Mary Emma Warner
Mary Emma Warner, third of the eight children of Eleanor
Amelia Martin and John Warner, was born 14 November 1874 on her parents’ farm just outside
Martintown, Green County, WI, the village founded by her maternal grandparents Nathaniel Martin
and Hannah Strader. She was known as Emma, and only used Mary Emma in formal instances.
If you look over the entirety of the Martin/Strader website, you will see that, out of all the grandchildren of Nathaniel and Hannah, Emma is part of an exclusive group. Only three of those grandchildren spent both their youth and their twilight years living in Martintown or its sister village of Winslow, Stephenson County, IL. Of them, only two -- Emma and her first cousin (and extended sister-in-law) Mary Lena Brown Hastings -- left descendants who to this day live in one or the other of those two communities. The rest of the clan gave in to the typical mobile character of modern American life and scattered to the four winds.
Emma spent nearly the whole of her childhood on the farm where she was born, the one exception being when she was nine to ten years old (i.e. 1884), when the household spent about one year in Willow Springs, Howell County, MO. Her uncle Cullen Penny Brown (husband of Emma Ann Martin, the aunt for whom Emma was no doubt named) obtained a lumber merchant job in Howell County during that time period, and it appears he enticed his brother-in-law John Warner to come along to handle some aspect of the business. The venture, however, was temporary. While the Browns would go on to Arkansas later in the decade and eventually stay there on a year-round basis, the Warners returned to Martintown. Emma was surely pleased by this, as she had an abiding affection for her birth home. Among other joys, she was reunited with her childhood friends Wilamine and Phoebe Hastings. The latter two sisters, daughters of John Quincy Adams “Picket” Hastings and Barbara Ann Spece, were a quartet with Emma and her own sister Belle. Wilamine and Emma had both been born in 1874, and Phoebe and Belle both in 1876, and their bond was tight-knit. By far the best available image of Emma, shown to the right and in cropped form at the upper left, shows all four young ladies in the early 1890s. It is the top of Phoebe’s head that is obscuring Emma’s neck. Alas, a “clean” view of Emma in full bloom has not been found. Though she was obviously quite good-looking, she was self-conscious about her appearance and apparently arranged to “lose” photos of herself taken in youth except those that also showed other people whose images she wanted to preserve. Inevitably, she did not pose in front in those views. Throughout life she was extremely neat and tidy, always wearing dresses and never jeans or pantsuits even when those became common attire for females, and she may have felt she didn’t live up to her own standards of beauty.)
The friendship with Wilamine and Phoebe was
part of a greater association between the Warner and
the Hastings clans. Nellie Martin and Barbara Ann Spece were less than a month apart in age and
had always lived within a couple of miles from each other (aside from the Howell County sojourn).
The Hastings home was on a farm just north of Martintown, near the no-longer-extant hamlet of
Cadiz. Given such familiarity between the families, it was inevitable that marriages would result
once the younger generation came of age in the 1890s. The first wedding was that of Belle Warner
to Wilamine and Phoebe’s first cousin, Alfonso James “Alie” Spece in late 1894. The second, in
late 1895, united Emma’s first cousin Mary Lena Brown to Wilamine and Phoebe’s eldest brother,
Frank Opal Hastings. Finally, Emma married the second-eldest brother, Fred Philo Hastings. That
third wedding took place 17 November 1897 at the Warner farm (though the papers were filed
in the county seat of Monroe).
Fred had been born 11 February 1870 on the Hastings farm at Cadiz, coming into the world not long before the majority of the clan of Green County pioneer William S. Spece and Julia Ann Youngblood departed for Buchanan County, IA. In adulthood, Fred’s middle name was used by close friends and relatives as a nickname. However, unlike his wife, he generally was identified by his “regular” name.
