Martha Tannehill Evans was born in September, 1846, in Logan County, Ohio, the daughter of James Tannehill and Ruth Patterson. The Tannehills’ first two children were born in Ohio but, around 1847, the family had moved to Davis County, Iowa, where their last six children were born.
Possibly it was the promise of abundant farmland that attracted the Tannehills to Iowa, as James was a farmer and his sons became farmers.
On November 30, 1876, Martha married John Robert Evans in Davis County, Iowa. Surprisingly, she was thirty years old by then and probably would have been considered a ‘spinster’. However, since Martha’s younger sister Lovena was blind, perhaps she was needed at home until then
John Robert Evans was a farmer, like the Tannehills. A widower, he was twenty years older than Martha and had been married previously to Louisa Adeline Miller, who died in 1875. John Robert often appears in the public record as J. R. Evans.
Martha very likely raised J. R.’s two youngest children, and they did have a ‘late in life’ son of their own, Robert James, born in 1885 when J. R. was nearly sixty.
The Evanses farmed near Bloomfield, Iowa, until November 22, 1898, when they moved to Phoenix, Arizona. Martha’s younger brother Joseph Edgar Tannehill had moved there around 1896, and perhaps the Evanses found the idea of a warmer climate appealing as they grew older. Nor were they alone in that, as Martha’s widowed father and four more of her Tannehill siblings either accompanied them or joined them soon afterward in Arizona.
The Evanses were Presbyterian and Martha was active in church work during the last years of her life.
Martha died of pneumonia on December 15, 1903 at the family home about a mile west of the Indian School. She was buried in the family plot in City Loosley Cemetery, Block 6, Lot 5, next to her little step-grandson, Otto Evans.
- - by Donna L. Carr
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