Blanche Bradford Martin

Blanche Bradford Martin, eldest of the two children of Elias Martin and Lavina Watson, was born 7 September 1876 north of Winslow, Stephenson County, IL. The farm where she spent her early childhood was actually part of Martintown, Green County, WI, but was on the Illinois side of the state boundary. The land consisted of eighty acres her father received as a gift from his father, Nathaniel Martin, upon reaching his majority. She is one of three granddaughters of Nathaniel Martin and Hannah Strader to bear the name Blanche, either as a first name or middle name. This was a popular choice in the local area. It is not absolutely certain which Blanche started the trend, but the Bradford was surely in honor of the locally prominent family, the Bradfords, headed by patriarch John Bradford (1809-1893), who had been a coworker, employer, and occasional business partner of Nathaniel Martin, the association having begun with John Bradford’s arrival in Winslow in 1838 from Massachusetts. (He was a direct descendant of William Bradford, first governor of the Plymouth Colony.) John’s son Frederick was by then a farmer just outside Martintown and his daughter Blanche Bradford, age fourteen in 1876, may have been the direct inspiration for the naming. Frederick’s sister Belle Bradford Knickerbocker had been Elias Martin’s schoolteacher when he was in second grade (and probably other years), back when the school at the village of Martin was only a twelve-foot by twelve-foot shack nestled beside the Martin home, and the only pupils were Elias and his sister Nellie along with a couple of the offspring of local gunsmith Tracy Lockman.

Blanche may have attended her generation’s version of Martin School in her youngest years, which would mean many of her cousins were classmates. This possibility has yet to be confirmed, though. She is known to have finished her primary education at the grammar school in Winslow. During her adolescence she, along with her mother and her younger brother Robert Earle Martin, born in 1884, became residents of the village of Winslow itself. Elias decided to stop farming. He caught gold fever in about 1890 and left for Cripple Creek, CO, where he was a miner for the rest of his long lifetime. He never again resided in the Winslow/Martintown area, leaving Lavina to dwell there as a single woman. The couple do not appear to have ever formally divorced. Elias is almost certain to have contributed some sort of financial support to his wife and children, but it is clear from surviving records that both Blanche and Earle perceived themselves as needing to be able to get by as independent beings as early as possible. Blanche became a teacher, that being one of the few professions available to women and one that was shared with her first cousin Blanche Bucher. By 1900 both she and Earle had moved out of their birth home. Blanche shared a home with her widowered grandfather Thomas Watson on his farm north of Martintown in Cadiz Township, Green County. Earle boarded on neighboring acreage as a farm hand, even though he was only in his early teens.

In her mid-twenties, Blanche became a nurse in Chicago, eventually becoming the head nurse of the children’s ward at Cook County Hospital. This led to a courtship with one of the doctors who worked at the hospital, to whom she was wed 9 October 1906. The doctor was John Bruner Colwell, son of minister John Bennett Colwell and Charlotte Ijams. He had been born 24 February 1873 in Harristown, Macon County, IL, near Decatur. As a very young man he had taught two years of country school in McLean County, IL, then had set his sights on an advanced education. He had done his undergraduate study at Wesleyan Illinois University in Bloomington, IL in the mid-1890s, and had proceeded on to Rush Medical College in Chicago, where he had been awarded his M.D. in 1902. For seventeen months after his graduation, he had been on staff at Alexian Brothers Hospital in Chicago, but when the position of assistant warden at Cook County General Hospital had come open at the end of 1903, he participated in the written competition, took first place, and was awarded the job. He kept the position for seven and a half years, until 1911, becoming Blanche’s husband during the midst of his tenure. The couple resided right in the hospital itself -- it was an era when medical “residents” literally were residents of the facilities where they worked.

Blanche is second from left in the front row in this photograph of the Winslow grammar school class of 1889. This photo was saved by the family of William Gage, who is one of the boys on the far right. (The teacher’s hand is on his shoulder.) The same image appears in photocopy form on page 187 of Harold Fowler’s 1991 book, Early History of Winslow, Illinois, and it is thanks to the caption in that source we can be sure Blanche is included here, and know which pupil she is. Unfortunately a stain on the original photo may be altering her features to a degree.

