Individual Details
Clara Leona WHITTIER
(23 Sep 1879 - )
Record Journal of Douglas County, December 12, 1941, p. 4, col 5.
A Pioneer Story
---------
By Clara Whitties [sic] Waldron
Greenfield, Monterey County, Calif.
P.O. Box 622
--------
Editor Case and Readers of the Castle Rock Record Journal:
My deep sorrow and loneliness here among strangers impel me to write this article for publication in the old hometown newspaper, of which my dear father, Washington Irving Whittier, was formerly publisher. It should prove of interest because the lives of my parents were naturally in much the same channels as your parents and grandparents, and may be enlightening to the youths of to-day in this national pre-war period. It was war time then, too when father and mother were young - across the ocean in Europe, yes but THE WAR was in our own beloved country, North against South; friend against friend; brother against brother. There wasn't so much fuss then about Draft Dependents, etc. The South felt their liberties were being infringed upon; the North felt the Union was endangered; their own beloved flag imperiled. Grandfather Tart and my father both volunteered. Not long before, Grandfather Whittier had been killed by a log from the load of wood he was bringing home from slipping just as he was coming through the yard gate. The oldest son, Oscar, was in Illinois. There were two girls, Helen, mother of Vincent Wheeler, and Lucy, mother of Ulric and Ceylon Sturdevant, and a little curly haired boy, Edmund, father of Clinton Whittier. Yet Grandmother Whittier, weeping, but loyal, did not restrain her two boys when they felt duty calling them to the protection of their flag. Both were only teen-age boys; Uncle Oscar was 19, I think, when they came home after the war closed, and father was 17. I wish I could locate the daguerotypes of the two taken before they left. Grandmother Whittier showed them to me; two bright, ruddy-looking boys; but Grandmother Tart told me my father looked like a ghost when he came back. That is probably why he left his native state, Vermont, and came to Colorado. Uncle Oscar, too was in the West, drawing the ozone of the Rockies to burn out the germs eating at his lungs. I do not know how long father was in Colorado at that time. I do not know when he got acquainted with mother. She was born in New York. Her parents were Ambrose and Lydia Hallock Tart.
She was the oldest in a family of ten children, Grandfather and and Grandmother Tart had moved to Addison County, Vermont, and had four children when Grandfather went to the war. Their fifth son, Frank, was born about seven months after he went. I doubt if my father knew my mother before he went to war. Perhaps he met her when he came home ill on a furlough.
The comrades of those awful days felt very close to each other, and as the Whittiers and Tarts then lived in neighborhoods not far apart, probably this common interest drew the two families together. Father was about ten years older than mother. He said he came West and waited for her to grow up, then went back and got her.
After their marriage they established a home in Lincoln, Vermont, where father engaged in the mercantile business.
Two sons were born in Vermont. The eldest died in infancy; the second son, Clarence, was a toddler when father returned to Colorado and located in Spring Valley, in the southern end of Douglas County. Probably father was teaching the Spring Valley school. During these early days he taught school in most the districts along Cherry Creek and Antelope Valleys. When mother joined him a few months before I was born, she was accompanied on the train trip West by her 17-year old brother Fred. Mary Riggs siad then they landed at Greenland, she thought mother and her little son Clarence were the two whitest people she ever saw.
Years later, Uncle Fred, a volunteer soldier from Utah, was one of Teddy Roosevelts Rough Riders. Tart was an unusual name, and the army got it Dart. Uncle received honors under that name, so he took it legally. His widow, who lives at Spanish Fork, Utah, visited mother in Castle Rock last year, joining mothers oldest sister, Minnie Adell Varney, from Bristol Vermont. Mother's youngest sister, Eva, younger than I, never had the opportunity to see her brother Fred.
I was born in the Pollock house; the one with the big chimney, near the Spring Valley school house; to a very homesick mother, which may account partly for the deep loneliness I have always felt when away from my people.
The Reynolds family lived on the Pollock ranch then. Mr. Reynolds was a crippled soldier. He and father were close friends. Father made his first public prayer at the grave of a little child at Spring Valley. No ordained minister was available.
When we left Spring Valley, my parents homesteaded near the old Jack Platt and Dish and Forbes ranches, within walking distance, as I dimly remember my parents taking us two little children and going to these farms for twilight calls.
Gid Pratts, Henry Duvalls and D. R. Williamses are others I recall as familiar old-time friendly neighbors.
