Rose Marie Bucher

Rose Marie Bucher, daughter of Mary Lincoln “Tinty” Martin and Elwood Byron Bucher, was born 19 January 1887 in Martintown, Green County, IL. She was occasionally referred to as Rosa. She was the third of seven children. (This tally includes the twin boys born in the 1890s who did not survive infancy.) Rose’s early childhood was spent in Martintown, probably on eighty acres of farmland Tinty had been given as a dowry by her parents Nathaniel Martin and Hannah Strader. Some time in the 1890s the household shifted a short distance south over the state line to property with a Winslow, Stephenson County, IL address. Rose attended Martin elementary school and then Winslow High School.

It was during her high school years that Rose lost her mother. Tinty died in 1902, when Rose was fifteen. Four years later Rose’s uncle Horatio Martin also passed away. In early 1907 Horatio’s widow Laura Hart Martin married Rose’s father E.B. By then, E.B. had already slipped into Horatio’s place as the head miller of the Martin grist mill. Laura and E.B. would go on to finish raising Rose’s little brother Ralph, along with Laura and Horatio’s younger children Fay, Vivian, and Clark. It was not necessary to look after Rose, however, because she was grown, and soon became a wife.

Rose’s bridegroom was Charles Lewis Buss, who had been born 13 April 1883 in rural Auburn, DeKalb County, IN. A son of Christian C. Buss and Elizabeth Park, Charles may have left DeKalb County in his late teens or early twenties and met Rose after coming to the Martintown area, but it is possible Rose moved to Indiana at age eighteen or nineteen, perhaps to teach school. Whatever the particulars of the courtship, the wedding took place 26 December 1907 in Freeport, Stephenson County, IL.

As newlyweds, Rose and Charles established themselves in the general area where he had been raised. References from 1908 in the “news of Martintown” column of the Journal-Standard of Freeport, IL mention visits Rose made back home, and refer to her residence as Auburn, IN. The spring, 1909 birth of son Dwight happened in Waterloo, just north of Auburn, so the family was still in DeKalb County at that point. They moved some time within the next twelve months to Martintown, where they remained for over a decade. Martintown was a spot where Charles could be sure of employment. Elwood Bucher had become the owner of the Martintown sawmill in 1905 after the death of Nathaniel Martin, and owner of the flour mill in 1906 after the death of Horatio Martin. Rosa and Charles lived in one of the legacy Martin-family homes along the north bank of the Pecatonica River just up the slope from the mill buildings. Charles went to work as his father-in-law's assistant at the flour mill, assuming more and more responsibility as the 1910s went on.

Rose gave birth in quick sequence three times in the early years of the marriage, the third child arriving after the move to Martintown. The first baby was lost at birth and no reference to a name or a gender has surfaced. The chief evidence that the birth occurred is the 1910 census, taken during a survey year in which all women were asked how many times they had given birth and how many of those offspring were still alive. The baby has been given a “placeholder” position in the simplified chart of descendants on this website, but does not have a separate biographical page given how little there is to say. Happily the other two children, sons Dwight and Estel, born in 1909 and 1911 respectively, were healthy and would go on to enjoy lives exceeding eighty years each.

Many descendants of Nathaniel Martin and Hannah Strader left the region in the first few years of the century. The local economy was going into decline and Martintown was becoming a backwater. Rose and most of her siblings stayed longer than some. Rose and her husband felt the urge to spread their wings as well. However, Charles was needed at the mills. This became especially true in about 1920, when E.B. Bucher became an invalid. Things finally changed in the early 1920s. Charles lost three fingers in an accident at the mills, and took it as a sign that he should never have remained on the job that long.

Rose and Charles moved to a farm near Olivet, Vermilion County, IL. Olivet is near the larger town of Danville. The couple would remain in the Danville area for the rest of their lives -- a full life in Charles’s case, an even longer one in Rose’s case. Their son Dwight would also remain for good. Another local-area resident through much of that span was her nephew, Dr. Ray Elwood Bucher. In coming to Vermilion County, Rose can be said to have been completing a circle in terms of family history. Her great-grandparents Jacob Strader and Rachel Starr had homesteaded in the county in the early 1820s along with many of Rachel’s siblings and their spouses. In fact, Rachel’s older sister Elizabeth and her husband Henry Johnson may have been the very first white couple to settle in what is now Vermilion County, their arrival occurring in the spring of 1815. Rose’s grandmother Hannah had been born on John and Rachel’s homestead in 1829 and had spent the first seven years of her life there. Rose and Charles's home lay only a few miles from the cemetery where her great-great grandfather John Starr had been laid to rest in the late 1830s.

Farming being a tough way to make a living, Charles gave it up in the mid-1940s. He and Rose left their farm in favor of a house at 512 Lafayette in Danville. He became a mail carrier, a job he would continue well into his seventies. (Dwight would eventually follow in his footsteps, taking over the same route.) However, Charles’s job was not his main focus. He had left Martintown in part out of his burning desire to preach. This was a passion Rose shared. They both earned licenses as ministers of the Nazarene church, and both actively led congregations. Rare as it is now for a Christian female to take the pulpit, it was even rarer then, but Rose heard the calling and felt compelled to heed it. When the founder of the Oaklawn Church of the Nazarene departed in the late 1940s, Rose stepped in as pastor, found a new venue, and kept the group of worshippers intact. Meanwhile, in 1951, Charles founded Danville’s Home Gardens Church and its Sunday school. He was its guiding force, but Rose was heavily involved, going door to door in the neighborhood in the evenings to recruit new members, and she served as pastor at Home Gardens from 1951 to 1956. Her proselytizing efforts were effective and both Oaklawn and Home Gardens grew in membership and in physical size. She was later credited with having been the co-founder of both churches. She also served as pastor of Cedar Grove Church of the Nazarene from 1961 to 1964, during which interval an addition to the church was built.

Like many members of the Martin/Strader clan, Rose was musically gifted. She played the piano. Not surprisingly, one of her main uses of the instrument was to play hymns and inspirational tunes. She would do this even while at home, inviting visitors to sing with her.

By the end of her tenure at Cedar Grove, Rose was far into her seventies. Finally, she began to slow down. Her marriage of over sixty years came to its conclusion when Charles perished 3 December 1968. Within the first few years of her widowhood Rose became afflicted by Alzheimer’s Disease or similar dementia and spent years closely looked after by Dwight. He dedicated himself to that effort and thus Rose was able to remain at home at 512 Lafayette into her nineties. In 1979 she needed so much care that Dwight enrolled her at Colonial Manor Nursing Home in Ridge Farm, Vermilion County, near his home. Toward the very end, she was admitted to Lakeview Medical Center, but nothing could be done to reverse her decline, so she was transferred to Americana Nursing Home in Danville, where she spent her final three days of life. She was ninety-three years of age when she expired. Her death date was 20 September 1980, meaning that she had outlived all the other grandchildren of Nathaniel Martin and Hannah Strader with the exception of Bert Warner and Clark Martin. On 23 September 1980 her remains were interred with those of Charles in Danville’s Sunset Cemetery, Reverends Paul E. White and Paul Noel Wright officiating.

Children of Rose Marie Bucher with Charles Lewis Buss

Dwight Cecil Buss

Estel Maynard Buss

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