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
