Caswell County, NC -- A Piedmont community is vowing to keep the legacy of a family killed in a crash in Kentucky alive. Kentucky state police say a tractor trailer rig crossed the median and hit a van head-on the morning of Friday, March 26. The family killed in the van used to live in Caswell County.
Tonight, friends of the Esh family told WFMY News 2's Ashley Smith they are trying to find peace after losing people who meant so much.
When the Esh family left Yanceyville in 2001, they left quite a legacy: A business people could trust and community touched by their generosity.
The Eshes kept in touch with their friends in Caswell County. Friends who are now mourning their loss.
"It just made my wife and I both just sob," George Fowlkes, who worked six years with John Esh and then bought the Esh Buildings business, says the family song on youtube was almost unbearable. "They would go to the nursing homes and sing. They'd come around to everybody's house during christmas time and sing christmas carols. All of them have beautiful voices," says Fowlkes, "They got to know and love a lot of people and we've missed them since they've been gone, but we still keep in contact with them."
"I had just went out there and visited them two weeks ago," Ezra Molner, a friend of the Esh family, wasn't planning on packing his bags again this soon. But now, there is a funeral to attend. He says the news of their death spread quickly, "There are people here in this community that are mourning from the local area just as much as the local community in Burkesville, Kentucky."
And while part of the Esh family is no more, friends will make sure their memory lives on in more ways than one. Fowlkes says his business carrying the Esh family name has new meaning, "I want to carry on and tell people what happened to the Esh family. What they were doing and what they stood for."
"I believe that their witness in Burkesville, here in Yanceyville, everywhere that they've been is going to be a lasting witness," says Molner.
Only two small children survived the crash. George Fowlkes told us both of those children were John Esh's grandkids.