Carrie Nation

6 Oct

Carrie Nation sold cards and hatchet lapel pins to make money.

When Carrie Nation read Jeremiah 1:10 in her Bible, she wrote “SMASHING” next to it. Jeremiah wrote, “I have this day set thee over the nation and over the kingdoms to root out and pull down and to destroy …” and Carrie read, “pick up an axe and smash up bars.”

Carrie Moore was born in Kentucky and moved to a farm in Cass County just east of Peculiar, Missouri in 1855 when she was 9. She weathered the Civil War with her family in Texas and married a young doctor named Charles Gloyd just after the war. She was 21. Within the year, Gloyd would drink himself to death and Carrie would give birth to their daughter Charlien. Her experience with Gloyd– and messages from God– led Carrie down a path of deliberate destruction.

Carrie was a young single mother in 1870, with an infant and destitute mother-in-law dependent on her. She moved to Holden, Missouri, built a small house, and went to the Normal institute in Warrensburg. She taught school in Holden for four years but was fired and replaced by a school official’s relative. Having few other choices, Carrie married again. David Nation was 20 years older than her and had kids from a previous marriage. They moved to Texas to give farming a try. After operating a hotel, saddle shop, and unsuccessful cotton plantation the family was forced north because of David’s political involvements in Texas. They moved to Medicine Lodge, Kansas in 1889.

Carrie Nation is buried in Belton, Missouri.

Kansas had outlawed liquor in 1881, but were never really serious about it. Not until Carrie Nation got involved, that is. She started a local chapter of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and took it upon herself to protest establishments selling alcohol – peacefully at first, singing hymns and praying outside bars and addressing bar owners with a polite, “Good morning, destroyer of men’s souls.”

Not getting the results she wanted, Carrie grew frustrated. She, like most women of the time, was a victim of circumstance. Alcoholism had destroyed her first husband, a man she loved, and left her to fend for herself, his mother, and their daughter. Forced into another marriage for mere survival, she looked at alcohol as the crux of the problem – it destroyed homes, it destroyed families, and it destroyed the stability of women and children dependent on men.

On June 5, 1900, Carrie prayed for guidance. She heard the words, “Take something in your hands, and throw at these places in Kiowa and smash them.” She went to Kiowa, Kansas, found a saloon, and destroyed alcohol bottles with rocks. Soon she adopted a hatchet, making her attacks on saloons quicker and more effective. Between 1900 and 1910 she was arrested 30 times. She divorced in 1901.

No one else was taking the temperance movement to such extremes, and Carrie became a pretty famous figure. She developed a following of like-minded women who helped her destroy bars. She lectured internationally, published a newsletter, and sold souvenirs to pay her court fines and support her family. She may have taken temperance to a dangerous level, but along the way she helped people who needed it. She opened her last home, named Hatchet Hall, in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, to young women who needed help, financially or otherwise.

Carrie Nation is buried in the Belton, Missouri City Cemetery

When she was 65, Carrie collapsed during a lecture and died in Leavenworth, Kansas. Today you can visit Carrie Nation’s grave in the Belton City Cemetery. Her homes in Arkansas and Kansas are still standing as well.

Carrie Nation’s legacy as a radical activist lives on. Her image has graced the likes of  funny t-shirts and beer coasters protesting alcohol taxes. There’s also a band in Kansas named for her. Although they wouldn’t tell me why they chose her for their image, they have been described as “a stagecoach on overdrive.” I think for those who knew Carrie’s wrath, that about says it.

Visit the collection of Carrie Nation papers on the Kansas Historical Society website for a glimpse at her personal papers and photographs of bars she smashed.

Carrie Nation and the Speakeasy

Woman receives honor for orphanages

19 Sep

Springfield News-Leader, 11:00 PM, Sep. 18, 2011, by Claudette Riley

Historical marker will remember care of Civil War orphans.

The orphaned children of Civil War soldiers were fed, loved and looked after in a series of Springfield homes operated by Mary Whitney Phelps.

Mary Phelps

This month, the Civil War Orphans’ Home historical marker — honoring Phelps’ work — will be dedicated on the grounds of Sunshine Elementary.

