Elizabeth (Lair) (Dunavan) Letts
born September 3, 1785, in Rockingham county, Virginia
died September 3, 1835

This fall on the third day of September our mother died after a short spell of sickness with the bilious fever. We were left a lonely set of children, who had lost a kind and loving mother and we felt the loss, for our mother was beloved by her children and all who knew her. She was a woman in the prime of life and had always been a very healthy, robust woman until this last spell of sickness. On the day she died she was just fifty years old. She was buried in a new graveyard on the bank of Fox River about three-fourths of a mile north of Dayton, opposite the mill dam, and I think was the first person that was buried there, and since it has been the burying ground of the town of Dayton and quite a distance around. The graveyard is kept up very nicely but I have not had the satisfaction of visiting my mother’s grave for a number of years. But she is not lost to my memory or ever will be while I am alive. Her grave is marked by a plain white marble slab five feet high and about twenty inches wide and bears this inscription:

In Memory
of
Elizabeth Letts
Wife of
David Letts
Born Sep. 3 1785
in
Rockingham Co Va
died
Sep. 3 1835¹

1. Paul M. Angle, editor, PIONEERS / Narratives of Noah Harris Letts and Thomas Allen Banning (Chicago, Ilinois: R. R. Donnelley & Sons Company, 1972), 59-60.