... [1892] In the afternoon I rode thirteen miles down into the head of Poplar Cove to see my oldest sister, Mrs. Price, a widowed lady. In the last few months she had had two children to commit suicide — a son by shooting himself through the head, and just one month from that date her daughter, Mrs. Crouch, a widowed lady, hung herself.
She was a member of the Methodist Episcopal Church, and was a most devoted Christian lady, but became demented. She left a son eighteen years of age.
On Sunday morning I walked out a few hundred yards' to view the place where she hung herself. She had gone above the cleared land, up a deep ravine in the forest, to where a slim, tall black- walnut grew about ten feet above the center of the ravine. Beside the walnut was a large limestone rock, about three and one-half feet high. At the lower side a redbud grew up about two feet below the walnut, forking about two feet above the ground, one fork turning back over the ravine, and the other running up and pressing against the walnut about four and a half feet above the top of the rock. I was told that she got on the rock, wrapped a leather rope twice around her neck, then once around the walnut and the redbud, then once again around the redbud only. Taking the ends of the rope in her hands, she stepped off. The straightness of the walnut, and the rope being around the redbud right at the walnut, pressed her face and hands tightly against the walnut; so that it was impossible for her hands to loosen on the ropes, and in that condition she was found dead. She hung herself about ten o'clock in the morning, and was found about four o'clock in the afternoon. My old sister, in her eightieth year, rode down the Cove three miles with me, where I preached to a large audience in a grove. ...
