Butler County Genealogy Trails Kansas Marie Antoinette Murdock Bio

BUTLER COUNTY'S EIGHTY YEARS BIOS

MARIE ANTOINETTE MURDOCK

(Transcribed by Lori DeWinkler)

When Mrs. Thomas Benton Murdock died in February, 1925, Victor Murdock wrote this editorial for the Wichita Eagle:

With lace about her neck and her wrists and a little ricepaper Bible in her hand to the last, Aunt Net is dead. She was born on the Eastern Shore to the Culbreths who named her Marie Antoinette. From the period of pink toes and dimpled fists to the day when age exacted the last tithe and took all the toll that eighty-four years demand, she was beautiful. Fifty or more of those years were in Kansas. But the high dry prairie winds, the headlong blizzard that course through crannies to destroy, the sun that searches to sap and to shrivel, the driving deluges that spatter the Kansas panes with Saracens, never visited her cheek too roughly. Age did not wither her. Her voice never left the wide, smooth highway of an ineffable calm, and no emotion ever betrayed a gesture of hers into quickness. She read deeply, endlessly of men and things, of nations and affairs, of the earth earthy and the stars ethereal and her discourse was an enchantment. She had faith, not as a fixed point, but as an all-enveloping entity as fathomlessly deep as the sky. Hundreds knew her as Aunt Net, not with the connotation of intimacy, but with the devotion to the mother principal which in this world people dimly sense is the changeless peace subsisting at the heart of endless agitation. Those who looked upon her knew her to be beautiful. Those who came within the sunshine of her intellect knew it. But most of all those realized it who felt the enthrallment of her spirit.