Anna Mary Fisher Dameron (1839-1894) - From Missouri to Arizona

 

Porter Cemetery - PCA Archives

Anna Mary Fisher was born March 27, 1839, in Lewis County, Missouri.  She was one of five children of James Fisher and Lucinda Doke, who were fairly well-to-do farmers.

On Valentine’s Day 1866, Anna married Willis Monroe Dameron in Adams County, Illinois.   Willis had been married previously to Sarah Dysart, the daughter of a clergyman. She had died in 1860, presumably from complications following childbirth.   Dameron, who was supporting his widowed mother and his little son Everett, seems not to have served on either side during the Civil War.

After their marriage, Willis and Anna farmed in La Belle, Lewis County, Missouri.  They had two sons of their own:  Logan Douglas, born in 1867, and Richard Monroe, born in 1872. Logan was named after his paternal uncle, a successful dry goods merchant.

The Damerons’ son Logan attended La Belle Academy and taught for five years before enrolling in Hospital Medical College in Louisville, Kentucky.  After graduating in 1891, he moved to Phoenix where he went into practice with Dr. H. A. Hughes.

By then, Anna was in poor health.  When Logan returned to Missouri for a Christmas visit in December, 1892, he persuaded Anna and Willis to accompany him back to Phoenix.

Anna lived for two more years before dying of pneumonia on December 31, 1894.  After a Methodist Episcopal service conducted by Rev. W. A. Harris, she was buried in Porter Cemetery.  Her husband joined her in January, 1907.

Shortly after Anna’s death, her son Logan married Bettie Hughes, the daughter of his partner.  Having helped to start the Arizona chapter of the American Medical Association, he became its president in 1903.

 - by Donna L. Carr

 

 

Wong Fong (abt. 1891 - 1914) - Barber

 

Photo by Donna Carr

Late on the night of February 12, 1914, a shadowy figure loitered behind the house at 220 East Madison in Phoenix’s Chinatown.  While he waited for the people in the house to retire, he smoked a cigarette, emptied several spent cartridges from his revolver and reloaded.

Around midnight, he pried open the door to the screened porch and crept inside.  A man was sleeping there, bedclothes drawn up to his chin against the nighttime chill.  From only a few feet away, the gunman shot the unarmed man in the head, then fled into the darkness.

Awakened by the sound of the gunshot, neighbors summoned law officers.  They identified the victim as Wong Fong, a 23-year-old barber.  The house on Madison was the home of a prosperous Chinaman named Wong Fie, who may have been a relative of the deceased man.  At the time of the murder, Wong Fie was not at home.  The third occupant of the house was Wong Fie’s twenty-year-old wife, Quock Young.   So who had killed Wong Fong, and why?

Born in China, Wong Fong had been in the United States for at least six years.  While living in Globe, Arizona, he had converted to Christianity and had attended a Lutheran mission school there.  His facility with both English and Cantonese was such that he had even been considered for a post at a Lutheran mission school in Shanghai.  For the past eleven months, however, he had been living in Wong Fie’s household in Phoenix--long enough for him to have fallen in love with his kinsman’s much younger wife.

Presumably, Quock Young returned his affections, for she claimed that she had asked Wong Fie for a divorce.  She recounted that Wong Fie, furious at his possible ‘loss of face’, had withdrew a large sum of cash from the bank and gone to Morenci, ostensibly to consult the marriage broker who had arranged his match with Quock Young. 

When the coroner’s jury was empaneled the next day, Rev. Frey, a local Lutheran minister, presented a letter which he said he had received from Wong Fong on the very day of his death.  It read, “When I am killed, arrest Wong Fie.”  But Wong Fie had an alibi; he was visiting a friend at the time that Wong Fong was murdered.

Evidence at the crime scene suggested that someone had lain in wait for Wong Fong for at least an hour.  On the strength of his alibi, Wong Fie was released from custody.  While the newspapers made much of the ill-fated romance, Coroner C. Johnstone had no choice but to rule that Wong Fong had met his death at the hands of an unknown assailant.  

On March 10th, Wong Fong was buried in the Chinese section of City/Loosley Cemetery.   His murderer was never apprehended.  Quock Young seems to have reconciled with her husband, for she was seen in Phoenix months later, wearing several gold rings and necklaces. Evidently Wong Fie still held her—and her silence?—in high esteem.

 

- by Donna Carr

 

Edward Ohmer Rouzer (1879-1906) and Mary E. Smith Rouzer (1883-1906) - Honeymoon Ends in Tragedy

Photo:  Donna Carr

Hotel Del Monte 1906 - Library of Congress

Edward Ohmer Rouzer was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, in 1879.  He was the son of Charles Conover Rouzer and Jennie Ellen Morton.  Charles was in the hotel business and was for many years the manager of Indianapolis’s exclusive Columbia Club.

In 1901, the Rouzers moved to Bisbee, Arizona, where Charles became the manager of the Copper Queen Hotel.  The 44-room hotel boasted Italianate architecture and opulent furnishings suitable for the mining magnates and businessmen that made up its clientele.  As the front desk clerk, Rouzer’s son Edward earned an enviable reputation for amiability, courtesy and efficiency.  By 1904, Charles Rouzer had returned to Indianapolis, leaving Edward in charge of the Copper Queen.

Edward probably met Mary Elizabeth Smith while she was visiting her married sister, Winifred Smith Buxton, in Bisbee.  Mary had been born in Phoenix on July 9, 1883.  She was the daughter of John Y. T. Smith and his wife Ellen “Nellie” Shaver.  Smith owned a flour mill in Phoenix.  Mary herself had graduated from Pomona College in California in 1905.   The engagement of Mary Smith to Edward Rouzer was announced in January, 1906.

Friends and relatives traveled to Los Angeles to see the happy couple united in marriage by Rev. John Fry on April 11, 1906.  The Rouzers planned to honeymoon in San Francisco before returning to Bisbee in May.  They checked into an upstairs room with a view of the ocean at the Del Monte Hotel in Monterey, California, on April 17th.

In the predawn hours of April 18th, an earthquake of 7.9 magnitude struck the west coast of California.  A chimney on the Del Monte Hotel toppled onto the room where the Rouzers were sleeping; they were crushed instantly under tons of bricks.  No one else in the hotel was injured. 

Owing to the general confusion following the earthquake, it was a day or so before the Rouzers’ families were notified of their demise.  The bodies were returned to Phoenix by train and held at the Easterling & Whitney funeral home until the Rouzers could arrive from Indianapolis and Mary’s mother and brother-in-law from Los Angeles, where they had gone to attend the wedding only a week earlier.  Rev. John Fry, the same minister who had officiated at the nuptials, conducted the funeral service on April 25th, and Edward and Mary were buried together in Rosedale Cemetery.  Friends of Edward Rouzer, who had pooled their funds to buy the Rouzers a wedding present, used the money for flowers instead.

In 1914, the Rouzers’ remains were moved to Greenwood, where Mary’s mother, Mrs. Nellie Smith, had purchased a family plot.

- by Donna L. Carr