George W. Cole

George W. Cole
Pickens County AL to Bell County, TX

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by Bobbye C. Winston

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Cemetery Records of the Cole family of TX

George W. Cole

George W. Cole with wife, Mary Jane, and their four sons: Victor Hugh Cole; John Ross Cole; George Doyle Cole; Thomas Edward Cole.

George Washington Cole was born October 6, 1859 in Pickens County, AL and died Sept. 17, 1928 at the hour of 7:00 p.m.in Bell County, TX. He was the son of John Russell Cole, Jr. and Elizabeth Jane (Lizzie) Locke Cole. His mother died when he was 12 years old. After her death he lived with his uncle, Thomas Van Buren Locke, for a short while.Uncle Tom tried to keep him at home in Pickens County but he ran away to Belton, TX at age 18, where he became a successful businessman. He married Mary Jane Tomlinson on Feb. 10, 1884. She died March 1, 1932. The family were member of the First Christian Church of Belton where George W. Cole was an elder.

They had four sons: Victor Hugh Cole; John Ross Cole; George Doyle Cole; Thomas Edward Cole.George W. Cole was a beloved member of his Craft, Cole, and Locke families.

Card sent by George W. Cole to his Craft relatives in Pickens County, AL 1884

A Tribute to George W. Cole
by
Walter Miller
1928

On last Monday evening, just when the mystic twilight was fading into dusk, at his pleasant home in Belton, there came to George W. Cole, Jr. that silent, irresistible call which awaits each of us, when, without the warning of a single moment, his manly spirit was transferred to its eternal abiding place.

For a number of years the writer has been quite closely associated with this good man, and knew him, his life, his hopes, his fears, his joys and sorrows, and his ambitions, as few others have been privileged to know. Together we have made trips, long and short, for pleasure, for business, and in the discharge of duty, and so not many are better qualified than I to state what manner of man has thus been so suddenly removed from the daily walks of life.

He has ever possessed that high and noble courage to uphold the right and to no less condemn the wrong, and in any moral issue, none would register a doubt as to what would be his attitude. In his civic relationships, it may be he has sometimes stood for men and measures which subsequent developments have shown defective, but if so, none but well knew it had been an error of judgment only. In his mind and heart that patriotism immortalized in son and story, had lost none of its glamour, and it is upon the responsibility of such men as he that yet rests securely the foundation ideals of this our fair republic.

Long years before the advent of our innumerable service organizations, his life was one of stern devotion to those tenets promulgated by them now, and his zeal and faithfulness as a member of some of the foremost of the fraternities has helped to point to a loftier objective full many a life in doubt, and has brought fresh courage and brighter hope to those downhearted. His hand was ever most ready to help where help was needed most, and it has been truly said of him, that he has gone more miles for accommodation solely, than has any other man we know. His code recognized no social classes or chastes, but was his unyielding conviction of universal brotherhood.

His life was a most vivid portrayal of that domestic fidelity, beautiful in its every concept, and all too rare in this age of apparent laxity along many lines, and no one more deeply and sadly deplored the ever increasing tendency to depart from those ancient cherished ideals of the true home and family, the basic unit on which must build all that is noblest and best in our boasted civilization. And truly, his honored example has yielded fair fruit, as is happily attested by the contented, sheltered home life from which he was called, and that of the four upstanding sons left to sorrow at his going.

His love for his church and his devotion to the obligations which he had assumed in membership there, was surpassed only by his constant trust in his Creator, and his buoyant and happy conception and anticipation of a peaceful life of stainless joy, in that final realm of conjecture, and yet of certainty, which was the climax of all his hopes, the guiding star toward which his face has ever turned in times of stress or sorrow, the glorious culmination of his lofty ambitions, which, in the solid commonplace of a workaday world, stood as a beacon light to guide him ever onward and upward, and I have not a doubt that now he views from within the Glory Throne, the retrospect of a life well spent, and has only joy and gladness that he thus was ever true.