Cora Belle Warner

Cora Belle Warner, fourth of the eight children of Eleanor Amelia Martin and John Warner, was born 19 October 1876 in Martintown, Green County, WI. She was better known throughout life as Belle, but most formal documents list her by her full name. She was raised almost entirely on a farm along the Pecatonica River opposite Martintown, the village her grandparents Nathaniel Martin and Hannah Strader had founded. The one break in the pattern occurred in the mid-1880s when the family spent a year residing in Willow Springs, Howell County, MO.

Belle married Alfonso James Spece. Born 14 January 1875 in Martintown, he was better known as Alie Spece, and later in business life as A.J. Spece. He was the son of Margaret Ellen Spece, known as Ellen. His father’s identity is unknown. Ellen would never say who had impregnated her. The conception had occurred a little before her nineteenth birthday when she was as yet unwed -- a status she retained, never taking a husband at any point during her remaining thirty-five years of life. For her to have accepted such a life and maintained such a stubborn silence implies the revelation of the father’s identity would have caused more of an uproar than the pregnancy itself already had. This in turn points to the possibility the father was Ellen’s brother-in-law John Quincy Adams Hastings, in whose household she lived, or that it was a prominent man of the immediate vicinity, such as Hannah Strader Martin’s brother-in-law Henry Rush. This is not pointless speculation -- in this era, the possibility exists that DNA comparison of Alie’s descendants with descendants of Picket Hastings or Henry Rush (or some other man of 1870s Cadiz Township) may finally answer the question.

Because of his fatherlessness, Alie inherited the Spece name, which came from his maternal grandfather William S. Spece, a Green County pioneer. The wedding of Belle and Alie, which took place 12 December 1894 in Monroe, Green County, WI, was the first of three unions of grandsons of William S. Spece and Julia Youngblood with granddaughters of Nathaniel Martin and Hannah Strader. The following year Belle’s first cousin Lena Brown would marry Alie’s first cousin Frank Opal Hastings. In late 1897 Belle’s sister Emma would marry Frank’s brother Fred Philo Hastings. Frank and Fred were older brothers to Belle and Emma’s beloved childhood friends, Wilamine and Phoebe Hastings.

In the early years of the marriage the couple were securely ensconced in Martintown. Alie was mainly a farmer during those years, though he probably was peripherally involved with the various businesses the Warner and Martin clan pursued, which would have given him a familiarity with the buying and selling of products -- skills he demonstrated later in life. Nine months into the marriage Belle gave birth to Gladys Beryl Spece, the first of the couple’s three children. Despite the alacrity with which Beryl appeared, the family did not expand again for several years. It was not until early 1902 that second child William Nathan Spece followed. Sadly, the baby survived only twenty-five days before succumbing to whooping cough.

At the turn of the century big changes began to unfold within the tight-knit family of John and Nellie Warner. Until that point, with the exception of the brief period in Howell County, MO, they and their offspring had all remained within or close to Martintown, the most venturesome forays being to cultivate acreage no more than a few miles away in rural Green County. But in the second half of the year 1900, John and Nellie bought a large house in Scioto Mills, Stephenson County, IL, about ten miles southeast of Martintown. This became home to the middle-aged couple and their unmarried sons Charles, Cullen, Bert, and Walter. This time the leavetaking was permanent. Those family members would never again live in Martintown. For the time being, though, John and Nellie’s married children and spouses -- Belle and Alie, Emma and Fred Hastings, and John Martin Warner and Anna Lueck -- all cleaved to the community where they had been raised. In fact, if anything, John Martin Warner was even more bonded to the place, because in the very early 1900s he became the proprietor of one of Martintown’s two general stores.

In late 1903, Belle’s younger brother Cullen married Minnie Brecklin and the following May they became parents of a daughter, Selma. This was just two months before Belle and Alie completed their family with the birth of daughter Erma Alice Spece. It was while Selma and Erma were still infants that a great scourge rose up to confront the Warner clan. That scourge was tuberculosis, and in the end it would not only kill several family members, but drive nearly all of the survivors to the Far West. Minnie Brecklin Warner was the first victim, dying in early 1906 before Selma had turned three years old. In April of that year, Nellie’s brother Horatio Woodman Martin was dead of the same cause. All around the region, neighbors and in-laws were falling ill. One of those who was afflicted was Cullen Warner. A TB specialist in Chicago informed John and Nellie that if they wanted their son to have any sort of long-term prospect for life and health, he needed to be taken to a hot, arid climate. John and Nellie responded proactively. Having heard from Nellie’s cousins, the Frames, of the opportunities and qualities of the San Joaquin Valley of California, they gave up their Scioto Mills home and moved at the end of 1906 to Fresno County along with Cullen and little Selma. Younger son Bert came along as well, and probably youngest son Walter, too, though Walter took the time to marry sweetheart Margaret Jane Bell three days before the departure.

