Eliza M. Gill.
Miss Gill was born in Melrose, April 5, 1851. She was of old New England Colonial stock, being a direct descendant of Richard Warren, John Alden and Priscilla Mullins of the Mayflower company. Among her ancestors were Pete Harrington, who helped throw over the tea in Boston Harbor, and Captain John Vinton, connected with the Vintons of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, and himself one of the most prominent yeomen of Revolutionary days.
Miss Gill lived at the family home, 28 Ashland street Medford, for sixty-one years and during twelve years was a teacher in the public schools. A graduate of the High School, taking also an extra year of study in the classics, she had developed a fine literary and historical taste, becoming an interesting writer and an earnest student, especially along historical and genealogical lines, in which she was an expert. She was a life-long member of the Mystic Congregational Church and always a loyal participant in its activities as her strength allowed; also a member of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, where her mother, Ellen M. Gill, was so remarkable a figure in her culture of flowers for many years. Miss Gill was a charter member of the Sarah Bradlee Fulton Chapter, D. A. R., a member of the New England Historical and Genealogical Society, also of the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities. Prior to her removal from Medford to Waltham her health had failed and in Waltham she entered a private hospital where, after many months of weakness and much suffering at times, she finally passed away.
In all this later experience she was upheld by her patient and cheerful spirit and her strong Christian [p. 40] faith. Always a great reader, toward the end she could only be read to and found then her chief comfort in the Bible and Whittier's poems, her especial favorite being his ‘Eternal Goodness.’
As Miss Gill's church minister for thirteen years, and her next-door neighbor for nearly as long a time, the writer can bear full witness to her fine and interesting mind, her sympathetic nature and her Christian courage, faith and cheer.
