Tag Archives: Emeline Stout

Brief Life of a Delicate Beauty: Mary Stout

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Mary Stout 1847-1881

Mary Stout, tintype

Mary Stout, Sister of Dr. Wm. C. Stout, tintype. Best guess: 1865-1870

This very pretty young lady who either had naturally curly hair or spent some time crimping it. She was very thin–particularly if you compare her to the other Stout women–who lived up to their name.  The photographer saw fit to add some bright red spots on her cheeks, which ironically in hindsight seem to reflect her illness. This is a tintype, and so not extremely clear (see more about different types of photographs in this article I wrote about dating photos.)

Mary was the second oldest in the family, coming along in 1847, two years after my great-grandfather William Cochran Stout, when her mother Emeline was twenty-five years old. Like her seven brothers and sisters, she grew up on a farm in Guernsey County (moving only with the family from Oxford Township to Wills Township when her father changed farms) but unlike her siblings, she never left home and never married.

Although I say she never left home, it seems that she might have received a bit of education beyond high school, because in 1880 the census report lists her (at 33) as a teacher. Ten years before that, when she was 23, she was not teaching–she was “at home.”  I speculate that this could mean she was a music teacher or sewing teacher–something that would not entail going out to a public place, and might not require extra education.  Don’t those long thin fingers look like a pianist?

Whatever it meant by “teaching,” the 1880 census also reports that at the time of the census she has been unable to work because of “lung disease.”

Was Mary a “consumptive?”  Did she suffer from what we now call tuberculosis?  And did her illness perhaps inspire her brothers Will and George to enter medical practice? All is speculation.

At the point in time when the census taker called upon the family in the summer of 1880, Mary’s father Isaiah Stout had died, William had left home, George was studying medicine, Martha was married and Thomas off to make his fortune in the West. Elizabeth (Lib) and Sarah were still at home, but soon to be married. Frank was still tending the farm, but about to take off to study law and move west.

All I know for sure is that frail, pretty Mary died in 1881 when she was 34 years old, apparently carried off by her lung disease. Their mother, Emeline, must have felt the blow severely. While she had lost other children, this was the first adult child to die before their mother.

Mary Stout, my great-grand aunt is buried in the Stout family cemetery in Guernsey County.

How I am related

  • Vera Marie Badertcher, who is the
  • daughter of Harriette Anderson Kaser, who is the
  • daughter of Vera Stout Anderson, who is the
  • daughter of William Cochran Stout, who is the
  • sister of Mary Stout.

This has been another post that is part of the #52 Ancestors initiative. To see more participants go to the website that started it all: No Story Too Small.

Research Notes

  • From Ancestry.com, I gathered information on birth, death, residence, family, etc. from Census and birth and death reports.  
  • Also from Ancestry. com, I accessed newspaper archives of the Cambridge Jeffersonian for the years 1881-1905, but Mary Stout was not mentioned.
  • Family photographs are in the author’s possession. 

Into the Wild, Wild West:Tom Stout

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Thomas Albert Stout, 1855-1926

Young Tom Stout was restless. He wasn’t sure what he wanted to do, but his plans did not include more school, and now free of his father, his dreams did not include working on the Ohio family farm, either.

Thomas Albert Stout was the fifth son of Emeline Cochran Stout and Isaiah Stout–the third living son when he was born on the Stout farm in Guernsey County, Ohio.  He was ten years younger than my great-grandfather, William Cochran Stout and five years younger than the 2nd living son, George Stout. He had one older sister and would have three younger siblings who survived infancy.

In 1872, when Tom was 17, his father Isaiah Stout died and was buried in the family graveyard on their farm. Tom’s brothers seemed focused on goals. His younger brother, Frank (John Franklin) wasn’t sure where he was heading, but he knew it involved more education after high school (or common school as they called it.) The oldest brother, Will, had graduated from medical school and George was attending medical school in Cincinnati and preparing to come back to Guernsey County to practice.

That left Tom to run the farm, which to this ambitious teenager must have sounded like a big bore.

 

Tom Stout

Tom Stout, Charles Bohm Photographer, Denver CO. 1872

Young men of his time were following Horace Greeley’s advice from 1865 to “Go West Young Men.” And coming from pioneer stock that had migrated either from Scotland to Ireland or from England to Holland and then to the Eastern United States and west to Ohio, he decided to keep the westward movement going. Tom took a train as far west as he could go– Colorado –where he got a job working in freighting. The first rail line reached Denver in 1870, but since it did not cross the Rockies, there was still plenty of freight going by mule and wagon.

After a year in Denver, Tom moved on to Idaho, “involved in railroading” according to the History of Wyoming, Vol. 3 (1918).

