Lee Gaston
Lee Gaston was born on 28 March 1836 in Chester County, South Carolina. A memorial at his grave gives his full name as Elihu Leander Gaston and his parents as William N. Gaston and Narcissa Love. He signed and was tried as E. L. Gaston, and the papers of his day called him Lee.
On 29 March 1855, the day after he turned nineteen, he married Drucilla Ann Bailey of Union County, called Drucy. They had ten children over twenty-three years, from Elizabeth in 1857 to Alice Gertrude in 1880. Chalmers, born on 2 April 1877, was the ninth.
He served the Confederacy in Company D of the 1st South Carolina Cavalry, a mounted regiment of the Confederate army in the Civil War of 1861 to 1865. His headstone is a Confederate soldier's stone that reads "E. L. Gaston / Co. D / 1 S.C. Cav. / C.S.A."
After the war he farmed in the Baton Rouge neighborhood of Chester County, in the upcountry north of the town of Chester. A Columbia dispatch of 1886 called him "a prominent farmer of Chester county".
The year 1886 broke the family. In August Lee and Drucy lost their son Johnie Jefferson, who was not yet seventeen. Four months later, on Tuesday 14 December 1886, Lee spent the day in Chester with his son-in-law William E. Estes, the husband of his daughter Susana. The two had lived together on good terms for several years, by the testimony at the inquest. They started home after dark, both drunk. A few miles out, on horseback, Lee shot Estes through the heart. Estes rode a short way, fell from his horse and died.
Lee was charged with murder. He came to trial at the March 1887 term of the Circuit Court at Chester, a term with more murder cases on its docket than any in years. He was the only white man among the accused. He swore that Estes had locked an arm around his neck and threatened to cut him, and that the pistol went off in the struggle. A witness for the State swore that Lee had told him that same night that he shot to kill. The jury found him not guilty.
Susana married again within months, to James Doster of the upper part of the county. Doster died at the end of September 1887, and the Chester correspondent wrote that in less than ten months "this unfortunate woman has buried two husbands." She lived until 1927 under the name Doster.
Drucy died on 13 August 1889, aged fifty-three. Lee died on 11 December 1892, aged fifty-six, three days short of six years after the shooting. They are buried side by side in plot A5 of the churchyard of Bullock Creek Presbyterian Church, across the county line in York County. Their son Chalmers, fifteen when his father died, farmed in Chester County all his working life.
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Cite: Heirology, "Lee Gaston (1836-1892)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/lee-gaston-1836-1892-0a37a6.