Selma Arabelle Warner

Selma Arabelle Warner, only child of Cullen Clifford Warner and Minnie Brecklin, was born 23 May 1904 in Scioto Mills, Stephenson County, WI. Her middle name is Alice in a birthday book kept by her first cousin Dorothy Doris Warner Yost -- who was perhaps simultaneously a second cousin. Due to this seemingly trustworthy family source, Alice was the middle name that appeared on this website for the first ten years of its existence. However, it would appear Dorothy assumed Selma’s middle name was the same as another cousin, Erma Alice Spece. It is Arabelle in Selma’s obituary and this is now regarded as correct.

Scioto Mills was Selma’s home for so short a period she would grow up with no memory of having lived there. Likewise, it was home to the older generations for a limited period -- only six years. Selma’s grandparents, John and Nellie Warner, had moved from their long-time home in Martintown in the latter part of the year 1900 and come ten miles southeast to Scioto Mills, where John was a sales broker for the local lumber mill. Cullen Warner and his as-yet-unmarried brothers Charley, Bert, and Walter had all been part of this relocation, and it was in Scioto Mills that Cullen had become acquainted with Minnie, leading to their marriage.

When Selma was an infant, both of her parents developed tuberculosis. Her mother died in early 1906 when Selma was less than two years old. Her father was at risk of dying very soon as well. The family doctor recommended that Cullen go to live in a place with an arid climate so as to stave off the disease. At the very least, such a measure would buy him more time. John and Nellie responded profoundly to their son’s needs, relocating their household -- which still included not only Cullen and Selma and themselves, but sons Bert and Walter as well -- to the San Joaquin Valley of California. They took along Walter’s new bride Margaret Bell. The group journeyed by train in December of 1906. Upon their arrival, they took temporary shelter with Nellie’s cousins Will Frame and Jake Frame in southern central Fresno County.

Within a few months John and Nellie purchased a ranch on the edge of the foothills in Fresno County near a small trading post called Academy. This ranch, called Spring Brook Ranch or “the Fancher Creek place” by the family, served as the Warner estate and was where Cullen lived full time along with his bachelor brother Bert. It was Selma’s home, too, but her grandparents were her main caregivers so as to lessen the chance that Cullen would give his daughter TB. They spent some of their time elsewhere in the county.

In 1909 Selma’s aunt Belle Warner Spece and family also moved from the Warner family’s old stomping grounds along the Wisconsin/Illinois border and made a home in the small town of Sanger, ten miles due south of Academy. The following year Selma’s eldest two uncles, John and Charley Warner, would follow suit. These arrivals expanded the family presence and gave her back her two same-age female cousins, Erma Spece and Dorothy Warner, somewhat counterbalancing the loss of her father, who succumbed to his illness in the spring of 1909 a few weeks before Selma reached five years of age.

The ranch was not what the Warners had hoped it would be. It did not have the necessary source of irrigation water it needed in order to thrive. John and Nellie made plans to sell, which they would accomplish by the end of 1910. In the meantime, through the second half of 1910, they and Selma lived in Fresno, where John made a temporary business by operating a butcher shop that sold the meat derived from the cattle that had been raised on the ranch. This was followed by a brief period on a twenty-acre fruit farm near the land of Will Frame in the vicinity of Fowler and Del Rey in southern Fresno County, a parcel originally bought for Walter and Margaret, who gave it up after two growing seasons. Soon, though, Sanger became the main base for the whole clan. Selma spent her elementary-school years in Sanger living with her grandparents.

The Grim Reaper was not yet done causing uproar in Selma’s childhood. Her grandfather John passed away when she was eleven. (Though only sixty-eight years old, in his family that was a full lifespan.) From that point until she married, the male caregiver in her daily life was her uncle Charles Elias Warner. Later Selma would refer to Charley as a major father figure in her life, which is a remarkable statement given that Charley never was a biological father to anyone, nor was he ever married, and it was an era when men seldom looked after children who were not their own. All family members agreed he did an exemplary job of looking after Selma. Nellie was part of the household as well, of course, and would continue to reside with Charley for several years after Selma had grown up and spread her wings.