When I was three years old, father sold the homestead and bought the Proctor place. This house, near the Cherry Creek bridge at Irving (It was Rock Ridge then, the name later given honoring father) also had a big fireplace with a stone chimney. So did the Case house.
Father was teaching the Lake Gulch school that winter, usually riding horseback, I think. He had some difficulty with the combination of American and German languages, but I retain the memory of how greatly my parents appreciated the kindness of those early German settlers; their cheery greeting when he passed them by, out doing their morning and evening chores, sometimes hailing him with a package to take home sauerkraut, freshly butchered meat, links of sausage, etc. I think that must have been an unusually cold winter. Father wrapped gunnysacks around his legs and feet to help keep warm, but even so, his toes and cheeks were frost bitten. Mother would replenish the fired when it was time for father, but frequently, before he could enjoy the warmth, me must first rub his face hands and feet with snow or hold them in cold water to get the frost out.
The Bauers, Seidentstickers, Deepkes, Hagge and Misners were among the kind hearted Germans he became became acquainted with during those Lake Gulch school days.
Father enlarged our farm by purchasing the Case ranch, and we moved into the house now occupied by the Joe Hillyen's. Uncle Oscar helped to put on the two north rooms for the Rock Ridge post office. I think the mail came in from Castle Rock on Saturdays only then.
About this time, father and Mr. Reynolds bought the old Duvall farm (this was Henry Duvall's father, and the Reynoldses lived there.) That is the part where the stone house is; the dwelling on the present Whittier ranch. One afternoon I tried to stay up for the interesting hour when the mail came in , but I could not enjoy it long. I was so tired, and my head ached so badly. So mother undressed me and put on me one of the new nighties she had just made for me; the bleached muslin one with the Hamburg embroidery. (The other two were unbleached with homemade lace.) and she put me to bed. It was a long while before I again watched for the mail. Father, according to his usual character, had taken in a couple of wayfarers, and I had contracted a violent seige of scarlet fever. I returned to consciousness after a week of delirium, with my mother's loving face bending over me and Mrs. Ida Duvall and Adela Kaempfer (Adams) dim figures farther in the room. Old Doctor Moore examined me and said he believed I had passed the crisis.
Then mother's desparate illness followed. As soon as we were able to travel, we two went back to mother's old home and remained for several months, renewing our depleted strength.
Father sold the farm and bought the Castle Rock Journal and the little new white house across from the Ellison Hotel, near the D&RG tracks where the advent of our precious Christmas baby boy, Frank Irving, was such a joyful event the following year. The week before mother and I left for Vermont, her oldest sister, Minnie Adell, married George Varney. She was a beautiful bride of sweet sixteen, wearing dress wrap and bonnett of brown satin, with passementrie trimming, elegant with huge bustle, tiny waist, wide bonnet, ties with a big bow under the left ear. I have seen a portrait of Frances Cleveland, the White House Bride, similarly costumed. Little new Mrs. Varney never dreamed she would live to see women of all ages and classes loitering around in trousers. I do not like it myself, yet I would vote for the trousers two to one in preference to the weight of clothing little Aunt Delle war for her wedding festivities.
My parents sold the little white house and bought the house opposite the stone house of the Chris Christensen's. It is so much nicer and larger than it appears from the outside. We enjoyed it and lived there for ten years. Father planted those tall cedars and spruce trees when they were saplings. But those years were saddened for us by the death there of Grandmother Lucy Ann Whittier, and by Brother Clarence, barely twenty-one years old going to the Army of Occupation in the Philippines. Two years later, he and Fred Webster came home from a Philippine hospital, broken in health. We moved to the San Luis Valley, where brother drank artesian mineral water and partially regained his health.
Father and Clarence published the Monte Vista Graphic. Clarence and I were both married at Monte Vista.
Meanwhile, father was again the owner of the Cherry Creek farm with the stone house. He said that was the prettiest valley in the country, and seemed to hunger for it. He sold his interest in the Graphic and he and mother and Frank went to Vermont for an extended visit with relatives and old time friends and more especially to attend the family reunion celebrating the Golden Wedding of Grandfather and Grandmother Tart. Then they returned to the Cherry Creek farm and father had his desire to end his days there, all too soon, only two years later. Mother and Brother Frank stayed on there for a while, then she went back to Vermont among her people, later came to California, and was with us here until Brother Clarence passed on at Los Angeles, and finally she wanted to be with her baby boy, among old friends, and old surroundings, so she established the home in Castle Rock, where many of you knew and loved her. She never recovered from the strain and shock of Brother Frank's death last December; so she will be happier in the Heavenly Home.