“Mary Whitney Phelps was a true heroine of the Civil War,” said Sally Lyons McAlear, president of the Mary Whitney Phelps Tent No. 22, Daughters of Union Veterans of the Civil War. “It is known that she took an interest — having been an orphan herself — in the Civil War orphans and half-orphans in Springfield.”

Phelps became deeply involved in the plight of children who lost one or both parents during the bloody battles in southwest Missouri and beyond.

“The Civil War did leave a large population of orphaned children,” McAlear said. “She used these different homes, throughout time, in downtown Springfield. We were in a dilemma about where to place it.”

Location of those orphans’ homes included:

» Home of John S. and Mary Whitney Phelps on the 1,050-acre Phelps Plantation, now the area of Phelps Grove Park.

» Home of Louisa Campbell, widow of Springfield’s founder, John Polk Campbell.

» Former Berry mansion, used as a government hospital during the war, now roughly the area of the John Q. Hammons fountain on Chestnut Expressway.

In 1866, the U.S. Congress recognized Phelps’ work on behalf of wounded soldiers and orphaned children with a $20,000 award, which she used to finance the expenses of the orphans’ home.

Two years later, the Mary Phelps Institute for Young Ladies opened in a two-story frame building near the northeast corner of Sunshine Street and Campbell Avenue.

McAlear said that institute served “orphans, half-orphans and indigent girls and operated until there was no longer a need.”

The decision to locate the historical marker, made of black granite, on the Sunshine Elementary campus — strategically located near several of the home locations — was enthusiastically supported.

“How appropriate to place it on the grounds of a school,” McAlear said. “It was the hope from the beginning that we involve the children at Sunshine in what the Civil War was all about.”

A ceremony to unveil the historical marker has been scheduled for 1 p.m. Sept. 30 at the school’s corner of Sunshine Street and Jefferson Avenue.

Sunshine Principal Rene Saner said teachers are exploring different ways to weave the lessons of the Civil War — and the lives of children living during that time — into classroom lessons.

“It’s a time that these kids can’t relate to and this will help them understand,” Saner said. “It’s an excellent opportunity for our kids to learn about our history.”

Students have been practicing the Civil War song “When Johnny Comes Marching Home” in music class and fifth-graders are writing essays about life during the Civil War.

Extra resources, including access to a trunk of artifacts used by soldiers during that war, will be made available to Sunshine teachers this month.

The event will also be a learning experience. Civil War bonnets, made by members of the Daughters of Union Veterans, will be presented to girls enrolled at Sunshine. The boys will receive Abraham Lincoln top hats.

Mayor Pro Tem Bob Stephens, Presiding Commissioner Jim Viebrock, Rep. Sara Lampe and Associate Superintendent Ben Hackenwerth plan to speak during the event.

The Phelps Camp No. 66, Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War, will provide a color guard and musket volley. Others are expected to attend in Civil War era attire.

As students grow and move on to middle and high school, McAlear said she hopes they will pass the historical marker and remember they played a role in its unveiling.

“At long last, Mrs. Phelps’ contributions are being etched in stone,” McAlear said, in a written release. “It will be sitting there in a prominent place.”

The Mary Whitney Phelps Tent No. 22, Daughters of Union Veterans of the Civil War, 1861-1865, will dedicate the Civil War Orphans’ Home historical marker this month. The ceremony is 1 p.m. Sept. 30 at Sunshine Elementary, the corner of Sunshine Street and Jefferson Avenue. Parking is available at the adjacent Jefferson Avenue Baptist Church.

The Mysterious Tale of Patience Worth

16 Sep

by Jean Schiffman

San Francisco Arts Monthly September 2011 Vol. 21 No. 3

Seances were held; novels, poems, short stories and plays were published, all of which were supposedly dictated by the garrulous Patience, a 17th-century English immigrant to America. (No proof was ever found that such a person existed.) Pearl and her husband, John Curran, even adopted an orphan, called Patience Wee, that they said was the child of Patience. (The girl was eventually sent off  to Los Angeles and died young.)

Was Pearl Curran a preternaturally gifted fraud? Was she truly possessed by a spirit from the past? Was she psychotic?

