Walter Clare Warner

Walter Clare Warner, eighth of the eight children of Eleanor Amelia Martin and John Warner, was born 20 April 1886 at Martintown, Green County, WI. He was raised for his first fourteen years on a farm just outside the village founded by his maternal grandfather Nathaniel Martin. The farm consisted of eighty acres given by Nathaniel as a dowry gift to his daughter Nellie upon her marriage to John in 1869. Walter received all or most of his elementary-school education at Martin School, just across the Pecatonica River from his grandparents’ mills and residence. (He and his brother Bert can be seen in a photo of a mid-1890s Martin School class on the page of this website devoted to scenes of Martintown. Click here to go straight to that page.) As a teenager he may have attended Winslow High School; however, the school was just being established when he was a teenager and he may not have had the opportunity to go there.

Walter was part of the relocation of his parents and unmarried brothers to Scioto Mills, Stephenson County, IL in late 1900, where the family would remain for six years, meaning that Scioto Mills was the only other community besides Martintown that Walter could look back upon as a childhood home. Scioto Mills featured a large sawmill and had a train depot, but otherwise was such a tiny community it did not provide Walter with many chances to meet young ladies. However, he nevertheless managed to meet the one who went on to become his wife, with whom he would have an “until death them do part” union. The fact that their love manifested was an instance of a tragedy having a silver lining. Toward the latter part of 1904 Walter’s new sister-in-law Minnie Brecklin Warner, wife of Walter’s slightly older brother Cullen, began suffering active symptoms of tuberculosis. John and Nellie immediately arranged for regular visits by a nurse familiar with treatment of TB patients. The person hired was Mrs. Ellen Shuler Bell, better known as Bird Bell. She was a widow whose late husband, William R. Bell, had been killed in a machine-shop accident in Brodhead, WI in 1897, leaving her with seven children -- all daughters -- still at home. By 1904, a number of those daughters were still under her wing. One of them was Margaret Jane Bell, who had been born 9 December 1890 in Freeport, the seat of Stephenson County. Freeport was one of a number of places the Bells had lived before Bird, as a widow, had retreated to Cedarville, which was quite close to Scioto Mills and much like it, both places being whistlestop communities in the woods with only a handful of commercial buildings. William R. Bell’s family had pioneered Cedarville and it was a haven where Bird could enlist kinfolk to help look after the girls. Margaret sometimes accompanied Bird on her visits to see patients. Inasmuch as Cullen and Minnie and their little girl Selma resided within the large Warner home in Scioto Mills, Walter had many chances to encounter Margaret over the course of 1905. In January of 1906, Bird actually moved into the Warner home temporarily while Minnie was reaching the end of her struggle. (Minnie passed away 30 January 1906.) The Bells and the Warners were bonded by the ordeal, and Walter and Margaret’s growing affection for one another was a natural consequence of that.

Walter and Margaret courted through the rest of the year 1906, and possibly would have done so for a bit longer in deference to Margaret’s tender age, but events nudged the sweethearts to hurry up and get married, which they did 12 December 1906 in Freeport, three days after Margaret turned sixteen. The reason they needed to make up their mind whether to stay together was because Walter was to leave as part of a family exodus to the San Joaquin Valley of California. In the wake of Minnie’s death, the family doctor had advised the Warners that Cullen, who was also ill with tuberculosis, should be relocated to an arid part of the nation to slow down the progress of his case. John and Nellie spearheaded a plan to do so, and assumed that not only would they be accompanied by Cullen and Selma, but also by their other younger sons, Bert and Walter. They set their sights on the San Joaquin Valley of California, where Nellie’s Frame cousins had settled over the preceding fifteen years. They were to leave in early December, but delayed just long enough to have the wedding -- or that is to say, most of them did. Bert Warner was to accompany an entire train car of major family possessions, including the horses and buggy, and the schedule required that he get going. By the time of the nuptials, Bert and the train car were three days into the journey.

The migration to the Far West would eventually involve the entire Warner family. Some, such as Walter’s sister Emma, took their time about joining the others. Walter and Margaret themselves may have held back as well to a degree. They visited Illinois in 1907 and may then have lingered until the latter part of 1908 before agreeing that they would permanently commit to the big change of venue. Fortunately for Margaret, this decision did not rip her totally away from her birth family. Over the next few years, Bird Bell and most of her other daughters also became Californians.

