Notes for JOHN WESLEY CRARY:

Son of Nathan and Lydia (Arnold) Crary.
Born: December 20, 1784 in Unknown.
Died: September 20, 1846 in Unknown.
Buried: Row 11 (from the west), Kemp Cemetery, Defiance County, Ohio.
Married: Sobrina Hopkins Before 1832 in Unknown.

John Wesley Crary was a well-known builder of mills, and in his younger days, he built what were then the largest mills in the United States and Canada. As he got older, he took on less strenuous activities, like owning a furniture business and writing poetry. He wrote the following at age eighty:
"As I grow old, how softly close
The doors of sense and shut me from the world
Like tender petals from some lingering rose,
Which of a frosty night have inward curled
Dim as the figures in a dream, now pass
Those glittering shows that stirred my youthful heart,
Poor hungry shadows on a misty glass
Each but a moment seen ere it departs.
Nor sight, nor sound, nor tastes of earth's delights
Can longer please; these things have passed and gone.
My soul will put her quiet house to rights
And in the upper chambers watch the dawn."