Daniel P. Bystle
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Daniel Potter Bystle 1821-1903
Initiated, passed, and raised in June of 1852. Senior Warden in 1859, 1863, 1869, and 1870. Master in 1864, 1886, and 1888. Purchased Hall in 1876. Passed away on June 7, 1903.
We don’t know much about Rosanna Bystle, but we do know that her husband, Daniel, was the cabinet and furniture maker here in the community. That was his profession back on the East Coast before he came out to try his luck at gold mining.
Another part of cabinetmaking is coffin-making, and he was the undertaker for the community, also. There’s an old story that was told by many of the pioneers about Daniel Bystle that when he worked in his shop, he always whistled while he was building furniture. But some of the people that lived very close to his home, when he was building late at night and whistling Yankee Doodle, they knew that there was a funeral for the next day because he only whistled Yankee Doodle while he was building coffins. He was a very busy man here in the community, and he owned a horse-drawn hearse to carry the coffins to the gravesites. Another story that some of the old pioneer families would tell about Mr. Bystle was that the hearse would always be driven at a very slow pace to the cemetery for the funeral. The family would always follow close behind, and then it was customary for the family to follow the hearse back into the center of town before they actually ended the funeral procession. Mr. Bystle was known to travel a little bit more briskly back on the return trip than on the way to the cemetery, so some of the families relate about letters that their great grandmothers talked about them almost having to almost run behind the hearse back into the center of town after the funeral was over.[2]
References
- ↑ Smith, Dottie (1999). The Dictionary of Early Shasta County History (2nd ed.). self-published.
- ↑ http://www.parks.ca.gov/pages/735/files/transcriptshastacemeterytour.pdf