For the next couple of years, Alie and Belle lingered in Green County. (Photo at left taken at their farm during that period. Belle is holding the bridle. Erma is sitting on Mike, the family horse.) Belle missed her folks a great deal and made an extended visit to see them in January and February, 1908 with her sister Emma, but for the time being the Speces were not tempted to move. They had committed to the area in a big way with the purchase in 1905 of land a mile or so north of Martintown, the former Julius Stark farm. By the time of the big Warner exodus, Alie had already built a new barn and had made other improvements. He would go on to do more, including drilling a new well. The culmination of his ambitions was the installation of a cheese factory. The building was finally ready at the beginning of 1908. Alie hung a sign that read “A.J. Spece Cheese Company” that was to remain in place for nearly a century -- i.e. it was still there in view of Green County passersby long after he was dead. It is ironic that the sign was so lasting, and it was similarly ironic that Alie’s tenure as the owner of a cheese factory would be prominently mentioned in his biography in the 1974 genealogy of the William S. Spece clan, because Alie in fact operated the business for less than a year. By December, 1908, concerns arose that Belle might be at risk of developing TB. Happily, she never did, but given the concern, it was the sensible decision to join those who had moved to Fresno County. Alie’s mother had died only a few months earlier -- that loss may have contributed to a weakening of the bond with Martintown.

The trip west took place by train in early January, 1909. This was a bitter season to cross the Rockies. Though Belle had successfully done so with Emma a year earlier, this time the conditions nearly led to disaster. Alie and Beryl both developed very bad colds and Alie went on to develop pneumonia, which in that pre-antibiotic era meant he was very much at risk of dying. Both were hospitalized in Cheyenne, WY. By mid-month, Beryl was better, but Alie remained in his bed into early February. He wrote and sent a post card to Fred Hastings on the fourth stating he was now able to sit up, but that holding a pencil was almost beyond him -- his shaky penmanship demonstrates how true this was. Fortunately he really was on the mend by then and soon the family members continued on to their destination.

During the first few years in California, the main base of the Warner clan was a cattle ranch John and Nellie established in Fresno County east of the town of Clovis at the edge of the Sierra Nevada foothills. This property was called Spring Brook Ranch -- though later it would usually be referred to in memory as the Fancher Creek place for the stream that ran through it. The nearest community was a tiny trading post called Academy, which in those horse-and-buggy/dirt-road days contained the nearest post office. The house was of ample size, as the Scioto Mills house had been. The Speces took shelter at Spring Brook Ranch and that was where they spent their first four or five months as Californians.

Cullen Warner died 1 May 1909. Belle immediately wrote a letter to her sister Emma back home in Green County. The letter survives. It describes the death vigil, and reveals the sort of misery Cullen went though during his final days. If there could be said to be a bright side to such a letter, it was in the way the text demonstrates to those of us in the 21st Century how tightly the John Warner/Nellie Martin clan cleaved to one another. However, despite that sort of bond, Spring Brook Ranch would not go on to embody the “legacy estate” status that Martintown and its mills had held for the earlier generation. The fact was, the land was marginal for agriculture. The whole family was to give up on it during 1909 and 1910. By early 1911, even ownership of the deed was a thing of the past. The new main base would become the small town of Sanger, located about ten miles due south of Academy. All of the Warner clan would live there over the years to come, some for just a few years, others for major fractions of a century. Belle and Alie and the girls appear to have been the very first members of the family to actually occupy a house within the community, moving in during July or during the first few days of August, 1909.

Alie found various types of work during 1909 and the first months of 1910. Finally, a more solid venture took form. In early 1910, Anna Lueck Warner was clearly suffering from TB, so the John M. Warner household became yet another convert to California. John had been a general store proprietor for a decade and naturally thought in terms of continuing to be a merchant in California. He and his father soon established a feed grain warehouse and hardware store along the Southern Pacific Railroad tracks in Sanger, calling the business the Warner Warehouse Company. The warehouse was the largest structure ever erected in Sanger to that point, and the largest for many decades afterward. Local historians would eventually declare it to have been Sanger’s first “urban” building.