Belle, Wilamine, and Phoebe had all married before their twenty-first birthdays, so Emma was a bit of an old maid bride at twenty-three, but in fact the timing was ideal and Emma would go on to bring up more children than any of her siblings. It was not, however, a large number in the absolute sense -- only three. (Belle and Walter each had three children as well, but Belle lost a baby at less than a month old and Walter’s eldest died before reaching school age.) Fourteen months into the marriage Emma gave birth to son John Warner Hastings. The subsequent pregnancies occurred at widely spaced intervals. Second child Elma Grace Hastings was born six and a half years after her brother, and third child Leah Merle Hastings came along eight years after that, by which point Emma had reached her late thirties.
In the early years of the marriage, Fred was a tenant farmer in Cadiz Township, trying to scrape together enough to purchase his own acreage. This kept both husband and wife in close proximity to their siblings and parents, except that in 1900, her parents and brothers Charlie, Cullen, Bert, and Walter moved to Scioto Mills, Stephenson County, IL, about ten miles southeast of Martintown. This was still close enough for regular visits, but not with the ease with which Emma could keep in touch with Belle and John, the two siblings who had stayed put. She probably saw her brother John at least three to four times a week given that he was a proprietor of one of Martintown’s two general stores in the early years of the 1900s and any trip Emma made to town included a stop at the store to say hello even on those occasions when she did not need to purchase of some sort of household necessity.
(Emma with her cousin and sister-in-law Lena
Brown Hastings at a family gathering held in Martintown 19 July 1917. The full photo is shown on
Hannah Strader’s biography page on this website.) Bigger changes in terms of extended-family
dynamic began in late 1904 or early 1905. Cullen’s wife Minnie Brecklin Warner, who had recently given
birth to daughter Selma, developed tuberculosis. This scourge would go on over the next few years to
kill several family members, including Emma’s sister-in-law Anna Lueck Warner, uncle Horatio Woodman
Martin, nephew Elbert Clare Warner, as well as Frank B. Ritter, husband of her first cousin Arley
Bucher. But first it killed Minnie. Before she succumbed at the beginning of 1906, Cullen had come
down with his own case of the disease. The family doctor warned that Cullen probably would not survive
another winter in a region as humid as northern Illinois. In response, John and Nellie decided on a
group move to a more arid climate. They gave up on the Scioto Mills home that year in
favor of a relocation to the San Joaquin Valley of California, where some of Nellie’s first cousins,
including Jake Frame, Will Frame, and Elias Frame, had settled in the 1890s. Those who migrated in
1906 included Cullen, little Selma, Bert, and Walter (with his new bride, Margaret Bell). By 1910
the group expanded to sweep up the rest of Emma’s siblings and their families. The only holdouts
were Emma and Fred. Their household, which now included baby Elma, stayed put. The separation was
distressing to Emma, but she was also the type of person who liked a familiar environment. Besides,
though her immediate family was now gone, the Martintown/Cadiz/Winslow area was still home to many
extended relatives, and to many in-laws. By 1910, she and Fred finally succeeded in becoming
deedholders of a farm of their own. Not only did this in itself make them feel more rooted, but
the fact that the acreage was right in the midst of their childhood haunts in Cadiz Township,
surrounded by the farms of relatives, old schoolmates, and fellow parishioners, helped accentuate the
bond.
Alas, farming in the upper Midwest increasingly became a marginal way to make a living during the 1910s. Emma and Fred stuck to it for eight years, completing their family with the birth of Leah during that phase, but eventually the couple decided they would be better off in California after all. John and Isabel Scott of Chicago bought and took possession of the parcel, leaving Emma and Fred free to head west in the summer of 1918. They sent major possessions via train but they themselves travelled by automobile. They did their best to make it a pleasant, leisurely experience. They even detoured all the way through the Pacific Northwest. Before sightseeing at Mount Ranier, they spent two nights camped out at the home of a Mr. Pronty, on whose farm Fred had worked as teenager. (The obtaining of that job had rescued Fred from his earlier employment, which had been loading bricks at a brickyard; apparently Fred had remained grateful for the opportunity to leave that behind and become Pronty’s hired man.) Despite the deliberate pace and the stopovers, the trip was grueling given the condition of roads and the quality of vehicles in that era. With the lack of air-conditioning other than to open the windows, the heat must have been ferocious. The family was bedraggled as it finally reached Sanger -- the Fresno County town where most of the Warner households were -- on the eleventh of August.
