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Reprinted here with permission from the Brockville Recorder.
� The Keelers and the Warners by Harry D. Blanchard � As promised, we shall here briefly outline the pioneer story of the Warner family from the time of the departure from Leeds-Grenville, in the late fall of the year 1845, to a farm near Kewanee, Ills., and we shall then conclude with a concise summary of the noble life of the Rev. Sylvanus Keeler after the time of his arrival in Canada. ����������� Ralph Warner, who married Clara Keeler, daughter of the Rev. Sylvanus Keeler, was in the wood business on St. John�s Island and later lived in Elizabethtown. In 1845 he moved his family to Chicago by boat. On arrival there they slept one night on the dock in very bad weather. They brought with them from Canada ox-teams and they drove from Chicago to the new homestead near Kewanee, Ills. Ralph Warner was a very large man and his sons were all six-footers. His grandson, Franklin Howard Warner, married Sarah Ann Bickford near Udell, Iowa, Sept. 27, 1877. Our dear friend, Major David M. Warner, is their son. They lived for a time in Texas and moved from there to Oklahoma, where they were numbered among the honored pioneers. Major Warner was born on Feb. 9, 1881, in a little pioneer log-house at Post Oak Grove, Indian Territory, now near Durant, Oklahoma. Major Warner grew up �on the gront�. He recalls traveling hundreds of miles in the old covered wagon. Until he was 12 years old he was in terror of strange white people but would [go] anywhere with a blanket Indian. To put himself through college and acquire a finished education he taught school, ran steam-threshers, worked in a quarry and on the railroad. Finally graduating in 1907. He went to the Philippine Islands and returned by Suez and the Holy Land, visiting Egypt, Italy, Switzerland, France, Germany, Denmark and England; thence to New York, completing his circuit of the world on Christmas Day 1913. He went to the Mexican border and returned to graduate with [a] B.A. degree from the University of Oklahoma in 1917. He was commandant of military training at the University and later had army experience in all parts of the county until finally appointed to his present position of great responsibility. ����������� Major Warner�s mother, Mrs. Sarah Ann Bickford Warner, died on Nov 17th last on the homestead at Richland, Canadian county, Oklahoma. She would have been 76 years of age on May 31st of this year had she survived. Her husband two of their sons and two of their daughters were with her at the last. All of her long active life she had been a pioneer. The pioneers of Indian Territory, now Oklahoma, are known as 89ers and they are honored in the southwest in like manner to our reverence for the U. E. Loyalists. They are now few in number, but the title 89er passes on to their children. Mrs. Warner was universally loved and respected, being known in the southwest as �Mother Warner.� Among our papers when we are gone, attached to our �Warner� file will be found a group likeness of Mr. And Mrs. Warner and her brother and his wife, Mr. And Mrs. Charles Bickford, Carnegie, Oklahoma. It is a wonderful picture and speaks volumes for the intelligence, will-power and rectitude of the pioneers of America. ����������� We shall have to leave the biography of the Rev. Sylvanus Keeler to another and concluding chapter next week, while we clean up a few notes here which should go into the record. ����������� The old neighbors will be interested to know that the friend of our grandfathers, John Keeler, went on a visit to his sister in Kewanee, Ills. Clara, wife of Ralph Warner, in the year 1865. While in Kewanee he contracted an illness something like flu, from which he never recovered. He was determined to die in Elizabethtown and was able to reach Brockville, probably by boat, in the middle of a stormy October night. He went to the home of his daughter, Mrs. Elizabeth Keeler Herrick, in Brockville, but she did not know who he was and would not open the door. The exposure aggravated his condition and he died without reaching the farm at Greenbush. Major Warner�s father remembers the details of this. He was 11 years of age when he was taken by his father to Illinois. He still fondly remembers old Greenbush and was keenly interested in our history of old Greenbush,� a copy of which is still on loan to Major Warner and will go with out collection of stories already preserved there, to the archives of Canada at Ottawa when it is returned. ����������� The children of Hulda Keeler and her second husband, David Mallory, were Ira; Charles; Amasa; Lavina, married Oran Adams; Hulda, married Charles Wilcox; Mercy, married Henry S. Judd; Clara, married F. F. Lee. Amherst Alford, mentioned hereinbefore, came from Connecticut about the year 1790. He married Ruth Nichols, daughter of David Nichols and his wife, Susannah, who came from Vermont in 1802. David Nichols was a Baptist elder. His other children were Clark, Sheldon, Hiram, and David. Arza Judd and his wife, Lola came from Connecticut in 1801; they were uncle and aunt of Amherst Alford, they settled in Harlem. Next week we shall conclude the Keeler-Warner story with a biography of the Rev. Sylvanus Keeler after the time of his arrival in Canada. It will make very interesting reading as he was a wonderful man and had a large part of making Ontario what it is at this day. The writer should say that he remembers clearly Mrs. Elizabeth Keeler Herrinck at the Morton Keeler homestead when he was small. He also remembers faintly a schoolmate, either Susie or Helen Warner, who lived with relative in the house at the northwest corner of the avenue which ran down to the home of John Forsythe, the saddler. She was about the age of our brother, Will. ����������� We should note here that Major Warner