Not to be outdone, Alie set up shop next door to the warehouse. His business was a feed lot where cattlemen from the hills could fatten up their stock just prior to loading the critters onto rail cars to head to market. The cattlemen naturally would purchase feed from the warehouse, and the Warners naturally encouraged customers to make use of the feed lot, a synergistic arrangement. Alie probably helped out at the warehouse on a spontaneous basis. His brother-in-law and father-in-law probably helped out at the feed lot just as often. However, it seems clear from surviving family correspondence that ownership of the two businesses was separate. (The feed lot is shown in the image above right, scanned from a photograph saved by Bert Warner. The individuals shown were not identified on the print, but it is almost certain the man on the tractor is Charley Warner, the man standing behind the rig is Alie Spece, and the two little girls are Erma Spece and Selma Warner. In the background on the right is the Warner Warehouse Company building.)

In the summer of 1913, Alie and Belle abruptly traded their house and business in Sanger for a peach farm about ten miles to the south between the communities of Fowler and Del Rey. The acreage had been purchased by Belle’s parents in the spring of 1909 with the expectation that Walter and Margaret Warner would live there and maintain it, and eventually take it over by purchase and/or by inheritance. Walter however had decided he wasn’t meant to be a farmer and he and Margaret had handed the place back to his folks. They had no particular use for it and were willing to let it go to Alie and Belle at attractive terms. The Speces ended up occupying and taking responsibility for the land just as the crop was ripening and there was a mad scramble during August and September to get the peaches off the trees and set out on trays in the sun to become dried fruit. Many photographs survive of this effort. Some of the Frame relatives, who were also Del Rey-area farmers, pitched in to get it all done.

Walter and Margaret’s decision to give up the burden of caring for the farm may have been that the couple felt that they needed to concentrate upon the care of their young son Elbert Clare Warner. The child’s case of tuberculosis was becoming severe. If you click here, you will end up at the page devoted to Clare Warner, and you will see a picture of the little boy watching the Speces drying peaches in 1913. Tragically, Clare died in September of that year, even before those peaches had reached market.

Alie and Belle seem to have been exhausted by the effort of dealing with the peaches and held on to the farm for no more than a year. Back to Sanger they came, though whether they reclaimed their old home or found another is not quite clear. Again, tuberculosis played a role. In 1911, Anna Lueck Warner had perished of the disease. This had dimmed John Martin Warner’s enthusiasm for his new Sanger existence. In late 1913 or early 1914, he chose to sell out his share of Warner Warehouse Company and settled in the city of Fresno with his new wife, Grace Annetta Martin. Meanwhile John Sr. had reached retirement age, and also wanted to be bought out. So the business went to a new set of partners: Alie Spece and Bert Warner. Bert had already been serving as a manager since 1911, an arrangement that allowed his elder brother to spend more time with his dying wife, while simultaneously giving Bert the financial security he needed to marry Grace Mildred Branson, who had been a teacher at a small rural school near Academy.

Alie and Bert did not always see eye-to-eye on the handling of the business. Both wanted to run it as he saw fit; neither wanted to be the junior partner. Things came to a head in 1919, when Bert wanted to take the risk of putting in a gasoline and service station on the street edge of the property. Alie challenged Bert to buy out his share if he wanted to be that bold -- otherwise sell his share to Alie so that he would not have to listen to such impractical suggestions. Somewhat to Alie’s surprise, Bert had saved up enough money to be able to achieve the buyout. Alie shifted into the insurance business. (For the record, Bert’s service station went on to make him a very well-to-do man.) Belle worked as a retail clerk -- though it is unclear whether this was for others, or for her husband.

Despite the friction involved in Alie and Bert’s business partnership, Belle and Bert remained close. This means close not only in terms of affection, but geographically close as well, because Sanger would continue to be Bert’s place of residence and it often would be home to Belle, too. The town would even more be home to the Spece girls, Beryl and Erma. However, Belle and Alie would not be there continuously. In the 1920s they went back to a fruit farm near Del Rey -- perhaps to the same farm they had owned before -- and remained there until approximately 1934. Then, after half a year or so back in Sanger (during which time they celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary), they moved to Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz County, CA. (Shown at right are an elderly Belle and Alie relaxing at the beach in Santa Cruz.) In doing so, they were following in the wake of Walter and Margaret Warner. Finding a dwelling there they could afford was a challenge. While searching for one in the late spring and early summer of 1935, they stayed with friends Alvin and Hattie Arneal. Finally they found a place at 39 Cayuga Street, not far from the beach, and also conveniently near the Arneals. The property was, as Belle put it in a 24 July 1935 post card to Emma, “in terrible condition,” especially the yard. Apparently it was a bit too terrible, because very soon they moved to 142 Windham Street, in the same neighborhood but about a quarter mile farther from the beach.

