Rev. L. Phillip Smithey (abt 1855-1889) - Methodist Missionary

 

PCA Archives

Louis Phillip Smithey was born on October 24, 1855 or 1857, in Jetersville, Amelia County, Virginia.  He was a younger son of Royal Smithey and his wife Mary Ann Elizabeth Hubbard.   On the eve of the Civil War, Royal was employed as an overseer for George W. Jones, a wealthy farmer in Nottoway County.   After the war, he returned to farming.

Phil Smithey seems to have been in somewhat delicate health as a boy, but early in life he aspired to go into the ministry.   His older brother William also became a minister.

Following his father’s death in 1883, young Smithey enrolled in Vanderbilt University in Nashville.  It was a Methodist Episcopal college, and Smithey took classes in the theological department.  However, ill health impelled him to go west after a year.  Moving to California, he served as a deacon in Azusa and Duarte.  By 1887, his phthisis had advanced, and he was suffering from pulmonary hemorrhages.

Seeking a drier climate, Phil Smithey moved to Prescott, Arizona, in the fall of 1887 and engaged in missionary work in what was then a wide-open frontier town.  Though uncompromising against sin, he was said to have been of a cheerful disposition and ever sympathetic towards others. 

Thanks to Arizona’s salubrious climate, he lived for another two years and gained a small but devoted following among the residents of Prescott.  Nevertheless, his health, never robust, continued to decline.  When death became imminent, some advised him to go home to his family in Virginia, but he insisted on remaining in Arizona.

Smithey moved to Phoenix in August 1889, and died two months later, on October 12.  He was buried in the Masons Cemetery.

- by Donna L. Carr

 

 

Edward J. Lowry (1855-1905) - Sheriff in Ferry County, Washington

 

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Edward J. Lowry was born in 1855 in Carbon Township, Huntingdon County, Pennsylvania.  He was the son of Irish immigrants Michael Lowry and Bridget Conley. 

Huntingdon was coal-mining country, and Michael was miner.  He may also have been a member of the Molly Maguires, a secret society whose intent was to counter the exploitation and terrible working conditions of coal miners.  The Molly Maguires are sometimes considered a precursor to the labor unions of later decades.  If Michael was involved with the Molly Maguires, perhaps that was why the Lowry family left Pennsylvania for Saline County, Ohio.  By 1870, Edward, aged 15, was himself working in the coal mines there.

In 1877, Edward married Sarah Humphrey.  The young couple moved to Boulder, Colorado, where their first child, Edward, Jr., was born in 1879.  Edward continued to work as a miner, and he also became an organizer for a short-lived union, the Knights of Labor.

Something must have intervened in the late 1880s to set Edward on a different path.  Sarah was living temporarily with her parents in Bevier, Missouri, when the Lowrys’ second son, Ralph, was born on April 18, 1889.  A decade later, in 1900, the family had reunited in Republic, Washington, a sparsely populated region in the far West.  Edward and his older son were still working as coal miners until, in late 1900, Edward was elected sheriff of Ferry County.

Apparently, Edward was pretty good at his job.  The local newspapers printed detailed accounts of the sheriff’s activities, including the time when five prisoners sawed through the wooden ceiling of their cell and escaped via the roof on Christmas morning, 1901.  Hot on the trail of the fugitives, Sheriff Lowry caught up with two of them three days later, just as they were in the act of robbing the customers of a saloon!

January 1904 brought a case of a personal nature.  Sheriff Lowry’s wife Sarah, who had been suffering from an unspecified mental illness, escaped from the Mount View sanitarium in Spokane.  Fortunately, she was found the next day at a local hotel.

By 1905, Lowry was suffering from tuberculosis.   Seeking a warmer climate, he and his 16-year-old son Ralph set out by train for Phoenix, Arizona, arriving on October 9th.  Perhaps the long trip had exhausted Lowry’s strength, for he died the following day.  The Fraternal Order of Eagles arranged for his funeral and burial in Rosedale Cemetery.

Lowry’s son Ralph graduated from Washington State College in 1917 with a degree in civil engineering.  He was eventually employed as a senior engineer for the U. S. Bureau of Reclamation and worked on the Hoover Dam, the Shasta Dam and the Grand Coulee Dam.