was at the homestead at Richland, Canadian county, Oklahoma, with his dear mother in her last illness. In addition to the skilled local medical attention she received, Major Warner took with him two doctors from Oklahoma City. Mrs. Warner was conscious nearly to the last and said that she had not suffered pain, but from lack of breath. All of her children were home for the funeral. We should say also that ___his noble efforts to preserve the history of his ancestors, Major Warner was ably assisted by our schoolmate of old time, Mary Keeler, to whom we were just preparing to write for reminiscences when she passed away. In his letter of sympathy to Major Warner the writer said among other things, �After all a fellow�s best friend is his mother. Our mothers risked their lives to bring us into being and throughout their pilgrimages they deferred to us in all things and they laboured incessantly to make the way easier for us.� In a letter just received from Major Warner he outlines some of the experiences of his father, Franklin Howard Warner, since his departure from Leeds county in 1865. ����������� After his marriage at Centreville, Iowa, in 1877. Mr. Warner and his wife made the long journey by covered wagon to the vicinity of Austin, Texas. Where they farmed during the summer of 1878. Then they moved on west to the frontier in Tom Green county. Mr. Warner freighted for the army with wagon and teams from San Antonio out as far as Fort Stockton and San Angelo. He made one trip of a whole week across the plains without seeing a single human being, only his team and dog keeping him company, although he encountered an abundance of wild buffalo, antelope, deer, wild hogs, turkeys and prairie chickens. He escaped Apache Indians although their raids were then still frequent. Their first child, Sarah Eveline, was born out there on the frontier Jan 30, 1879. The family moved north to Indian Territory now Oklahoma. In 1880 where Major Warner was born, on [the] date already set out herein, where his sister, Emily Susannah, was born, Feb. 20, 1883, and his brother, Hiram Alford Warner, was born June 25, 1885. In Nov. 1885, the family moved by covered wagon, but way of Fort Reno, to Western Kansas, where they homesteaded 160 acres 15 miles south of Ashland, Clark county. Here they spent the first winter in a dugout, like a cellar with a dirt roof on it, and then built a sod-house, with plain dirt floor in which they lived until Feb 1889, when they left for the new land of Oklahoma Territory. They camped at Fort Reno until the new country was officially opened for settlement by the boon of a cannon at 12:00 noon April 22, 1889. This gun started the famous horse-race for homes, which is always referred to as �The Opening.� Those were the 89ers already mentioned. ����������� Major Warner well remembers the journey to Kansas, The three lean years there, the trip back to the line and the big �opening�, with all its excitement. His father, our dear brother exile; Mr. Franklin Howard Warner, was one of 5 or 6 who led in the great race and staked the first claims. He returned to camp, hitched up and drove in on their new homestead at 3:30 that afternoon. Major Warner rode a gray horse, �Old Seelum�, and drove their cattle in on the land behind their wagon on that history-making afternoon. ����������� The whole section of country was thus settled in one day. Major Warner says that he has never seen folk with greater hope and ambition than had these original homesteaders, nor has he, in his circuit of the globe, ever witnessed a more beautiful and wonderful sight. It was spring time and the rolling plains were carpeted with a beautiful green, with great rolls of timber, in heavy leaf, lining every creek and stream. The whole landscape was just as when Columbus came over the sea, not a road, not a house, not a field, nor a well. Now it is a land of smiling farms and modern, comfortable houses. The first schools were �soddies�, with ridgepole and pole rafters, with brush across and then a layer of sod, which was heaped with a generous covering of red clay. The plain dirt floors, which merely had the grass shaved off, became quite firm with use. ����������� The Warners were among the first to build a frame house with a cellar in the new land and this house was two years later replaced by a large and substantial one, which was their home until the death of Mrs. Warner some months ago. A son, Clarence, had been born on the Kansas plains, making five children who came with the family in the new home, where were born two more sisters and six more brothers, a total of 13, of whom three sisters and six brothers survive, along with their father. ����������� On April 27, Major Warner flew over by army airplane from Dayton, Ohio, to Philadelphia, PA, on official business. The place traveled at over 100 miles per hour at an altitude of from 3,000 to 5,000 feet. He returned on April 29. Whole farms looked like city blocks, the rivers like silvery ribbons and the creeks like little crooked marks upon the map. ����������� The above brief outline of the life activities of a son of our dear on county, Mr. Franklin Howard Warner, will be of much interest not only to other exiles, but to the younger generation and to those who have remained at home. What a thrilling book of experiences Mr. Franklin Howard Warner could write if he could be induced to set out in written form his own life story since the time of his boyhood in Harlem and Greenbush. A boy reared on a Leeds-Grenville farm gets such a thorough schooling in initiative and enterprise that he can go out and �get along� anywhere, even under the most trying and adverse circumstances. � Back to the Warner Page
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Copyright 1997-2009 Forever Publishing�
April 7, 2009
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