. Hodges

Lydia A. Hodges was born in the State of Ohio, July 16, 1836, and died at Olathe, Kansas, Monday, June 5, 1916, thus rounding out almost eighty years of useful, active and forceful life.

In a broad sense she was a forceful and masterful woman. Pioneer blood was in her veins. Her father, Dr. George Hartshorn, was not onty a physician, but a Methodist preacher of the type that in the early and middle part of the last century carried the Gospel to the Western Wilderness; and so, after Lydia Hartshorn  in young womanhood had married W. W. Hodges, a young schoolteacher, the family went to Wisconsin - then frontier country - and finally in 1896 the Missionary, the School Teacher and the Home Builder - always the woman - came to Kansas by wagon over the tral that led to high hopes in the new I country that is now Kansas.

The Hodges family pitched its tent and set up its altar on Block 80, Olathe, and there throughout the struggles of forty-seven years that home has remained and none has departed therefrom save through the gates to the Silent City.

 Essentially, Lydia A. Hodges was a home builder, a family builder, and a character builder. She took the very highest pride in keeping her family together on that sacred spot, where she fought out for them the problems of early life and imparted to them that strength of character, firmness of purpose, that business and political integrity, and manliness which has enabled her sons to take a commanding place in the business and political affairs of the state.

When the younger son went to Topeka in 1913 to be inaugurated as governor of our great state, there was back of her maternal pride a rote almost of regret that the family circle was to be broken even temporarily. An intimate friendship of forty years with Mrs. Hodges enables the writer to say that whatever of business and political success has come to Frank and George Hodges, they owe to their mother''s ideals of true manhood and her wise counsel and her insistence on that ideal.

When the time was ripe for civic improvement in Olathe, it was the son of this woman who led the fight for it and won, and today the magnificent street and sewer improvements in Olathe trace back to the Block 80. If the statute books of Kansas are filled with progressive laws, in a great measure, these laws are to be credited to the legislator and governor who received his training in that home. Even that great lumber business of the Hodges Brothers is a monument to the mother''s business sagacity and ideals

With all of her forcefulness, and courage to back it up, there was nothing masculine about Mrs. Hodges. Her strength was gentleness itself. She was a womanly woman, broad in her views and sympathies and, in her active days, the call of sickness, suffering, poverty or distress never went unheeded.

I know not if she ever read that verse of Dr. Holland''s. Maybe she never formulated the thought in words, but the lines express that which was always in her heart.

"I live for those who love me,
Whose hearts are kind and true;
For the heaven that smiles above me.
For the task by God assigned me;
For the bright hopes left behind me,.
 And the good that I can do.”

That, I believe, will be the universal testimony of all who knew her, and none knew her but to love her

An active member of the Order of the Eastern Star for forty years and a working member of the Congregational Church for many years Mrs. Hodges formed a wide circle of strong friendships and her ties of lodge and church made her a doubly useful member of the community.

The death of Mr. Hodges in 1883 cast upon her shoulders the burden of rearing a family of three children Frank, George and Minnie How she courageously took up the task and with what success she met the struggle with fortune I need not recite. Suffice it to say that when success crowned her labors she was enabled to live in comfort and spend her declining years mothering the second generation, whose baby tongues shortened "Grandma." into "Rabbo." and "Rabbo" Hodges she became to us all. Only a few months ago while on a visit to Olathe she insisted that I take breakfast with her alone, and there for more than an hour we talked and laughed over the davs gone by - days of hardship, some seasons of sorrow, and many days of happiness and gladness. That was characteristic of her.

She was always cheerful, always smiling and there was always a word of encouragement on her lips Throuh all her suffering she was patient and uncomplaining and met the Grim Reaper as she had lived with that courage and confidence which inspired someone to write:

"Say not, ''Good Night’ but in some brighter clime. Bid me ''Good Morning."

S. T. S.

Olathe Mirror
June 8, 1916
Page 1, Col. 2
2^nd Addition, Block 1, Lot 3, E3