Blanche and John did not have children. This was probably a deliberate choice, one which freed her to help John with his career. John oversaw a staff of ninety and in busy times was responsible for a patient load as high as two thousand souls, so there was plenty to occupy both spouses. And as someone who had not been subject to the best parenting model, Blanche was apparently happy to avoid the potential for a broken home and attendant heartache. However, it is also possible there may have been some sort of infertility issue in play.

After his long hitch at Cook County, John wanted to set up a private medical practice and enjoy a less hectic, less stressful career. He and Blanche tried to do so in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park, but they soon found there were simply too many physicians in the urban area -- too much competition. The money they had saved up was quickly depleted. At that point, as they considered their options, they both realized that rural Illinois was the place they knew best, and had the greatest appeal. John was the son of a “circuit rider” preacher. He and his mother and siblings had tagged along as the reverend rode from one small community to another as part of the Methodist “Illinois Conference,” preaching in country churches, schoolhouses, and farmers’ homes. John knew that there were many places where doctors were in short supply, and the people were warm and welcoming. The couple chose a spot in the northwest corner of Champaign County. Soon a mild epidemic of typhoid fever provided John with a great many patients to call upon, and won him a positive reputation. After a few months he purchased a pre-existing practice based in the small community of Foosland. Their home was on the edge of the village, rural enough that they kept a cow. (In later years, John would speak of the charming way the animal, Imogene, followed him around when she was a calf.)

Blanche was John’s main nurse -- and not in an administrative sense or “gentlewomanly” way. She participated in the thick of surgeries and other challenging procedures. Though the office was within Foosland itself, his business remained a “country” practice, and often involved house calls into the surrounding area. Blanche and John remained in Foosland through 1919. Their presence drew Blanche’s brother Earle to Champaign County. Earle would go on to live in the area for nearly twenty years -- his children and wife stayed lifelong.

John enjoyed writing, often composing poetry, and in 1956 he published a book of those poems titled The Songs That Are Unsung. The volume included a memoir of his life. Much of the memoir section has been posted on-line by a great nephew of his second wife as a tribute to him. To see the full tribute, click here. Meanwhile, here are three paragraphs that describe, in his own words, a typical scene in John’s life as a “country doctor” of a now by-gone part of the early 20th Century:

From the very beginning of our [re]location, we were busy. I bought a nice team of driving horses, which were very gentle, and became a real help in making country calls. When the springtime mud appeared, I had to use my team, for that Illinois mud doesn’t believe in automobile travel, at least it did not at that time. Night calls to long distances had to be honored, and I equipped my buggy with a cylinder of gas [to heat the passenger compartment], and a light fixture on the buggy top at the right side. With this I could send the light about a mile down the road ahead, on the darkest nights. Sometimes the darkness was so intense, one could not see the intersecting road, without light, and one always had to be careful the horses did not turn a corner at the wrong place.

One frosty night, when the road was frozen, after a snow which the wind had blown about, into drifts and bare roads, my team capered along on the bare roads very nicely. But presently the team had run into a drift some five or six feet deep. The horses were lunging, and I feared they might break the buggy tongue, or injure themselves. So I quickly jumped out of the buggy and rushed to the horses and quieted them, unhooked them from the buggy, and led them into the field at the side of the road, and tied them to the fence. Then I brought my horse blankets from the buggy, and put them over my horses -- returned to my buggy which was deep into the drift, got my medical bags, and set out to follow the fence to a house which I reached rather promptly. It proved to be the home of the people who had called me. They sent their men down to get the horses. Which they did, putting them in their barn out of the wind and cold, and removing the harness from the horses.

When the men returned to the house, I had already looked over the patient, and left medicine. But it was quite late and everyone went to bed including myself. Next morning the men went to pull my buggy out of the drift and bring it up to the barnyard. After breakfast my team and buggy awaited me, and I got in the buggy and drove back home in the light of day. This story I relate to show the great kindness that pervades country people, as a general rule.