John and Nellie’s first place of residence in California was land they purchased in 1907 near the trading outpost of Academy on the edge of the foothills east of Clovis. They nicknamed it Spring Brook Ranch. Although one of the purposes of having such resolutely rural property was to keep Cullen and his disease in isolation, the place was in fact the main family estate and was initially intended as John and Nellie’s main source of financial support, cattle-raising being the expected means to earn the money. Accordingly, John and Nellie arranged to have a nice big house built for themselves, Cullen, Bert, and little Selma. It was not, however, meant for Walter and Margaret to live in for any extended length of time. The assumption was that Walter and Margaret would be establishing themselves elsewhere sooner rather than later. They had to have shelter of some kind, though, and as a young married couple needed a certain amount of privacy. While no second house was erected, the ranch gained a second domicile in the form of a shack. That very shack is shown at right in an image scanned from a postcard Walter sent to his grandmother Hannah Martin at the end of March, 1909, a few days before he and Margaret were to move out of these rustic accommodations.

Walter and Margaret became parents of their first child, son Elbert Clare Warner, at the beginning of 1909 while still residing at the ranch. However, the birth itself may have taken place ten miles to the south in the small town of Sanger, where a doctor would have been more readily available. With a baby to think of, it was time to say good-by to the shack and create a home suitable for a growing family. John and Nellie heard of good land available cheaply near the farms of Nellie’s cousin Will Frame and his nephew William Washington Frame (son of Jake Frame). These relatives were based between the small towns of Fowler and Del Rey in southern Fresno County, approximately ten miles south of Sanger and therefore twenty miles south of Academy. John and Nellie purchased a twenty-acre parcel with the understanding that if Walter did well with it and was willing to commit to it, it would eventually be sold to him on advantageous terms, or even just given to him if John and Nellie became able to afford to do so. This was a solid opportunity, and Walter and Margaret accepted the arrangement. They moved to the parcel at the beginning of April, 1909, a few weeks before poor Cullen Warner succumbed to TB.

Unfortunately, the farm was devoted to peach orchards and Walter found he and peaches just weren’t a good match. After the harvest of 1910, he gave up and joined in a new family venture, selling produce in the market district of the city of Fresno. This also was a temporary situation. By about 1912, he and Margaret were living in Sanger, where Walter’s siblings John, Charlie, Belle, and Bert had come to be based, and the same for Walter’s parents and their orphan granddaughter Selma. Walter shifted from one job to another, eventually settling into his long-term career, carpentry.

The family expanded in 1912 with the birth of daughter Willa Roberta Warner. This happiness of this development was soon countered by a loss. Little Clare Warner was not healthy. There are hints in surviving family correspondence that he had been frail from the start. When asked later in life what her brother had suffered from, Willa reported it was tuberculosis of the bone. In September, 1913, Clare lost his battle with the disease.

The family remained in Sanger through 1916, and the arrival of final child Charles Alfred Warner. With a new baby to support, Walter obtained a job in the foothills, probably in the logging industry. His employer, as shown on Walter’s 1918 draft card, was W.H. Jones. While Walter had this job, he and Margaret and the kids lived in Tollhouse, a sawmill hamlet in the foothills. Later in 1918 or in 1919, they returned to Sanger. The town had by that point unquestionably become the headquarters of the clan now that sister Emma and her husband Fred Hastings and their kids had finally moved out, leaving behind their farm north of Martintown. Walter and Margaret took a house just three doors away from the one occupied by sister Belle and brother-in-law Alie Spece. Bert’s residence was only a few blocks away, though this became more of an awkward fact than a comfort when the two brothers had some sort of argument that caused them not to speak to one another for the rest of Walter’s life. Bert’s daughter Josie and Walter’s son Buster (Charles Alfred) met in primary school and did not know they were first cousins until each came home mentioning that they had been (alphabetically) seated by their teacher next to another kid with the last name of Warner.

Inasmuch as carpentry was a profession Walter could engage in almost anywhere, eventually it occurred to him that he did not have to do so in Sanger, where the summers were dreadfully hot, the winters were drearily foggy, and the scenery was uninspired. The lure of the coast won out. Some time before 1930 Walter, Margaret, and their two surviving kids moved to the benign climate of Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz County, CA. It was such a pleasant area that within not too many more years it lured Belle and Alie, and also Margaret’s sister June and her family. Once there, Walter may have -- according to vague recollections of distant family members -- been employed as a civilian by the U.S. Navy. The photograph at left, taken in Walter's final years, corroborates this story. His job with the Navy presumably involved carpentry.

Santa Cruz would ultimately be the place Walter finished his life, passing away 20 May 1946. The cause was suicide. A contributing cause was alcohol, which apparently Walter had made an increasing habit of indulging in. At this point his son Alfred was struggling with tuberculosis and Walter, having personally witnessed his brother Cullen die slowly and horrifically from the disease, and having already suffered the heartache of losing his first son to it, was apparently driven into a bleakness he could not overcome. Margaret survived him by six years. She passed away in Santa Cruz 11 April 1952.

Children of Walter Clare Warner with Margaret Jane Bell

Elbert Clare Warner

Willa Roberta Warner

Charles Alfred Warner

To go back one generation to Walter’s mother’s biography, click here. To go back one generation to his 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.