We, who are left so sad and lonely cannot wish them back. I deeply appreciate all the many kindnesses rendered her in her declining years, and the tender acts and sympathy shown our family this past sorrowful year.
May God bless you always. It was the year that mother was born that Oliver Wendell Holmes was inspired to write what he considered his best poem:
THE CHAMBERED NAUTILUS
As the frail tenant shaped his growing shell,
Where its dim dreaming life was wont to dwell,
Still, as the spiral grew,
He left the past year’s dwelling for the new,
Stole with soft step its shining archway through,
Built up its idle door,
Stretched in his last-found home, and knew the old no more.
Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,
As the swift seasons roll!
Leave thy low-vaulted past!
Let each new temple, nobler than the last,
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,
Till thou at length art free,
Leaving thine outgrown shell by life’s unresting sea!
A Pioneer Story
---------
By Clara Whitties [sic] Waldron
Greenfield, Monterey County, Calif.
P.O. Box 622
--------
Editor Case and Readers of the Castle Rock Record Journal:
My deep sorrow and loneliness here among strangers impel me to write this article for publication in the old hometown newspaper, of which my dear father, Washington Irving Whittier, was formerly publisher. It should prove of interest because the lives of my parents were naturally in much the same channels as your parents and grandparents, and may be enlightening to the youths of to-day in this national pre-war period. It was war time then, too when father and mother were young - across the ocean in Europe, yes but THE WAR was in our own beloved country, North against South; friend against friend; brother against brother. There wasn't so much fuss then about Draft Dependents, etc. The South felt their liberties were being infringed upon; the North felt the Union was endangered; their own beloved flag imperiled. Grandfather Tart and my father both volunteered. Not long before, Grandfather Whittier had been killed by a log from the load of wood he was bringing home from slipping just as he was coming through the yard gate. The oldest son, Oscar, was in Illinois. There were two girls, Helen, mother of Vincent Wheeler, and Lucy, mother of Ulric and Ceylon Sturdevant, and a little curly haired boy, Edmund, father of Clinton Whittier. Yet Grandmother Whittier, weeping, but loyal, did not restrain her two boys when they felt duty calling them to the protection of their flag. Both were only teen-age boys; Uncle Oscar was 19, I think, when they came home after the war closed, and father was 17. I wish I could locate the daguerotypes of the two taken before they left. Grandmother Whittier showed them to me; two bright, ruddy-looking boys; but Grandmother Tart told me my father looked like a ghost when he came back. That is probably why he left his native state, Vermont, and came to Colorado. Uncle Oscar, too was in the West, drawing the ozone of the Rockies to burn out the germs eating at his lungs. I do not know how long father was in Colorado at that time. I do not know when he got acquainted with mother. She was born in New York. Her parents were Ambrose and Lydia Hallock Tart.
She was the oldest in a family of ten children, Grandfather and and Grandmother Tart had moved to Addison County, Vermont, and had four children when Grandfather went to the war. Their fifth son, Frank, was born about seven months after he went. I doubt if my father knew my mother before he went to war. Perhaps he met her when he came home ill on a furlough.
The comrades of those awful days felt very close to each other, and as the Whittiers and Tarts then lived in neighborhoods not far apart, probably this common interest drew the two families together. Father was about ten years older than mother. He said he came West and waited for her to grow up, then went back and got her.
After their marriage they established a home in Lincoln, Vermont, where father engaged in the mercantile business.
Two sons were born in Vermont. The eldest died in infancy; the second son, Clarence, was a toddler when father returned to Colorado and located in Spring Valley, in the southern end of Douglas County. Probably father was teaching the Spring Valley school. During these early days he taught school in most the districts along Cherry Creek and Antelope Valleys. When mother joined him a few months before I was born, she was accompanied on the train trip West by her 17-year old brother Fred. Mary Riggs siad then they landed at Greenland, she thought mother and her little son Clarence were the two whitest people she ever saw.
Years later, Uncle Fred, a volunteer soldier from Utah, was one of Teddy Roosevelts Rough Riders. Tart was an unusual name, and the army got it Dart. Uncle received honors under that name, so he took it legally. His widow, who lives at Spanish Fork, Utah, visited mother in Castle Rock last year, joining mothers oldest sister, Minnie Adell Varney, from Bristol Vermont. Mother's youngest sister, Eva, younger than I, never had the opportunity to see her brother Fred.