I would love to know what Tom did for the railroad. It was very early days for railroads in Idaho which was still a pretty wild place.  At any rate, he heard about homesteads available in Wyoming. The railroad was headed that way, and with it would come growth. The Indian wars seemed to have been settled and the state was bursting with opportunity.

In the early 1880’s, he moved on to the town then called Mandell (population 281).  After the railroad arrived and the town changed its name to Sheridan, it grew faster than prairie grass in a rainy spring. By 1900 nearly 10,000 people called Sheridan home.

Tom staked out a claim just a bit south of Sheridan and spent a couple of years building the first irrigation ditches in the town. By the Spring of 1884, two years after the railroad arrived,  he became a landowner, farming and raising cattle on his own land.  It seems he was working too hard to take time for a social life but around 1887, when he was 32, he met a young lady whose family had recently moved to Wyoming from Kansas. They were married in Johnson County, Wyoming, just before Johnson County was split and Sheridan County created in 1888. His bride, Minnie Vance, was only 18.

Wasting no time, the couple had a son, Frank Perry Stout, in 1888 and a second son, Harry Oscar Stout was born the following year (Minnie had brothers named Perry and Oscar). Wanting to ensure that his children would have good educations, Tom moved his family into Sheridan while continuing to run his ranch. There he bought (or more probably built) a house right in the center of town–behind the courthouse.

Uncle Tom Stout, the rancher, Photo taken in MIles City, MT

Uncle Tom Stout, the rancher, Photo taken in MIles City, MT Circa 1885

Tom, or T.A. as he was known in Wyoming, kept building his empire until it stretched over 7000 acres.  And although the musical Oklahoma says “The cowman and the sheepman can’t be friends”, Tom was both, switching over from cattle to sheep about 1903.

In 1898, Emeline Stout, Tom’s mother, turned 70 in Ohio and the four Stout brothers and their three sisters gathered. They had a portrait made -the sons of an uneducated farmer who had all achieved respect in their communities through professional accomplishments–two doctors still in Ohio and a lawyer and a prosperous rancher who had gone West.

Tom Stout and HIs Brothers

The Stout Brothers. Back: Tom and Frank, Front: Doctors George and William

Tom was to marry again in 1891, and have another son, but that is another story…which you can read in “Tom Stout’s Second Wife.”

That 1918 Wyoming history book, in the flowery language common to those early 20th century history/biography books, said that Thomas A. Stout recently retired with an income that “not only supplies him with all the necessities but also with many of its luxuries.”

Tom Stout died in Wyoming in 1926. Thanks to that Wyoming history, I have a sketch of Thomas Albert Stout. Well, okay, it is a bit flowery, and every person described in the book seems to be a paragon of virtue, but here’s Tom/T.A.

After telling us that he is a member of the Methodist Church, Lodge 520 BPOE, and the Sheridan Commerce Club, and that he “votes with the Republican Party and strongly endorses its principles,”, the history closes with a description.

“(Mr. Stout) stands for those things which are most worthwhile in community life and is actuated by a spirit of progress and advancement in all things that he undertakes whether for the upbuilding of his own fortunes or the advancement of community interests.”

Not bad for a mixed-up teen from Guernsey County, Ohio.

Relationship

Vera Marie Badertscher

Daughter of Harriette Anderson Kaser

Daughter of Vera Stout Anderson

Niece of Thomas Albert Stout

Notes on Research

  • History of Wyoming, Vol. 3 (1918), edited by Ichabod Sargent Bartlett, pg. 245-6. Available on Google Books.
  • Family photographs  with inscriptions, in the possession of the author.
  • BLM land transaction records for Wyoming.
  • Eureka Herald and Greenwood County Republican, (Kansas), 23 Jan. 1891. Marriage license: Thomas A Stout and Mattie Worley. Greenwood County. (From newspapers.com)
  • From Ancestry.com:
    • Kansas, County Marriage Records, 1811-1911. Marriage License application for Thomas Stout and Minnie Vance, 1887
    • Montana, County Marriage Records, 1865-1993. Marriage license for Frank P. Stout, child of Thomas Stout and Minnie Vance.
    • United States Census, 1860, Oxford, Guernsey, Ohio; 1870, Wills, Guernsey, Ohio; 1880, Wayne, LaPorte, Nebraska; 1900, 1910 and 1920, Sheridan, Wyoming .
    • Sheridan City Directories, 1907, 1908, 1910, 1912, 1915, 1916,1919, 1920, 1927 and 1933.
  • Sheridan Municipal Cemetery Records available at Find a Grave.