In the late 1910s, the family of Edson Leroy Mead and Lavinia (aka Lavina) Elizabeth Alcorn moved to Sanger. One of the nearly-grown children of Edson and Lavinia was William Robert Mead, known as Bill (shown above right). Bill had been born 11 November 1898 in Packsaddle, Ellis County, OK, though at the time of his birth the spot was part of Day County. (Day County ceased to exist in 1907.) The Meads had left Oklahoma in the early 1910s, spending an interval in Shasta County, CA before coming south to Sanger, where Edson was a carpenter. Bill and Selma began a romance. She was still young -- very young by today’s standards -- but the prospect of becoming a wife and being able to finally be part of a traditional two-parents-and-a-set-of-kids household was understandably alluring to her. She had not even reached her sixteenth birthday when she and Bill were wed. Naturally that sort of precipitousness spurred gossip that it was a shotgun wedding, but the first of the couple’s five sons was not born until seventeen months after the wedding, the ceremony taking place 9 April 1920 in the city of Fresno. One bit of haste may have come from a desire to get it done while Bill’s grandfather Robert Alcorn, who was eighty-four, was still around to participate in the festivities. Robert, a widower who had been living with his daughter and son-in-law in Sanger, passed away a mere ten weeks after the event.

Early in the 1920s Selma and Bill moved to property just northwest of Grants Pass, OR, where Bill was employed by a railroad company (probably Southern Pacific). This was where the second and third of their children were born. They lived in a log cabin at the end of an unpaved driveway. (The photo of Bill at left was taken outside that home.) Bill’s brother Roy Lee Mead and family also came to the area, as did his sister Velma. The latter, after marrying Victor Chapman in 1930, settled on land on the route up to Crater Lake and lived out the rest of her long life there.

In the early 1930s Selma and Bill and their kids came back to California and settled in the southern part of the San Joaquin Valley in Alpaugh, Tulare County, CA, where Edson and Lavinia and some of Lavinia’s kinfolk had established themselves as farmers. Bill’s eldest sister, Minnie May Habekott, and his youngest brother, James Augustus Mead, and their spouses and offspring likewise made rural Alpaugh their long-term base. Selma and Bill shared a farm with Edson and Lavinia for some time. Alpaugh was to be Selma’s home for the vast majority of her adult life.

As mentioned above, Selma had five sons, but only the first two births were tightly spaced. The youngest member of the brood, Bob, was not born until the late 1930s. (Selma, Bill, and their four younger sons are shown at left in Alpaugh a few years after Bob’s birth.) The wide intervals between births meant Selma had sufficient freedom to be more than just a mother and housekeeper. She was active in such societies as the local chapter of the Rebekahs. Most of all she plunged into the doings of the Alpaugh Grange. While the Mead men participated in other parts of the Grange’s activities, Selma’s fiefdom was the Home Economics Club, for which she served variously as the president, secretary, treasurer -- and as conductor and performer, applying her musical talents. She also spent at least one term as the Master of the whole grange.

Selma lost her husband somewhat early. Bill died 3 January 1953 (the death was recorded in Fresno rather than Tulare County, perhaps indicating hospitalization). He predeceased his own parents. (Edson Mead would pass away a year later.) Bill also predeceased his brother Granville Edgar Mead by five days. Granville attended Bill’s funeral, then died in Wyoming during a train trip undertaken to seek medical treatment. Fortunately Bill survived long enough to know that his older sons had not been lost in World War II, and he had the chance to hold his first grandchildren in his lap when they were babies.

Selma continued on in Alpaugh as a widow for over thirty-five years. She was often called upon by her elderly aunts and uncles, to whom she was a kind of surrogate daughter because of the roles they had played in her upbringing. She herself, of course, never forgot the bond. However, because of the years in Oregon and then the long period down in Tulare County away from most of her birth kin, and the way in which she ended up so closely associated with her husband’s family, her boys did not necessarily maintain the same awareness of their Warner-Martin heritage. In general, the surviving Meads are not today in contact with the rest of the clan, particularly now that all of Selma’s first cousins have died.

Though she ultimately surpassed eighty-five years of age, Selma did not die of a natural decline. Instead, she was killed in a traffic accident 14 July 1989. She was a passenger in a Dodge pick-up truck driven by her son Bob -- whom she often counted upon to help transport her where she needed to go -- when a drunk driver going the other way on the highway crossed the dividing line with his Ford pick-up and caused a head-on collision. Selma was killed on the spot. The incident occurred in rural Tulare County just north of the site of Allensworth, a defunct town not far from Alpaugh. Bob spent a couple of days in intensive care, but managed to pull through. The driver of the Ford pick-up was charged with vehicular manslaughter.

Selma’s remains were interred at North Kern District Cemetery in Delano, Kern County, CA 18 July 1989.

Descendants of Selma Arabelle Warner and William Robert Mead

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