Per the request of Dr. Rufus Wood Leigh this account is typed as written by him for family remembrance of Sarah Ada Wood Webster. First Ward Chapel, Cedar City, Iron County, Utah, United States, on February 23, 1951. Bishop Dotson, kinsmen, and friends of the deceased: I assure you that to remain quietly and in contemplation on the mourners bench is my choice; but I respond, most humbly, to a request to represent the nephews and nieces of our departed and beloved Aunt, to make some references to the personal history of the Wood family in general and to her biography in particular. Observation and necessity forces me to the conclusion that funerals are for the living: relatives, friends, and the religious organizations of deceased persons. However, in many instances there is an honest attempt to have the spoken word, the music, and other features of the service conform with what the deceased person would desire. As stated by Bishop Dotson, this service is planned to conform with the specific requests of our Aunt so far as is possible. From acquaintance long and close, I know that all I shall say will be in harmony with her ideas. By eulogy we cannot add a cubit to the stature of her character and career, nor can we detract one jot or tittle therefrom. The sun has set on the career and life of Ada Wood Webster, one of the most widely known personages in Cedar City and Iron County. Her life, interests, endeavors were oriented from this town and country. The roots of her ancestry were driven deep into the soil of this valley. She had been in impaired health for the passed three years, having suffered repeated hemorrhages and a weakened heart. In 1949 I had the responsibility of placing her in the L.D.S. hospital for an extended period. At this time her every need and wish were provided by her niece Zilphia Urie and good husband Marvin Crawford and myself. Some time ago she knew the end was not far off and made provisions for it; though few persons, indeed, are ever ready for death. She further knew there should be, nor would be, no great sorrow on her passing. She often read aloud Lord Tennyson's poem in which the analogy is of life to a river, or river craft; the great divide-death-to the sand bar at the river's mouth; the projected after-life to the fathomless ocean: Crossing The Bar Sunset and evening star, And one clear call for me! And may there be no moaning of the bar When I put out to sea. But such a tide as moving seems asleep, Too full for sound and foam, When that which drew from out the boundless deep Turns again home. Twilight and evening bell, And after that the dark! And may there be no sadness of farewell, When I embark; For tho' from out our borne of Time and Place The flood may bear me far, I hope to see my Pilot face to face When I have crossed the bar. Permit me to refer to the European origin of Ada Wood's parents. In the early 1840's the new gospel from the New World was being preached. . . across the countryside of England. The urge was to migrate from the verdant landscapes of the mother country and employment in the rolling hills to the Basin of the Great Salt Lake in new America. In 1849 our ancestors (George Lymar and Jane Wood with three children) sailed from Liverpool with a large emigrant party including his wife Jane, three small children, three brothers and their families. They landed at New Orleans, traversed the Mississippi by boat, and proceeded overland from St. Louis by ox-team. An epidemic of cholera raged that year; the emigrants' numbers in many parties were cut in half by this dread scourge. Grandfather lost his wife (Jane), a small girl child, and his two brothers, Samuel and Stephen- all buried by the emigrant trail in the Missouri Valley. By coincidence, my paternal Grandmother, Ann David Leigh, was buried in the same grave with George Lymar Wood's wife and child. He and his motherless boy and girl, Joseph and Ann, as well as his parent-less nephew, Samuel Wood arrived in the Salt Lake Valley in the same year, 1849. He immediately began to build a home for them at Mill Creek in the east part of the valley. However, more than a year of difficult labor on this desirable project was for naught, since he was selected to be one the first parties, headed by George A. Smith, to blaze a wagon trail to this southern valley to smelt iron ore. George L. Wood's previous experience as superintendent in a rolling mill in his native England was the determinant in his selection. On the emigrant ship leaving Liverpool, England in 1849 with a large contingent of the Wood family aboard, were three Welsh girls, with their parents, whose name was Davies (Not Davis as later corrupted): Phoebe, Mary, Betsy. The Davies family arrived in the Salt Lake valley at about the same time as did George Lymar Wood. Prior to the departure of the George A. Smith's first party from Salt Lake city on December 7, 1850, for the iron fields, which had been discovered some three years previously, President Brigham Young united in marriage George Lymar Wood and Mary Davies, Stephan Chipman, founder of American Fork, married Phoebe Davies. Betsy Davies married a close friend of the Woods, Frederic Stump, who with many other wayfarers in Iron County pushed on to the more salubrious clime and mellower social and religious environment of Southern California, when Los Angeles was a mere Spanish pueblo. Cedar City had a population at that time as large possibly as that of today. An exodus followed an historic episode I shall allude to later. The older generation of this audience will recall that the daughter of Bishop Thomas Taylor, close friend of the Woods and owner of large iron interests, Nellie. She married a son of the Stumps. Nellie Taylor Stump is one of the few contemporaries and closest friends of our Aunt, still living. By singular coincidence the life of Ada Wood Webster ended with the closing of the century of European settlements in the valley of the Little Salt Lake, or as written by that intrepid explorer of the West, General John C. Fremont, the Valley of the Parowans, the name given the indigenous people by the immigrants into this area. The original pioneering party arrived in the valley of the Little Salt Lake, January 13, 1851. On January 2, 1852, my mother, Elizabeth Wood Leigh, was born in Parowan, the first of a family of nine, to George and Mary Wood, members of the first party. The other eight children were born in Cedar City. Of the nine children, there was one son, the late George Henry Wood, and eight daughters- two of whom died in early childhood. Seventeen years after the birth of Elizabeth Wood, the first born, Ada, the last of the family of a generation, was born, on February 27, 1869. Thus, lacking eight days, she was eighty-two at decease; four score years and two. Besides those named, the girls who attained maturity, married and raised praiseworthy families in this community, all now deceased, were: Phoebe