John and Blanche were well satisfied by their circumstances. Their life was full of important work, not the least of which was their role in treating the people of the Foosland area who fell sick in the great flu epidemic that ravaged the world during the winter of 1918/19. A memoir written by John’s second wife mentions that Blanche was a great help to John during this crisis. Happily, neither husband nor wife were themselves struck down. (Blanche’s namesake first cousin, Blanche Bucher Claus, was not so lucky, and succumbed at the end of 1918, in the midst of a pregnancy.) But irony was in play. Less than a year later, Blanche developed an abdominal tumor. (Presumably, this was cancer -- in his memoir, John simply calls it a “desperate disease.”) The mass blocked her digestive tract, and John had no choice but to operate. In that era, abdominal surgery was rife with the risk of infection, and indeed, despite his best efforts, the site did turn septic. Blanche died from peritonitis 7 October 1919.

John had to endure the horror of filling out his own wife’s death certificate. Soon Blanche’s remains were interred in the Village of Algonquin Cemetery, Algonquin, McHenry County, IL. Algonquin was home at the time to Blanche’s aunt Aurora Watson Robb, who must have played a role in the funeral arrangements, perhaps because it pained her to know that her only child, Clark Watson Robb, who had died in 1914 at the age of twenty-nine, was lying there amid strangers, and it comforted her to know he would gain the company of a family member. (Aurora and her husband James Robb were eventually buried between Clark and Blanche, but they did not pass away until many years later.) Aurora’s sentiments aside, it was an odd choice of final resting place for Blanche. Neither she nor John had ever lived in McHenry County. The oddness is especially true given that John was ultimately not buried with Blanche -- though that may have been his expectation back in 1919.

In his early widowerhood, John’s sense of loss was tremendous. It may have been during this period he wrote the poem “For She Is Gone,” which was later included in The Songs That Are Unsung. The work is a touching expression of a man suffering through the sorrow of having lost a wife. In his grief, John gave up his practice in Foosland and “went away” to mourn. He appears in the 1 January 1920 census in Palo Verde Township, Riverside County, CA. This was a region that needed travelling physicians to set up shop. He was only at that locale a short time, but even upon his return to Illinois, he spent a season or so in Chicago before he could bear returning to the place he and Blanche had been so happy together. When he did finally do so -- apparently in the summer of 1920 -- he came back not to Foosland itself, but to the much larger town of Champaign, and set up a new practice in the First National Bank building. He postponed the matter of establishing a home; instead, he took a room in the the Elks Quarters.

In Champaign, things were familiar but must have seemed alien. John had the nearby presence of his wife’s brother, but must have been devastated to consider that Blanche had never been able to see her little nephew, Robert Charles Martin, born four months after her demise. Some of his old patients came to see him at his new office, though it required them to travel some distance, but John did not go out of his way to gear up to the same level of work activity he had maintained in the past. The sweetness of a career shared with his lifemate was gone. He kept his practice small.

Shown here is the Robb family plot at Village of Algonquin Cemetery where Blanche is buried. Her headstone is on the right. Immediately to the left of it is the headstone of her aunt Aurora Watson Robb. Left of Aurora’s on the other side of the large ROBB memorial stone are the headstones devoted to her husband James Robb and their son Clark Watson Robb.

Over the next year or so, John gradually involved himself in the social life of Champaign, and came to know Pauline Trabue Groves, daughter of Charles Wesley Groves and Dora Trabue. She had been born 7 December 1889 in Kankakee, Kankakee County, IL, and had moved to Champaign with her parents and younger brother during the first decade of the 20th Century. She was a 1911 graduate of the University of Illinois. John and Pauline were wed 31 December 1921 in Champaign. (The photo reproduced below left is from her passport, issued earlier in 1921, giving an impression of her looks at the time of the marriage.) With Pauline helping to ease his heartache, John began to look for a new direction to his life, and a purpose for having survived Blanche.

