NALS 30 may 1881 p4 c4:
Hermit of the Knobs.
His Sudden Death and the Sad Ending of a Blight\ed Life
Gilbert Westison came to this city from the department of Puy de Dome,
France, in 1848. He was born in that department on the 6th of January, 1815,
of a good family. He had fallen in love with a girl of the neighborhood, but
she was above him in station and wealth, and her parents put an end to what
would probably have proved a marriage. This saddened and clouded the life of
Gilbert Westison, and in 1848, he left La Belle France and came to America.
Landing at New Orleans he came direct to this city, whence he went into the
French colony three miles west of the city, and purchased forty acres of
land. This land is in the wildest and most broken part of the knobs. Upon it
is a deep valley, from which, on either side, the hills rise upward to the
height of three or four hundred feet. The place is one of the wildest and
most lonely in this part of the knob range.
In this deep and lonely valley Gilbert Westison built him a hut.
He excavated into the hillside, forming a cave, and at the entrance planted
poles, upon which wild vines were trailed and which formed a covering to the
interior. This site had been selected on account of its remoteness from all
other habitations; for Gilbert Westison had resolved to spend the remainder
of his life as a hermit.. He could not have found a more secluded or lonely
habitation, nor one better suited to his purpose of retiracy from the world.
Here he lived for thirty-two years, and here alone, with no one to witness
the struggle, he passed out of life. He was found dead, lying upon his face,
about ten feet from the door of his hut, yesterday evening. He died of
physical exhaustion and heart disease, it is supposed.
Gilbert Westison was in every particular of his life a hermit.
His cave home was almost wholly without furniture. In an old leather sack,
which he always wore strapped at his side, were his papers, consisting of
his passports, certificate of birth, certificate of good character, deed for
his forty acres of land and tax receipts. In another leather sack eighteen
dollars in nickels and coppers were found, money he had received some twelve
years ago for caring for a smallpox patient. Fifteen years ago Westison
carried in his leather sack, enfolded in numerous wrappings of paper, the
miniature of a beautiful girl. But this has not yet been found among the
contents of his hut. This was the face of her whom he loved in his youth and
for whom he left France forever and immured himself among the wild
fastnesses of Floyd County. He said, some fifteen years ago. Top the writer
hereof: "It was a heart-breaking disappointment: I loved her very, very
much." The troubles and sorrows and sufferings of the old man are ended. No
doubt he rests in peace. He was a great Bible reader. He had been a
Catholic, but forsook his church and turned to Protestantism. Three times
the present spring, at night, he attended the services at Wesley Chapel, and
this was the only church he ever entered in the city. He had, however,
occasionally attended the Methodist church on the riverbank three miles west
of the city. Coroner Lemon held an inquest and returned a verdict of death
from natural causes.