Elbert Clare Warner

Elbert Clare Warner, eldest son of Walter Clare Warner and Margaret Jane Bell, was born 11 January 1909 in Fresno County, CA. He was known by his middle name.

At the time of his birth, Clare’s parents were residing in a shack on Spring Brook Ranch, the property of Clare’s grandparents John Warner and Nellie Martin along the foothills east of Clovis, near the trading post of Academy. However, it is possible Clare was born in the town of Sanger, the other main base of the Warner clan, because the ranch was remote and Margaret may have preferred to give birth in town where a doctor would have been readily available. Clare’s home for the majority of his short life was a small peach farm between the communities of Fowler and Del Rey, land that his parents acquired while he was still a newborn.

There is a reference to Clare in a May, 1909 letter written by his aunt Belle Warner Spece to her sister Emma Warner Hastings back in the Warner family hometown of Martintown, Green County, WI. The letter mentions that his mother Margaret had not been able to attend the death vigil for her brother-in-law Cullen Clifford Warner because Clare was still not doing well -- i.e. the baby had been sick since the last letter that Belle had written to Emma, and still was sick. This may mean that Clare was chronically ill from infancy onward. It could also mean that he just went through a bad patch when he was a few months old and then was fine. However, the general impression left to posterity is that he was a frail child. This is consistent with his abbreviated lifespan. His sister Willa is known to have stated that Clare suffered from tuberculosis of the bone. This is certainly a viable explanation, though it must be noted that Willa was only nineteen months old when her brother died and would have obtained this information second-hand. In any case, Clare passed away 19 September 1913 at not yet five years of age. This occurred just a few weeks after his parents had given up the farm, trading it for the Sanger abode of Belle and Alie Spece.

Clare’s demise led to the purchase of five grave plots at Mendocino Avenue Cemetery south of Sanger, on the northern outskirts of Parlier -- one of the closest major cemeteries to the peach farm. The first of those plots was used for his burial (gravemarker shown above left), and then that part of the cemetery evolved into a kind of Warner section. Clare’s grandfather John Warner passed away only a little more than two years later, and was buried in the adjacent plot. Naturally grandmother Nellie was placed beside John when she died in 1930. Inasmuch as Walter and Margaret Warner moved away to Santa Cruz, CA in the 1920s, they did not use their spots, which were filled in the latter part of the 20th Century upon the deaths of Clare’s uncle Albert Frederick Warner and his wife Grace Mildred Branson.

The only image of Clare that has turned up thus far is this one. He is the little boy on the right. The others in the image are his aunt Cora Belle Spece and her husband Alie and their daughters Beryl and Erma, drying peaches at the farm just after the Speces acquired the acreage. Inasmuch as the trade of the farm for the Spece home in Sanger is known to have happened in late July or early August, 1913, this photograph must have been taken during Clare’s final few weeks of life. The peaches you see here may not even have finished drying and reached market until after Clare was in his grave. By the time of the trade, the crop was ripe and the Spece family had to hustle to get the fruit cut and laid out on the trays under the sun. Distant Frame cousins were near neighbors and pitched in to help with the effort. It is believed to have been one of those relatives who had a camera and decided to chronicle the hectic endeavor. Many of the photos taken that day were sent to other relatives and ended up being saved for posterity -- this one comes from the mementoes of Mary Emma Warner Hastings, then a resident of Green County, WI, who received it the mail from her sister Belle. Had it not been for that photographic effort that day, no image of Clare at all might have survived. With any luck, a better view of Clare will eventually be discovered.

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