Emma and Fred and their kids stayed at first with Belle and Alie Spece and family. Soon they had a house of their own on DeWitt Avenue in Sanger. For a short while, Fred’s nephew Lowell Dale (son of Phoebe) was a part of the household, though he soon went back to Wisconsin. Some time in the early 1920s, things were uprooted again, this time to a house about ten miles west of Sanger at 2251 Olive Avenue in the city of Fresno. (Slightly below right is a view of that home in the late 1920s. Emma is sitting in a cane rocking chair in the driveway. Her daughter Leah is standing beside her.)
Surviving correspondence shows Emma embraced her new role as
a California resident, though
remaining wistful for friends and relatives left behind. For Fred, the move meant he was back to being a
laborer rather than his own boss, so it is an open question whether how thoroughly he appreciated
the new milieu.
By the mid-1920s Elma was in college. John, having worked as a rancher for a period, chose to attend college at the same time. As students needing to hoard their money, both remained in the family home. As the decade drew to a close, Emma and Fred anticipated the departure of the pair, and indeed, Elma headed off to be a teacher down in Kern County, CA. However, John did not move out. Instead, in 1928 (and perhaps as early as the tail end of 1927), Emma and Fred and Leah did so, leaving John to keep the 2251 Olive Avenue house long-term. Emma and Fred went back to their Cadiz Township farm. Due to economic uncertainties on the eve of the Great Depression, John and Isabel Scott had given up the property. Either Emma and Fred had only leased it to the couple, or they had carried the mortgage note, and with the Scotts’ abandonment the only way they could derive positive income from the property was to farm it themselves. So back to Wisconsin they came. Leah was less than happy about this, but at fourteen she could not be left to fend for herself. Emma, Fred, and Leah would never reside in California again. John and Elma made the opposite choice. Both spent the rest of their long lives in the San Joaquin Valley. (For several years this website biography stated the relocation occurred in 1929, which is what surviving family members thought sounded right. But Leah’s 1928 Winslow High School yearbook shows she was a pupil there for at least part of the spring term, and her 1929 final report card shows she spent the whole 1928-29 academic year there as a sophomore.)
Despite the fact that resuming their lives as a farm couple had not been their plan, Emma and Fred dived into it and enjoyed the positive aspects, of which there were many, including being able to reconnect with old friends and with many relatives of the Hastings-Spece and Martin-Strader clans. Emma did not limit herself to housewifely activities only, and could often be found teaming up with her husband to bring in the hay, shuck out the horse stalls, or pick the corn. In August, 1930 a set of photographs of the farm was taken that superbly documents the day-to-day sort of activities of the farm, as well as captures the look of the place (albeit in black and white). Eventually that series of images will be added to the Martin-Strader website as a sidebar of its own, a “life on a southern Wisconsin farm, 1930” sort of feature. Because of the notes on the back of those photos, it is still possible to know the family dog was named Peewee, the three white horses were Charlie, Frank, and Dewey, and the rise looking down on the property was called Arrowhead Hill -- all details that bring Emma and Fred back to life in a way dry stats about them could not.
Across the road from the Hastings farm was acreage owned by Charles Lewis Schumacher and his wife Rosa Mueller, who had immigrated to the area as children in the 1880s, travelling on the same ship as part of a migration of people from their community in Switzerland. Their son Robert Emmanuel Schumacher fell in love with Leah and married her in 1934. Early in their marriage the two took over the Schumacher farm, and so Emma and Fred were able to continue to enjoy the close presence of one of their offspring -- making up in a small way for the large geographic separation from their other two children.
One of the fringe benefits of living in California was the chance to take vacations in forests of the Sierra Nevada. In this view from the early 1920s, Emma, Fred, and Leah stand beside their car, which as just passed through the wide gap in the trunk of the Wawona Tunnel Tree, the famous giant Sequoia in Mariposa Grove at the southern entrance to Yosemite National Park. (The Wawona Tree fell down in 1969. Modern-day visitors to the park are unable to take pictures such as this one.)
