The version of Elma’s biography you see here is a
work in progress. More text and images will be added at some point. Please check back.Elma Grace Hastings
The version of Elma’s biography you see here is a
work in progress. More text and images will be added at some point. Please check back.
Elma Grace Hastings, second of the three children of Mary Emma Warner and Fred Philo Hastings, was born 5 June 1905 in Cadiz Township, Green County, WI. At the time she came into the world, her parents were trying to make a go of it renting farm acreage near Martintown, the village founded by her great-grandparents Nathaniel Martin and Hannah Strader. The family was deeply rooted in the immediate region. Her parents had both been born and raised in that part of Green County, as had both of her grandmothers. Her paternal grandfather, John Quincy Adams “Picket” Hastings, had come to Cadiz Township at age eight from Pennsylvania, and her maternal grandfather, John Warner, had been born and raised in Winslow, Stephenson County, IL, just one mile south of Martintown.
Beginning when Elma was an infant, the clan finally began to disperse in a significant way. Already five years before she was born, her mother’s parents John and Nellie Warner had moved ten miles southeast of Martintown to the tiny hamlet of Sciotio Mills, Stephenson County, IL. At the end of 1906, they and their younger sons Cullen, Bert, and Walter made a much more dramatic move, ending up in Fresno County, CA. Emma’s sister Cora Belle Warner Spece followed in 1909 and then her older brothers John and Charley did likewise in 1910, leaving Emma as the only child of John and Nellie who was still based back near the original family stomping grounds.
Emma and Fred stayed for the time being. His parents and three of his siblings were still local, and he preferred to stick around. In the autumn of 1909, he and Emma purchased a parcel of Cadiz Township land not far north of Martintown. Fred was just about to turn forty -- being his own boss at last was a big moment for him. Elma was four years old. She would in later years view the farm as the home where she grew up, though in fact she spent less than nine years of her childhood there. As her mother and both grandmothers had done, she attended the little Martin School.
Emma missed her family members. Fred agreed they would sell the farm, which was bought in 1918 by John and Isabel Scott of Chicago. In the late summer of that year they made a long trek by automobile through the Pacific Northwest and down to Fresno County to settle near the rest of the Warner clan out west. They lodged at first with Belle and Alie Spece in the small town of Sanger. It was only natural that Belle and Alie would be their hosts, for not only was Belle a sister of Emma, but Alie (Alfonso James Spece) was a first cousin of Fred. Soon Emma and Fred obtained a house of their own on DeWitt Avenue in Sanger. Within a few years, the family moved to 2251 Olive Avenue in Fresno. Elma would never again live in Wisconsin, even though in the late 1920s her parents and younger sister Leah went back, semi-forced to reclaim the farm after John and Isabel Scott “walked away” from making the mortgage payments. Elma was an adult when that move happened, and like her brother John, she chose to remain in the San Joaquin Valley for good.
Elma graduated from Fresno State College as part of
the Class of 1927. Soon she was hired as a school teacher, first in the city of Fresno, then in McFarland,
Kern County, CA, near Bakersfield. When she was twenty-six, she married Carl Emmert Fike, who was to be
her long-term and only husband. (His middle name is unusual; it is not a typo for Emmett.) Carl had
been born 24 March 1902 in Bellevue Township, Republic County, KS. When he had been an infant or toddler,
his family had given up on Kansas and settled on a farm near Laton, at the southern edge of Fresno County.
Carl was a middle child of the many offspring of Messmore M. Fike and Ethel V. “Nettie” Seifert. (Messmore
was from Fayette County, PA, and his unusual name surely came from the village of Messmore, which was either
his birthplace, or close to it.)
(Elma is the white-haired woman in the photo at right, taken 4 March 1975 at Fresno Airport. Left to right, her first cousin Josephine Warner Smeds, Jo’s husband Alfred Smeds, Elma, and Elma’s uncle Albert Frederick Warner.)
By the time of the courtship between Carl and Elma, Messmore and Nettie had been on their Laton acreage for decades. Carl, a grown son in his late twenties, was still living at home and helping care for the land, a vital role in that his father and his resident uncle, William Jackson Fike, had become too old to handle some of the rigors of its maintenance. After the wedding, which occurred 12 September 1931 in Laton, Carl and Elma settled on the Fike land. Their initial home was behind that of Carl’s older brother Floyd Everett Fike and his family.
Elma spent a period as a housewife and mother, but even as a married woman had a lengthy career as a teacher.
Carl preceded Elma in death by the larger part of two decades. He suffered a stroke in the late 1960s, and then perished 20 January 1975 in Laton. His remains were interred two days later at Oak Grove Cemetery. At the end of her long widowhood, Elma passed away 5 April 1993 in Hanford, Kings County, CA. She was buried with Carl and shares a gravemarker with him.
Descendants of Elma Grace Hastings
with Carl Emmert Fike
To go back one generation, click here. To return to the Martin/Strader Family main page, click here. To return to the Warner/Alexander Family main page, click here.