-by Joseph P. Lowry

 

 

Professor H. Cresswell Shaw (1855 -1902) - Organist

 

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Henry Cresswell Shaw was born November 1855 in Canada, possibly in Guelph, a city in Ontario about 43 miles from Toronto.  Guelph had a strong musical and arts tradition.  It was also home to the Bell Organ Company.  Founded in 1864, it manufactured reed and pump organs, pianos and melodeons, as well as a small number of pipe organs.  Perhaps it was not surprising, then, that Shaw studied music and became an organist.

In 1881, Shaw seems to have been a music dealer in Guelph when he transcribed for publication a piano arrangement of the song, The Palms (Les Rameaux par Faure).  It was dedicated to a Miss Bertie Geddes, a church organist in Hamilton and Guelph, Ontario.  A copy exists in the University of Michigan Library. 

In 1883, Shaw became the organist for St. Peter’s Church in Berlin, Ontario, a position he would hold for the next sixteen years.  (Berlin no longer appears on the map as a Canadian city; its name was changed to Kitchener in 1916, when Canada entered World War I as part of the British Empire.)  Shaw proved to be a devoted church worker and was especially popular with the young people’s groups.

Shaw’s hobby was horticulture.  In June 1895, he built Rosehurst Conservatories.  With the help of a gardener, the Conservatories grew roses, lilies and a variety of other hothouse flowers during Canada’s winters.

By 1896, Shaw was suffering from Bright’s Disease and sought a warmer climate during the winter.  He moved to Phoenix permanently in 1899, having secured a position as organist at the First Methodist Episcopal Church, which had recently had its pipe organ refurbished. 

In the summer of 1901, he made a brief trip—possibly his last--back home to Canada.

Shaw died on March 31, 1902, in his rooms at 524 South First Avenue11.  The Rev. E. A. Penick conducted his funeral, after which Shaw was buried in Rosedale, Section 147, Grave 2.

-by Donna Carr

 

John McCarty (1855 - 1901) - Arizona Game and Fish Commissioner

 

PCA Archives - John McCarty

On June 6, 1901 John McCarty set off from his remote camp near Clear Creek on Arizona’s Mogollon Rim to hunt for some rare pigeons and four dozen tassel-eared squirrels. He was never seen alive again. A few months later a body was discovered and identified as McCarty’s, but was it really his?

Little is known about McCarty’s past. Census records suggest that he was born around 1855 in Scott, Virginia, to James and Mary McCarty.  At any rate, he was in Arizona when he began to advertise as a professional hunter around 1890.

For the next ten years, newspapers related his adventures as he roamed the Territory, hunting bears, mountain lions and other livestock predators.  He also collected rare animal specimens for museums and universities.  Because of his extensive knowledge of the territory and its wildlife, he was appointed Fish and Game Commissioner in the fall of 1898.

On April 15, 1900, he married Lillie S. Sparks, then aged sixteen.  McCarty left his young wife, pregnant with their first child, with her grandparents when he set off on his last hunting trip a little over a year later.  Shortly before he departed, he had taken out six separate life insurance policies that totaled $27,000, nearly $750,000 in today’s currency.

 When McCarty did not return from his hunting trip on the Mogollon Rim east of Pine, his partner, J. K. Day, went to search the area.  Week after week, the search turned up nothing. Finally, on August 19, a body was found.  Near it lay McCarty’s shotgun with a burst barrel.  It was surmised that McCarty had been stalking a bear.  Apparently, the barrel of the gun had burst when he fired, likely disabling him and leaving him at the mercy of the angry bear.

The body was taken to Flagstaff, where an inquest ruled McCarty’s death accidental. His associates had his body transported to Phoenix for burial in the Masonic Cemetery.  Find out more at the PMMP!

-story shortened, by Donna Carr

 

#2 - Ann Murray Alsap (1855 - 1902) - Socialite

 

PCA Archives

Anna Murray Alsap was born in 1855 in Texas to William Pinckney Murray and his wife Margaret White. The Murrays had nine daughters who became known as “the Murray girls”.  They all married, and several are remembered as the matriarchs of prominent Phoenix families.   In 1876, Anna became the second wife of Judge John Tabor Alsap, who was considerably older than she. During Judge Alsap’s brief tenure as the first mayor of Phoenix, she undoubtedly gave dinner parties attended by the town’s elite. The Alsaps had five children before Judge Alsap’s death in 1886. Anna died on December 20, 1902, and was buried in the Masons Cemetery.