Wood Bergstrom, Naomi Wood Barnson Strong, Zilphia Wood Urie, and Laura Wood Jensen. Our Aunt's desire was always to be identified with all these stalwart citizens: this recital would meet her approval. It is to be noted that the life of our Aunt spanned four-fifths of the centennial now being commemorated by the good people of Iron County. It is sometimes facetiously said that the first one hundred years are the hardest. The first fifty years, until about the turn of the century, were rugged in Iron County. While it is a fact that after her maturity Ada Wood enjoyed the ease and affluence, cultural and educational advantages of a properous family, it is also true that her girlhood experienced the struggles of pioneer life, including the strife for church and civic leadership, economic aggrandizement, and paucity of comforts and amenities commonplace to recent times. Her mind was exceedingly impressionable, her likes and dislikes for personalities very strong. During her girlhood, with Cedar City the focus, the evil aftermath of the most regrettable episode in the history of Utah, the notorious Mountain Meadow Massacre, registered deeply on her sensibilities; it left an ugly imprint on her mind. As a young lady, Ada Wood had the advantages of an academic and musical education at the Church Academy in Prove. Close associated and friends of the time were such important personages as Emma Lucy Gates Bowen, Emma Ramsey Morris, and others. Later she studied voice under private masters of the art in Salt Lake City. In the early days she enjoyed travelling to California with her parents- experiences few young girls of those days enjoyed. He indulgent parents considered nothing too good for their last child -Ada. Ada Wood Webster's natural gifts, and consequently her endeavors, were the vocal arts: drama, music, and of later years, poetry. She had the personal satisfaction of seeing in recent years several of her poems published in current anthologies. She was always interested in persons and bestowing material gifts or gifts of the spirit on them. As a New Year's wish she used the following stanza from another poet's work in the anthology in which were her own: "The sun be warm and kind to you The darkest night some star shine through The dullest morn a radiance brew And when dusk comes, God's hand to you." In another department of life, increasingly important to human protection and improvement, and government, she took a keen interest, and to back up her ideals of good government, indulged in practical politics both on local and national levels. She was extremely democratic and mingled with all classes of people. From infancy she was a friend of and conversed easily with the Pah Utes; by close association with these native people who frequented the Wood residence and general store on Main Street she acquired a good working vocabulary of their language. It is most difficult and hazardous to evaluate a life objectively, but we may set a guide post or two. We have all come to know as a platitude, that we are fragile, compliant creatures, wafted from birth to death on the ceaseless current of time. In the larger biologic world, the individual is vastly less important than his species: reproduce and die is the ineluctable law. Individuals of the human race are similarly subject to this inevitable decree of nature or God. But, for the human race something infinitely important has been added. Collective man has evolved a way of life-human culture-with small increments of improvement through eons of time. It has been painfully developed by mutual helpfulness, by man's gifts to man, and more particularly has our culture or civilization developed by forces inherent in collective man; that is, the group, society, has evolved infinitely more than could be said for summation of individual effort. Indeed, man cannot live and improve as separate individuals. We may essay to evaluate a life by its contributions to society; even the humblest life worthily lived in helpfulness cannot but contribute to the totality of human good. These two ideas concerning the individual and the continuing culture, are classically epitomized in the Latin phrase: "Ars longa, vita brevis". Art,by extension we include the totality of human culture, is long; life, of the individual, is short. The life of Ada Wood Webster, as with all men, was comparatively short; but, though she did not pass on her blood in lineage, I sincerely believe that her life was an enrichment of the society into which she was born and with whom she deliberately chose to play her act. In the enveloping current of time, in which we live and move and have our being, the outgoing tide decimates our numbers. We revere the departed, and with the words of Omar Khayyam we surrender: "For some we loved, the loveliest and the best That from his Vintage rolling Time has Past Have drunk their Cup a Round or two before And one by one crept silently to rest." Ada Wood Webster was the last of a family, of a generation, of an era in Iron County, for she has outlived her family and most of her contemporaries. Life, under the circumstances, begins to be forlorn. Her union with Thomas J. Webster, a worthy and stalwart man, was without issue. Their deep desire for children impelled them to take a foster son, Thomas W. Webster, a veteran of World War II and now a member of the Air Force. To him who has lost the best and closest person he will ever know, our sympathy goes. I previously alluded to her interest being those of this community: religious, civic, political, cultural, historical, moral, economic. Her interest and pride in the beauty and utility of this edifice, the First Ward Chapel, is well known. To her, as to many other, this chapel was the finest in the church, and she had been around not a little. The ground on which it stands was originally a civic gift by her father to the public school system; two of her nephews were largely responsible for its ********: Builder George A. Wood, and then the Bishop Franklin B. Wood. She gloried in the strength and public service for education of the Branch Agricultural College. She, as a charter member of the Iron County chapter of the Daughters of Utah Pioneers, sponsored the preservation of the oldest cabin in southern Utah, now standing under protective canopy in the City Park (as of date,2013 the cabin is now housed at the Homestead History Museum); under the auspiciousness of this organization she contributed to the writing of pioneer biographies. Ada Wood Webster was truly and enthusiastically a representative of the second generation of pioneers of Iron County: she was the human product of this soil, climate, and social and religious order. Now, Bishop Dotson, kinsmen, friends, many her Christmas benediction, be a benediction ever: "May the spirit and peace of heaven Be in your homes and shine in your hearts On this the birthday of our Savior Lord Jesus". A'-men, A'-men