I was born in the Pollock house; the one with the big chimney, near the Spring Valley school house; to a very homesick mother, which may account partly for the deep loneliness I have always felt when away from my people.
The Reynolds family lived on the Pollock ranch then. Mr. Reynolds was a crippled soldier. He and father were close friends. Father made his first public prayer at the grave of a little child at Spring Valley. No ordained minister was available.
When we left Spring Valley, my parents homesteaded near the old Jack Platt and Dish and Forbes ranches, within walking distance, as I dimly remember my parents taking us two little children and going to these farms for twilight calls.
Gid Pratts, Henry Duvalls and D. R. Williamses are others I recall as familiar old-time friendly neighbors.
When I was three years old, father sold the homestead and bought the Proctor place. This house, near the Cherry Creek bridge at Irving (It was Rock Ridge then, the name later given honoring father) also had a big fireplace with a stone chimney. So did the Case house.
Father was teaching the Lake Gulch school that winter, usually riding horseback, I think. He had some difficulty with the combination of American and German languages, but I retain the memory of how greatly my parents appreciated the kindness of those early German settlers; their cheery greeting when he passed them by, out doing their morning and evening chores, sometimes hailing him with a package to take home sauerkraut, freshly butchered meat, links of sausage, etc. I think that must have been an unusually cold winter. Father wrapped gunnysacks around his legs and feet to help keep warm, but even so, his toes and cheeks were frost bitten. Mother would replenish the fired when it was time for father, but frequently, before he could enjoy the warmth, me must first rub his face hands and feet with snow or hold them in cold water to get the frost out.
The Bauers, Seidentstickers, Deepkes, Hagge and Misners were among the kind hearted Germans he became became acquainted with during those Lake Gulch school days.
Father enlarged our farm by purchasing the Case ranch, and we moved into the house now occupied by the Joe Hillyen's. Uncle Oscar helped to put on the two north rooms for the Rock Ridge post office. I think the mail came in from Castle Rock on Saturdays only then.
About this time, father and Mr. Reynolds bought the old Duvall farm (this was Henry Duvall's father, and the Reynoldses lived there.) That is the part where the stone house is; the dwelling on the present Whittier ranch. One afternoon I tried to stay up for the interesting hour when the mail came in , but I could not enjoy it long. I was so tired, and my head ached so badly. So mother undressed me and put on me one of the new nighties she had just made for me; the bleached muslin one with the Hamburg embroidery. (The other two were unbleached with homemade lace.) and she put me to bed. It was a long while before I again watched for the mail. Father, according to his usual character, had taken in a couple of wayfarers, and I had contracted a violent seige of scarlet fever. I returned to consciousness after a week of delirium, with my mother's loving face bending over me and Mrs. Ida Duvall and Adela Kaempfer (Adams) dim figures farther in the room. Old Doctor Moore examined me and said he believed I had passed the crisis.
Then mother's desparate illness followed. As soon as we were able to travel, we two went back to mother's old home and remained for several months, renewing our depleted strength.
Father sold the farm and bought the Castle Rock Journal and the little new white house across from the Ellison Hotel, near the D&RG tracks where the advent of our precious Christmas baby boy, Frank Irving, was such a joyful event the following year. The week before mother and I left for Vermont, her oldest sister, Minnie Adell, married George Varney. She was a beautiful bride of sweet sixteen, wearing dress wrap and bonnett of brown satin, with passementrie trimming, elegant with huge bustle, tiny waist, wide bonnet, ties with a big bow under the left ear. I have seen a portrait of Frances Cleveland, the White House Bride, similarly costumed. Little new Mrs. Varney never dreamed she would live to see women of all ages and classes loitering around in trousers. I do not like it myself, yet I would vote for the trousers two to one in preference to the weight of clothing little Aunt Delle war for her wedding festivities.
My parents sold the little white house and bought the house opposite the stone house of the Chris Christensen's. It is so much nicer and larger than it appears from the outside. We enjoyed it and lived there for ten years. Father planted those tall cedars and spruce trees when they were saplings. But those years were saddened for us by the death there of Grandmother Lucy Ann Whittier, and by Brother Clarence, barely twenty-one years old going to the Army of Occupation in the Philippines. Two years later, he and Fred Webster came home from a Philippine hospital, broken in health. We moved to the San Luis Valley, where brother drank artesian mineral water and partially regained his health.
