Dorothy Doris Warner

Dorothy Doris Warner, daughter of John Martin Warner and his first wife Anna Lueck, was born 9 October 1903 in Winslow, Stephenson County, IL. Though she came into the world in Illinois, her original home was Martintown, Green County, WI, a village a mile north of Winslow founded in 1850 by her great-grandparents Nathaniel Martin and Hannah Strader. She was the second of two children, with her brother Leslie being six-and-a-half years her senior.

While Dorothy was an infant and preschooler, her father was the proprietor of one of Martintown’s two general stores and was widely acknowledged as a leading citizen of the community. In many respects Dorothy enjoyed a classic heartland-of-America upbringing for the first few years of her life. Unfortunately these good times did not last. Beginning not long after her birth and continuing for several years, the area around Martintown and Winslow was plagued by tuberculosis. All too many cases involved relatives of the Warner/Martin clan. Dorothy’s mother was one of those who fell victim to the disease. By late 1909 Anna’s condition was becoming ominous. She and John decided they would follow the example of John’s parents, brothers, and sister Belle and relocate to the San Joaquin Valley of California, in the hope that the arid climate would stave off the effects of TB. In early 1910, the family made this big move, even though it mean that John had to give up his livelihood. John and Anna, with Leslie and Dorothy, reestablished themselves in Sanger, Fresno County, CA. John went into business with his father as a co-owner and co-proprietor of Warner Warehouse Company, selling hardware, hay, and feed grain, and renting out storage space.

Though Sanger was only a small town, it was several times the size of Martintown and more impersonal. Dorothy cannot be said to have appreciated the disruption of her circumstances, and never warmed to life in California. She was much beloved by her grandparents Fred and Minnie Leuck and other maternal kinfolk. The affection was mutual. Nor did Dorothy really have much chance to like her new home given that it was a setting in which her mother was always suffering. Anna’s condition was not allieviated by the dry air. She grew steadily worse and finally, at the beginning of 1911, “came back home to die,” which she did in the early part of May in Monroe, the county seat of Green County, where her parents had moved several years earlier. Dorothy was confronted with the loss of her mother at only seven years of age.

The emotional trauma made Dorothy crave the comfort of Wisconsin even more. It did the opposite for her father. For John, Green County just wasn’t the same happy place without Anna at his side. He chose to go back to the West for good. Inasmuch as Leslie and Dorothy were still minors, they had to go, too. In 1913, John married Grace Annetta Walker. As far as can be judged from the perspective of a hundred years later, Dorothy did not particularly bond with her stepmother. As often as possible, Dorothy spent extended visits with her Green County relatives. By the time she was a teenager, her father indulged this preference to such a degree that Dorothy did not finish high school in Fresno County. She graduated from Monroe High School, Class of 1922. By then, there was no convincing her to be a Californian again.

Her decision meant that for the whole of her adulthood she was separated from routine daily contact with the majority of her Warner relatives. A few remained local, including her aunt Emma Warner Hastings, whose home was near Martintown. Another significant exception was her own brother. Leslie had attempted to start his independent life in Fresno County, but his original plans were derailed by another tragedy -- he lost his young wife, Olga, to the influenza pandemic in late 1918, only eight months into the marriage. In the early 1920s Leslie returned to Wisconsin, married second wife Eleanor Viney, and settled in Dane County. For the rest of her life, Dorothy and Leslie’s homes were never more than forty miles apart.

Dorothy obtained a teaching credential from Green County Normal School and proceeded to serve as a rural school teacher while she was a young single woman. At twenty-three, she wed Avery C. Yost. The wedding took place 1 June 1927 in Milwaukee, Milwaukee County, WI. Born 31 May 1904, Avery was a son of Fred Yost and Myrtle (“Myrtie”) Keel -- meaning he was also a descendant of Green County pioneers. In fact Avery was almost a cousin. While he and Dorothy were not blood relatives, they had many cousins in common due to a number of marriages in the previous two generations among the Trickle, Keel, Morton, Martin, Strader, and Frame families. (Shown at left is Dorothy and Avery’s wedding portrait.)

Dorothy and Avery spent their early years as a couple farming in Cadiz Township (the Martintown area) amid the parcels of distant and close family members. Among those who lived around them were Avery’s mother Myrtie and stepfather Frank Good, Avery’s uncle John Yost and his family, and the aforementioned Emma Warner Hastings and her family. During their late youth they moved eight to ten miles west to acreage in Gratiot Township in Lafayette County between the villages of Gratiot, WI and Warren, IL.