The Groves family had a mailing service business, which Pauline continued to help manage even after marriage. Her father had also been a publishing agent. This gave her the background to be able to assist John in a project he had been entertaining since his widowerhood. He had seen that doctors were notoriously bad record-keepers, and often ran the business side of their practices poorly. He had come up with a system of charting, which Pauline helped to put into form as Dr. Colwell’s Daily Log for Physicians. Together they founded Colwell Publishing Company, and issued this debut volume in 1929. Though their timing was not good -- the Great Depression made any business venture challenging -- Pauline’s understanding of publishing and mail-based promotion permitted the company to build up steam. She handled the bulk of the work for the first five years, while John continued to practice medicine. Then, given the success they were enjoying, he closed his medical office and joined his wife as full-time proprietors of the company. Later they brought in John’s nephew Robert Forrest Colwell, who ultimately became their business heir and continued to operate the firm for decades more as The Colwell Company and then as Colwell Systems, Inc. By the time Forrest rose to operating manager in the late 1940s, the firm’s focus had expanded to include forms to serve the professional dental community.

Pauline, in addition to her business ventures, also tried her hand at writing. Along with Osee Johnson Knouf, she was the author in 1968 of Trabue Family History: Ancestry and Known Descendants of David Trabue, Jr. (The photo of John reproduced above comes from that volume.) She also wrote shorter genealogical pieces for magazines. John, as mentioned, wrote poetry. As a dual-income household without the financial drain of offspring (except for a half-dozen years -- see below), the couple enjoyed a considerable amount of prosperity. As a consequence, they were eventually responsible for major philanthropic donations to educational and arts institutions in the greater Champaign area. Their names are associated with an endowment fund that continues to this day. As a widow, Pauline contributed to the founding of Mackinac College and subsequently served on its board of trustees.

During their lifetimes, the Colwells’ wealth allowed them to pursue a number of interests and hobbies. John loved fishing. He kept a cruiser at Coral Gables, FL, where the couple began vacationing on a regular basis beginning in 1934, and would host fishing expeditions out into Biscayne Bay. They spent enough time in Coral Gables that the poet laureate of Florida included John on a list of the state’s poets.

John and Pauline were biologically childless. This was by choice, as Pauline was concerned about being left on her own to raise offspring due to John being so much older than she. However, the pair did get the chance to be parents. In the early 1930s, they took in thirteen-year-old Velda Marie Budd and raised her to adulthood. Velda, born 18 July 1918 in Athens, Menard County, IL, was the daughter of John Budd and Pearl Van Landingham. Pearl had died before Velda had reached three years of age. An aunt had cared for her, but being taken in as a ward by the Colwells was a welcome development for her. Velda went on to marry Clifford Routh. Thanks to the resultant Routh offspring, John had the chance in his older years to be a grandpa. He also was a proud uncle not only of his siblings’ kids, but to Blanche’s nephews, Robert C. Martin and John E. Martin, who with their mother remained Champaign-based even though Earle Martin moved away in the early 1930s.

John never reopened his medical practice after closing it in the 1930s, but he served on the staff at Burnham City Hospital in Champaign and taught at the Burnham School of Nursing. At the end of his life, as he spent four months as a dying patient at Carle Memorial Hospital in Urbana, his nurses included one of his former Burnham students.

John passed away at Carle Hospital 17 September 1959. His remains were interred in the Champaign area at Grandview Memorial Gardens. Pauline survived him by a long span, keeping busy with her philanthropic work. In her final few years she resided at Urbana Americana Healthcare Center, where she died 9 December 1981 -- two days past her ninety-second birthday.

Velda Routh lived out most of her life in Champaign County until entering convalescent care in Indianapolis where she could be near her son. In 2008, at age ninety, she contributed information and comments that improved this biography. It was she who provided the image of Blanche as a small child that is reproduced as part of this webpage biography. The tintype was among the personal mementoes of John Colwell that Velda inherited. Velda died 17 June 2011 at Methodist Hospital in Indianapolis.

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