Fred passed away 5 December 1943. It was a peaceful death, apparently of heart failure. He was in his rocking chair at home in Martintown and did not even have enough warning to stand up or call for help. He was not quite seventy-four. Compared to Emma and her siblings this was an early death, but his lifespan was the third-longest among the eight children of Picket and Ann Hastings, none of whom made it to eighty.
Emma kept the farm long-term, but leased it out rather than work it herself, able due to her modest lifestyle to get by on the income from that source. She stayed with Leah and Robert for a period, then acquired a house in Winslow. She was based there at least through the end of the 1950s. She apparently savored the independence of having her own house, though in some ways it seems it was more important to her peace of mind to have the house than to be alone in it. Leah and her husband and kids and other relatives checked on her nearly every day, and Emma regularly played host overnight to others of her generation, particularly Lena Brown Hastings, who by the early 1950s was spending most of her nights with her daughter Mary and son-in-law Eggo Koning thirty-five miles away, and who appreciated being able to occasionally stay local to Martintown and Winslow without imposing on offspring. Another regular visitor was Charley Warner, who moved back to Illinois in the early 1940s. It meant a lot to Emma that she could have at least one sibling nearby, as she had feared might never again be the case after the 1928 move back to Wisconsin. Inasmuch as Charley remained a lifelong bachelor, Emma was able to provide him with the comfort of close kin nearby as he -- and she -- slipped into their twilight phase.
Emma’s Winslow house often went empty, though, even to the extent
that the utilities were shut off, because
she made many extended visits to California. “Extended” often meant months at a time. Typically she stayed
alternately with John and Irma at the Olive Avenue house or with Elma and family at their farm near Laton
(twenty miles south of Fresno), or with Belle and her daughters Beryl and Erma in Sanger.
Even in old age and widowhood, Emma was one of those sorts of people who could be herself. She was a dutiful church-goer, and loved being able to have Leah and Leah’s two daughters as companions at services each Sunday. She was an avid seamstress, making blouses, dresses, and other garments for family members, and crocheting doilies to accent tables, walls, and kitchen counters. Many of the quilts she made have been preserved by her descendants, usually kept in storage because, as one surviving granddaughter puts it, they are too pretty to use. An immaculate housekeeper, Emma kept her home neat and tidy on all occasions, even when elderly. She baked and canned. She enjoyed movies, books, and writing.
Perhaps her key attribute of all was that Emma cherished her connection to friends and family. She deserves a special thank-you for much of the information and photographs that you are able to see here on this website. Emma was a packrat when it came to preserving family memorabilia. She saved newspaper articles about the births, deaths, weddings, and other major life events of relatives and neighbors from her mid-thirties on up to her late eighties, a half-century-plus span and a total of nearly 300 clippings. She saved hundreds of photos, including some from as early as the 1860s that she had inherited. She preserved many, many old letters and postcards. She left a diary. She also created her own genealogical lists and notes. One specific effort made in 1947 should be highlighted. Emma was contacted by Sarah Jeanette Hodge, a granddaughter of her aunt Jennie Edith Martin. Sarah was tracking down the genealogy of the Martin family. Emma not only supplied what answers she knew directly, but made it a point to write to her aunt Julia Beard “Juliette” Martin Savage, who was then the only child of Nathaniel and Hannah left alive. The response letter, a six-page missive from Juliette written 22 June 1947 from her home in Bangor, ME, was loaded with information that only Juliette could have provided. The timing proved to be critical, as Juliette died of breast cancer less than seven months after composing the letter. All in all, if not for Emma, it would have been impossible to put together as complete a record of the families of Nathaniel Martin and Hannah Strader and John Warner and Marancy Alexander, as we now enjoy.
Emma perished 6 September 1962 at the Lillian Rockow rest home just outside Winslow. Her remains were interred in Saucerman Cemetery, Cadiz Township, Green County, WI beside those of her husband. The resting place of Charley, who predeceased Emma by a year and a half, is also in that section of the graveyard.
Children of Mary Emma Warner
with Fred Philo Hastings
To go back one generation to Emma’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.