Dorothy and Avery never had children. As time went on and it became apparent this would remain the case, they ceased thinking in terms of maintaining a farm “for the next generation.” Their emotional investment in their land was unsentimental -- Avery was not so much a farmer as much as a farm manager, and the land viewed for its investment potential and annual yield of income and not necessarily as a home. The couple employed a number of individuals, some of them distantly related. For example, the 1940 census shows three such live-in farm hands, consisting of Dorothy’s second cousins Arthur and Freda Lueck (brother and sister) and even-more-distant relative Ketchel Rinehart. Eventually Avery was managing multiple farms, either through a series of astute business decisions or inheritence or both. The couple’s financial situation became quite secure, leading to a move some time in the late 1940s or in the 1950s into their final place of residence, a large brick cottage at 2614 Seventh Street in Monroe. (This home is shown below right.)

Dorothy was interested in family history and was proud of being a great-grandchild of Nathaniel Martin and Hannah Strader. As one of the few among the Martin/Strader descendants who still dwelled in proximity to Martintown during the mid-20th Century, she was an individual that relatives turned to in order to find out where to contact other members of the clan, and she deserves credit for keeping the connections alive, especially among the far-flung descendants of her great great grandparents Joseph Alexander and Olive Littlefield. Her efforts at the beginning of the 1960s to solicit donations from relatives to be spent on improvements of the old Nathaniel Martin home (including rebuilding a fence) put certain cousins back in touch for the first time in decades.

Avery died 23 January 1977. Dorothy continued on in Monroe. Eventually she became feeble with age and needed younger folk to “look in on her.” Inasmuch as she had no son or daughter, nor even a niece or nephew, she came to lean heavily upon the help of Jacob and Erma Tuescher of Browntown. (The village of Browntown is a few miles northwest of Martintown and as the only incorporated community within Cadiz Township, its post office serves the homes that were once part of the Martintown postal district.) Jake’s brother Fay Teuscher was married to Merle Yost, one of the first cousins with whom Avery had grown up. (Ina Merle Yost Teuscher was the eldest of the three daughters of John Yost and Lottie Keel. This means Merle and her sisters were actually double cousins of Avery, offspring not only of his father’s brother, but of his mother’s sister.) Dorothy and Avery had come to know Jake and Erma well during the years spent in Gratiot Township. Jake and Erma’s Browntown-area farm was probably acreage that had once belonged to someone in the Yost/Keel/Good clan.

Jake and Erma weren’t all that much younger than Dorothy -- only about a decade -- but they were still healthy and able to deal with matters that Dorothy no longer could manage. Their help was vital when Dorothy suffered a stroke in the mid-to-late 1980s that left her with considerable neurological damage. Among other things, she lost the ability to speak. Unable to stay at the 2614 Seventh Street residence, she was admitted to Pleasant View Nursing Home in Monroe. Jake took care of such things as mowing the lawn and shovelling the snow at Dorothy’s home so as to keep alive the hope that she might return there if physical therapy improved her condition. However, her recovery was limited. She learned to struggle along in a walker. She could write a few words in a dyslexic fashion. She knew who she was, though, and had her memories. She indicated her wishes, opinions, and comments in non-verbal ways such as pointing and nodding. Receiving letters and cards became a big part of her existence. Blind in one eye, she had trouble reading, but Erma and others would read aloud to her.

Around the first of June, 1993, Dorothy suffered another stroke. It left her even more impaired and subject to grand mal seizures. For days afterward she did not recognize people she had known for decades. Having perhaps had a premonition that such a crisis was pending, she had indicated several weeks earlier to Jake that he should arrange to sell her house and its contents. Jake took care of the legal details with the estate attorney. The furnishings, kitchen items, et al were sold at an auction on June 16th. The house was listed on the 19th and was sold within twenty-four hours. When told, Dorothy (whose lucidity had improved some in the three weeks since her stroke) indicated her delight by laughing and clapping. She was especially pleased that the residence had been purchased by someone she knew -- her dentist.

The June stroke was the onset of an unstoppable decline. Dorothy passed away at Pleasant View 31 August 1993, just shy of age ninety. Her remains, like those of many family members, were interred in Saucerman Cemetery in Cadiz Township.

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