Manuel Harvey Reno (1831-1899) - Kentucky Judge

 

PCA Archives

Manuel H. Reno was born January 28, 1831, in Ballard County, Kentucky.  He was one of nine children belonging to Richard D. Reno and Celia Bohannon, a farming couple.  The federal census of 1850 suggests that the Renos had moved to Kentucky around 1830 from Alabama.

Around 1855, Reno married Ann D. Ellis in Ballard County, Kentucky.   Their first child, a daughter named Mary Belle, was born on March 23, 1856.  She was followed quickly by Susan Theodocia, born 1857, William Richard, born 1858, and Maggie, born 1862.

No evidence has been found that Reno was ever in the Confederate army.  Kentucky being a border state, it is possible that his sentiments aligned with the Union.  He seems to have remained a small farmer throughout the war. 

By 1880, the Renos were farming in Clinton, Hickman County, Kentucky.  Although there is no mention of where he read law, Reno eventually became a county judge in Kentucky.

The Renos retired to Phoenix around 1892.   Although Reno doesn’t seem to have practiced law in Arizona, he was active in local politics.  Originally a member of the Grange Party, he later became a member of the Populist Party which supported Buckey O’Neill’s short-lived political career.

In 1894, Reno launched an Arizona chapter of the Child’s Aid Society, which seems to have been an insurance company benefitting the children of deceased members when they came into their majority by providing them with a small fund to get a start in life.  In an era when fathers could not necessarily count on living long enough to see their children grow up, this might have been an attractive option.

Reno was an officer of the Hopeton Baptist Church and taught Sunday school there.

He died on December 11, 1899, of valvular heart disease.  After a funeral sermon preached by Rev. Lewis Halsey of the Baptist Church, he was buried in Ancient Order of United Workmen Cemetery. 

At the time of Reno’s death, his eldest daughter, Mary Belle, was teaching school at the Sacaton Indian Agency.  Although she had married James Zimmerman in Kentucky in 1883, she may have been a widow by 1899.

- by Donna L. Carr

Louise Gregory (1903-1903) - Infant

 

PCA Archives

Louise was the only child of Walter T. Gregory and his wife, Augusta Frances “Gussie” Russell.   She was born around July or August and died in Yuma on December 20, 1903, of “stomach and kidney trouble”.   Her parents brought her little casket to Phoenix for burial, because that had been Mrs. Gregory’s home and her parents were still living there.

By the time of Louise’s birth, her father Walter had already had a rather colorful life.  The son of a hotelier, he had been born in frontier Cheyenne, Wyoming, in 1873 and had grown up in California, Tombstone and Tempe, Arizona.   Walter was working as a newspaper reporter in Phoenix when the Spanish American War began, and he enlisted immediately in Company B, 1st U. S. Volunteer Cavalry, otherwise known as the “Rough Riders”. 

That short war had scarcely concluded when Gregory reenlisted in Company K, 4th U. S. Cavalry to serve in the Philippines.  Although generally in good health, he suffered recurrent bouts of malaria from his military service in the tropics.  Upon his discharge, he went to New York for a brief period but returned to Arizona when his father died in Tucson.

Thereafter, Walter moved back to Phoenix where he met and married Augusta Frances “Gussie” Russell.  In 1903, Walter’s former military commander, Alexander O. Brodie , by then territorial governor of Arizona, appointed Walter secretary of the territorial prison in Yuma.  It was there that little Louise was born and died.  Walter and Gussie divorced within the next few years.

Disillusioned with life out West, Walter moved back to New York, where he found work with his brother Will’s theatrical booking agency.  Unfortunately, he succumbed to pneumonia on April 16, 1909.  Because of his military service, he was interred in Arlington National Cemetery outside of Washington, D. C.

The parents of Walter’s ex-wife had by this time relocated to southern California, and she had joined them there.  Gussie, or Frances as she was now calling herself, met and married Edmund J. Mulvihill, Jr., a railroad telegrapher.  However, she died still relatively young in Los Angeles on May 31, 1927.

 - by Donna L. Carr

 

Maude Ball (1864-1899) - Teaching Instructor

PCA Archives - AOUW

Maude was born June 21, 1864, in Marshall, Michigan, to Dr. Alexander Rawson Ball and Delilah née Weld.  She was the youngest of their ten children.  Maude’s father was a well-regarded homeopathic physician until his death at the age of 79 in 1902.  Her sister Hannah became a homeopath like her father and sister Fannie trained as a teacher.

By 1880, the Ball family was living in Mason, Shiawassee County, Michigan.  Maude herself graduated with a teaching degree in 1882 and eventually became an educator of teachers at Michigan State Normal School (now Eastern Michigan University) for several years. She then transferred to Whitewater Normal School (now University of Wisconsin--Whitewater) around 1897and served as secretary of the teachers' association.

Maude’s sister Delilah had married George Homer Jones in 1874.  On December 12, 1898, he died suddenly at the home of his mother in Michigan.  By September 1899, Maude was suffering from tubercular laryngitis, so her widowed sister Delilah accompanied her to Phoenix, Arizona Territory.

Like so many others who came to Phoenix during that time, Maude had been hoping that she would recover in the warm Arizona climate.  However, she died on December 26, 1899, at the home of her sister Delilah in Phoenix.

