MYRTLE FULLER BROWN
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Another pioneer who arrived with her parents from Purcell, Oklahoma, after a five-day train ride is Myrtle Fuller Brown who has written about the early days. They arrived at Mesa in the year 1905, and her father filed on a homestead. They found the dry and dusty countryside with no trees or grass or any other green vegetation quite a sharp contrast to Oklahoma where there was lots of natural rainfall, and where everything was so lush and green, Mrs. Brown wrote. To leave all that to come to a place where rainfall was all but non-existent, and where we could see little but sagebrush, sand and rocks, was a difficult adjustment to make and it was particularly hard on our mother, she added.
Mesa had a post office, store, hotel, schoolhouse and a railroad depot with two telegraphers, and a blacksmith shop where my father was the blacksmith, Mrs. Brown said. There were several families living there, including the W.T. Andersons. Anderson later became the first State Representative from our part of the state to Olympia. The Browns also hauled water from the river, as many of their neighbors had to do, before they could afford to dig wells. Mrs. Brown wrote that they used a 500-gallon tank on a wagon equipped with a hand pump on top of the tank, and it was the job of her sister and her brother to help her haul this water with a team of horses. The tank had only a 20-foot hose on it, so it was necessary to drive part way into the water in order for the hose to reach it. We took turns at the pump, and it used up the better part of a day to drive to the river, six miles from their farm, laboriously pump the tank full by hand, and then drive home again, Mrs. Brown added. The next year the family dug and cemented a cistern, to hold enough water for the farm stock and for household purposes, and it gave us a sense of a sufficiency of water, she said.
By 1907 my mother had decided that the children had been without school long enough, so she loaded all of our possessions onto the farm wagons and the buggy, and we drove to Eltopia, where by this time my father was established as the only blacksmith for miles around. We moved into a rented house and we children started in the two-room school, with some eighty other children, Mrs. Brown said. She gave high praise to two young school teachers who came from Kansas to Eltopia to teach in 1908, Mary and Anna Ruppenthal, who she considered it as a privilege to have had as teachers. “They were so very thorough.” The latter eventually became county superintendent of schools for Franklin County.