Father and Clarence published the Monte Vista Graphic. Clarence and I were both married at Monte Vista.
Meanwhile, father was again the owner of the Cherry Creek farm with the stone house. He said that was the prettiest valley in the country, and seemed to hunger for it. He sold his interest in the Graphic and he and mother and Frank went to Vermont for an extended visit with relatives and old time friends and more especially to attend the family reunion celebrating the Golden Wedding of Grandfather and Grandmother Tart. Then they returned to the Cherry Creek farm and father had his desire to end his days there, all too soon, only two years later. Mother and Brother Frank stayed on there for a while, then she went back to Vermont among her people, later came to California, and was with us here until Brother Clarence passed on at Los Angeles, and finally she wanted to be with her baby boy, among old friends, and old surroundings, so she established the home in Castle Rock, where many of you knew and loved her. She never recovered from the strain and shock of Brother Frank's death last December; so she will be happier in the Heavenly Home.
We, who are left so sad and lonely cannot wish them back. I deeply appreciate all the many kindnesses rendered her in her declining years, and the tender acts and sympathy shown our family this past sorrowful year.
May God bless you always. It was the year that mother was born that Oliver Wendell Holmes was inspired to write what he considered his best poem:
THE CHAMBERED NAUTILUS
As the frail tenant shaped his growing shell,
Where its dim dreaming life was wont to dwell,
Still, as the spiral grew,
He left the past year’s dwelling for the new,
Stole with soft step its shining archway through,
Built up its idle door,
Stretched in his last-found home, and knew the old no more.
Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,
As the swift seasons roll!
Leave thy low-vaulted past!
Let each new temple, nobler than the last,
Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,
Till thou at length art free,
Leaving thine outgrown shell by life’s unresting sea!
Events
| Birth | 23 Sep 1879 | Spring Valley (Historical), Douglas, Colorado, United States |  | ||
| Census | 3 Jun 1880 | Douglas, Colorado, United States | | ||
| Census | 1 Jun 1885 | Douglas, Colorado, United States | | ||
| Occupation | 1900 | Public School Teacher - West Castle Rock, Douglas, Colorado, United States | | ||
| Census | 1 Jun 1900 | West Castle Rock, Douglas, Colorado, United States | | ||
| Marriage | 17 Sep 1902 | Monte Vista, Rio Grande, Colorado, United States - Charles Ellis WALDRON | |
Families
| Spouse | Charles Ellis WALDRON (1876 - ) |
| Father | Washington Irving WHITTIER (1847 - 1910) |
| Mother | Sarah Ann Maria TART (1858 - 1941) |
| Sibling | Clarence Alonzo WHITTIER (1878 - 1938) |
| Sibling | Frank Irving WHITTIER (1889 - 1940) |
Endnotes
1. Bernard B. Whittier, The Ancestry and Descendants of Edmund Whittier (East Lansing, MI: College Printery, 1917), p. 33.
2. Charles Collyer Whittier, The Descendants of Thomas Whittier and Ruth Green of Salisbury and Haverhill, Massachusetts (Rutland, Vermont: Tuttle Publishing Company, Inc, 1937), p. 282.
3. 1900 U.S. Federal Census (Population Schedule), jpeg image, (Online: The Generations Network, Inc., 2009) [Digital scan of original records in the National Archives, Washington, DC], subscription database,
4. 1880 U.S. Federal Census (Population Schedule), jpeg image, (Online: The Generations Network, Inc., 2009) [Digital scan of original records in the National Archives, Washington, DC], subscription database,
5. Ancestry.com. Colorado State Census, 1885 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 2006., p. 5, Douglas County, CO.
6. 1900 U.S. Federal Census (Population Schedule), jpeg image, (Online: The Generations Network, Inc., 2009) [Digital scan of original records in the National Archives, Washington, DC], subscription database,
7. 1900 U.S. Federal Census (Population Schedule), jpeg image, (Online: The Generations Network, Inc., 2009) [Digital scan of original records in the National Archives, Washington, DC], subscription database,
8. Bernard B. Whittier, The Ancestry and Descendants of Edmund Whittier (East Lansing, MI: College Printery, 1917), p. 33.
9. Charles Collyer Whittier, The Descendants of Thomas Whittier and Ruth Green of Salisbury and Haverhill, Massachusetts (Rutland, Vermont: Tuttle Publishing Company, Inc, 1937), p. 282.