- by Patricia 

 

 

#12 Perlina Swetnam Osborn (1821-1912) - Arizona Pioneer

PCA Archives

Perlina Elizabeth Swetnam was born on January 21, 1821, in Lawrence County, Kentucky.  The daughter of Neri Swetnam and Mildred Cross, she was the youngest of their nine children.  As Perlina is an unusual name, she sometimes appears on the census as ‘Paulina’.

In March 25, 1841, she married John Preston Osborn, a native of Claiborne County, Tennessee.  By 1850, they were farming in Morgan County, Kentucky., and already had four children.

Around 1853, the Osborns relocated to Adams County, Iowa.  The Civil War was in full swing by 1863, when they moved to Colorado, but they had their sights set on the newly created territory of Arizona.  Early in 1864, the Osborns joined a party of emigrants traveling via Santa Fe to northern Arizona.  They arrived in Prescott on July 6, 1864, with three or four ox teams and wagons loaded with flour, ham and bacon which they sold to Prescott’s hungry miners.  With flour selling at $1 a pound and bacon at $.75 a pound, they soon had enough capital to begin their family’s new life in Arizona.

The Osborns built Osborn House, one of Prescott’s first hotels, which provided modest accommodations with a menu of pork and beans, bread and coffee.  Perlina, by now expecting her tenth child, remained in Prescott to run it while John Preston explored Del Rio and the Verde Valley and tried his hand at farming and ranching.  Unfortunately, his attempts came to naught as the local Yavapai tribesmen repeatedly raided his livestock and crops.

The Osborns’ oldest children having reached marrying age, daughter Jenettie wed Joseph Thomas Barnum in 1865, and Louisa married an up-and-coming lawyer named John Alsap on June 6, 1866. However, the alliance was short-lived as she died barely a year later.

The Osborn's son, John Jr., along with his erstwhile brother-in-law, John Alsap, moved south to the Salt River Valley in 1869, and John Sr. and Perlina joined them in January 1870, establishing a homestead at what would become McDowell and Seventh Street.

Once again, the Osborns were among the first white families to settle in a pioneer town.  John Preston, now in his sixties, became an influential citizen of the new town.  Perlina was known for her nursing skills, and the Osborns hosted many a traveling minister during Phoenix’s early years.

When John Preston Osborn died on January 19, 1900, he was buried in the A.O.U.W. Cemetery.  Around the time of Osborn's death, the street that ran along the south side of the Osborns' farm became known as Osborn Road, a tribute to this pioneer family.

Perlina passed away on December 3, 1912, at the age of 91. 

-by Donna Carr

John Proops (1848-1896) - Baker, Miner, Firefighter

Bing AI

John Proops was born on January 17, 1848, in Bristol, England.  After the death of his mother in 1856, his father moved the family to Charles Dickens’ London.  Young John was apprenticed to a baker and, in 1867, he shipped out to Adelaide, Australia, as a baker.

Settled by English debtors and convicts in the 1700s, Australia was a wild ‘n wooly outpost of the British Empire.  From Adelaide on the southern coast, Proops walked to Melbourne, stopping to work at sheep and cattle stations along the way.  From there, he went to Ballarat, where the discovery of gold had sparked a gold rush similar to the 1849 one in California.  Later, Proops returned to Melbourne to work as a journeyman baker.

While in Melbourne, Proops met and married Hannah Franks on February 18, 1873.   Their daughter Rose was born in 1874.  Thereafter, Proops became the chief cook and baker at the Government Orphan Asylum at Randwick, near Sydney, where sons Harry and Charley were born.

In 1881, Proops moved his family to San Francisco and then to Tombstone, but misfortune dogged his steps.  Only ten days after arriving there, his son Charley died of gastric fever.  Proops opened a bakery in Tombstone, but it did not pay enough to support his family.  After two years, he gave it up and turned to hauling freight from Kingston to Globe until his team of horses was stolen.  Eventually, he found work at the new courthouse in Tombstone. 

In May 1887, Proops came to Phoenix in the course of delivering a load of furniture for Mr. B. A. Fickas from his house in Tombstone.  He found employment first as a porter at the Commercial Hotel and then as the janitor of the city hall and gardener of the adjacent plaza.

Proops was said to have borne his previous financial misfortunes with a light heart and cheerful disposition.  A sociable fellow, Proops joined the volunteer fire company, the Ancient Order of United Workmen (A.O.U.W.) and the Foresters.

It was in the performance of his duty as a firefighter that he contracted his final illness.  On Friday, December 29 or 30, 1895, the volunteer company was called to a fire on East Madison Street.  Thoroughly drenched by the hoses and going home in the morning cold, Proops took a chill that turned into pneumonia.  He succumbed on January 6, 1896.

On the day of Proops’s funeral, the fire house lowered its flag to half-mast.  His comrades from fire company, the Foresters and the Ancient Order of United Workmen turned out to bury him in Phoenix’s A.O.U.W. Cemetery.

And there he remained until his widow Hannah died in 1903.  She was one of the first to be buried in the newly-opened Beth Israel (Jewish) Cemetery at 35th Avenue and Van Buren, and their son Harry had his father’s remains moved there as well.

 -by donna carr