Back in October, I reported on the death of my dear friend Stephen Cox. The other day, my friend and colleague, Timothy Sandefur, posted this wonderful, poignant news on his blog, a fitting postscript not only to his own fine 2022 work on Isabel Paterson (Freedom’s Furies: How Isabel Paterson, Rose Wilder Lane, and Ayn Rand Found Liberty in an Age of Darkness), but to Stephen’s pathbreaking 2004 Paterson biography (The Woman and the Dynamo: Isabel Paterson and the Idea of America). Timothy writes:
I’m pleased announce that a stone has at last been placed on the grave of Isabel Paterson, the novelist, columnist, and economist who was such an enormous influence on libertarianism; mentor to Rose Wilder Lane, Ayn Rand, and John Chamberlain, and in her day one of the most important literary intellectuals in America. She died in obscurity in 1961, while living with her friends the Hall family, and was buried at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church in Burlington, New Jersey. But no stone was ever placed on her grave.
A couple years ago, I began a discussion with Stephen Cox, Paterson’s biographer, about placing a stone on the site. I had found a donor willing to pay for it, even. Cox knew members of the Hall family, whose permission was necessary. But his correspondence with them, which I wasn’t privy to, took a while. Eventually, I contacted him again, and he said that he had decided that he would like to arrange to have the stone placed himself. I said that was fine with me… and then, not long afterwards, Cox himself died, rather suddenly.
I feared he had not managed to have the stone arrangements made, so I contacted St. Mary’s, and I’m glad to say that Prof. Cox did manage to complete the arrangements, and the stone is now in place. It’s a modest one, just as Paterson would have liked it, and bears the apt inscription “Proclaim liberty throughout the land,” a reference both to the book of Proverbs and to the Liberty Bell (and, as it happens, the epigraph of my forthcoming book).
Blessings to you, Timothy, and to Stephen’s memory, and the memory of Isabel Paterson.
In a sense, the stone is therefore a monument to two people: the great Paterson, of course, and also to Prof. Cox, who managed as one of his final acts to pay homage to this brilliant and fascinating lady of liberty.
Notablog 