The move to the coast put Belle and Alie near Walter Warner and family after more than a decade of geographic separation. Ironically, Walter and Margaret relocated to the city of Fresno shortly thereafter and remained gone from Santa Cruz for the better part of ten years. The only representatives of that branch of the family who lingered in Santa Cruz in the meantime consisted of Walter’s daughter Willa and her husband and children. Perhaps this dearth of family presence was one reason Belle and Alie didn’t cleave to the city permanently. Throughout the late 1930s and early 1940s they made many visits back to Sanger in order to see their girls. Finally in the mid-1940s they gave in to their daughters’ requests to come back so that they could be looked after on a daily basis as they entered their rocking-chair period of life.

One of Alie’s pastimes in his later years was the collecting of pig knick-knacks -- figurines, piggy banks, and so forth. His trove grew so large and varied that photographs of the items and an interview with Alie was published in the county’s big daily newspaper, the Fresno Bee. Some of these pig mementoes are still in the possession of descendants.

Alie passed away in Sanger 4 February 1949. By that time, both Beryl and Erma were single women. Their marriages were a thing of the past, and they no longer had small children to care for. Belle’s final fifteen years were spent sharing her day-to-day existence with one or both of her daughters. Erma opened a hamburger and pie restaurant at Shaver Lake in the Fresno County mountains. (To get to this small resort community at 5000 ft. elevation, they would pass right by the old Spring Brook Ranch.) Belle would make the pies, which are fondly remembered by the family members who dropped by on their way to camping spots or cabins farther into the mountains at Huntington Lake. The restaurant was a seasonal business, open during the summers when tourists and vacationers generated enough trade to make the operation a going concern. After deer hunting season ended each fall, Erma would do as most Shaver Lake merchants did and would close down until late the following spring.

Belle had her own cottage at Shaver Lake. Erma had another cottage a short walk away. In some ways, these cottages were their official homes. However, though the cottages were more or less accessible year round, both women probably spent less than half the days of the year there. The rest of the time, particularly when the snowbanks were at their thickest, Belle and Erma would return to Sanger and live with Beryl. Erma would work as a clerk at Beryl’s Gift Shop on Seventh Street. Belle could often be found at the gift shop as well, sometimes as a worker, other times simply as a family member keeping her girls company.

Belle was in many respects the glue of her original family in the middle of the 20th Century, helping to keep the bonds connected in spite of the natural and on-going dispersal of the clan. Her continued link to Sanger contributed to her ability to play this role. Relatives passing through could count on being able to find her or her daughters or her brother Bert when they passed through town. But Belle was not content just to sit at home and wait for others to come to her. Her health remained good into her eighties, contributing to her ability to handle long car trips. Belle made excursions to the San Francisco Bay Area to see the two grandchildren who had relocated there. She visited her brother John in southern Oregon. And on quite a number of occasions, she went all the way back to Green County, WI to see her sister Emma and brother Charley and the various other relatives who had remained near (or who had returned to) the original Warner/Martin family stomping grounds. One marathon trip occurred in 1956. Erma served as the driver. Various relatives were part of the journey during various stages. The travellers departed Sanger 15 June 1956 and did not return until the first of October. During those fifteen weeks, in addition to the long visiting sessions in such places as Martintown, Winslow, and Monroe, Belle and Erma took multi-day side trips to Iowa, northern Wisconsin, and upper Michigan as well as one long jaunt out to Boston, MA to see Lena Brown Hastings’s daughter Ethel Ruth Hastings Parsons. All in all, Belle and Erma (and Erma’s automobile) must have racked up at least eight thousand road miles.

Belle survived all of her siblings except Bert. Finally succumbing to a gradual and somewhat lengthy decline, she passed away 29 December 1963 at Sanger Hospital. Her remains were interred beside those of Alie at Sanger Cemetery 2 January 1964.

Children of Cora Belle Warner with Alfonso James Spece

Gladys Beryl Spece

William Nathan Spece

Erma Alice Spece

To go back one generation to Belle’s mother’s biography, click here. To go back one generation to her father’s biography, click here. To return to the Martin/Strader Family main page, click here. To return to the Warner/Alexander Family main page, click here.