Jane L. Meek

Jane married Dr. William E. Hoge, but Jane’s background deserves more than a passing mention. If William represented inherited prominence on the Pulaski side, Jane brought with her a Washington County setting marked by property, kinship, and education. Bland County history says she attended Salem College in what is now Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and it describes both William and Jane as serious readers with a “fine library,” adding that both were well-versed in Latin. That detail is unusually revealing. It suggests a marriage that was not simply domestic or economic, but intellectual. The Point Pleasant household they created was remembered as one in which religion, learning, and sociability belonged together.

Jane outlived her husband by just over nine years. The Bland County history gives her death date as May 7, 1894. William and Jane carried the family story outward into Bland County, but in death they came back to the ancestral ground at Belle Hampton. She was the last one to be buried in the Hoge/Howe Sunnyside cemetery alongside her husband.

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