Pearl, John, Patience Wee and several other real-life historical characters–including true believers and naysayers, editors and publishers–appear as sharply defined characters in Patience Worth, a world premiere by San Francisco playwright Michelle Carter. The rising small professional group Symmetry Theatre Company offered her the commission. Carter is a novelist and Pen and Garland award-winning playwright whose past plays–Ted Kaczinsky Killed People With Bombs and Hillary and Soon-Yi Shop for Ties premiered at the Magic Theatre–have been highly acclaimed. Also a creative writing professor at San Francisco State, she had heard of Patience Worth vaguely and accepted the commission with alacrity, spending six to eight months researching the character and the context.

Pearl Curran

For much of the script, Carter drew verbatim from Pearl/Patience’s writings and from the transcripts of the séances, adding her own writing as well. Pearl’s husband kept good records during that period, so Carter had plenty of material. In 21 tight scenes, the play follows a series of actual events that transpired between 1913 and 1923 and tracks the uproar among Pearl’s family, friends, associates and the public over the whole otherworldly affair.

Linguistically, Carter’s Patience Worth is a smooth mix of early 20th-century American and Patience’s thickly formal and oddly rambling declamatory speech. (“Tomorrow comes/A new, new tomorrow/And then another morrow,/And morrows and morrows yet to come./

This moment we commune–/No coming morrow–But to hold this record,/This holy instant,” intones Patience at one point.) The play is also interlaced with popular songs, folk ditties and nursery tunes of the era and is full of humor, drama and mystery.

Symmetry cofounder/actor Chloe Bronzan had read an article about Pearl/Patience in Smithsonian magazine a year ago and was struck by the issues it brought up, including those of gender, class and education in America. Is it possible for someone uneducated to be a talented writer? She wondered. “Particularly,” says Bronzan, “it spoke to me in terms of that time, when women weren’t even allowed to vote.” Was it a miracle, a hoax, a medical or neurological condition that resulted in those writings? “What would it have been like to be Pearl?” says Bronzan, “to consciously or unconsciously have this gift? Would it have been frustrating for her not to express it as herself,” given contemporary assumptions about her place in society?

Bronzan thought the strange case of Patience Worth was an excellent subject for Symmetry Theatre, which is dedicated to equalizing the gender disparity in union job opportunities on the American stage. Fittingly, the play features four women and one man (including Bronzan and the two other cofounders, Robert Parsons and Jessica Powell), some in multiple roles.

The first thing that intrigued Carter about the subject was the class dynamics. “Pearl was very insecure about that,” says Carter. “She was ashamed about coming from the Ozarks. She desperately wanted to be a singer and got some vocal training, but it was not to be. She married a much older man and tried to ascend status that way. I think she was quite disappointed in life until Patience came. … The class element is heartbreaking.” Pearl’s friend, Emily Hutchings, announces repeatedly, and quite pointedly, that her own mother was “the second female doctor in the Mississippi Valley.” Hutchings, a writer, was the first to transcribe Patience’s utterings during the séances but rewrote them to make them sound better, until the Currans dismissed her.

“At first glance we assume that women in that era who don’t have the life they wanted, it’s the result of sexism,” continues Carter. “But I think these women are creating their own fates. Pearl made this happen for herself.” So did the ambitious Emily Hutchings, and so did another character, Agnes Repplier, a skeptical critic and essayist of the day.

Patience Worth

Carter was also fascinated by the sad life of Pearl’s adopted daughter, who was told that her real mother was Patience, but whom she was only allowed to talk to once. “How dislocating and strange that would be,” says Carter–to believe that your mother is a ghost.

It was hard for Carter to decide what to do with Patience’s pronouncements. “Either it could be completely rewritten or it could be radically incomprehensible,” says Carter. “I tried to use her language in constructive ways–at times impenetrable but at times you feel you’re in the presence of something. Her megalomania had power over people, she was very flirtatious with men. If [her speech] were completely incomprehensible, we wouldn’t get that; we’d think all these people [who believed in her, including Douglas Fairbanks] were fools. It was delicate, how to make that work.”

To direct the premiere, Carter requested local director/choreographer Erika Chong Shuch, best known on the theater scene for innovative projects at Intersection for the Arts and with Campo Santo. “Her work has a feeling of mystery and magic,” says Carter. “She doesn’t put easy explanations on things.”

Such was Shuch’s faith in Carter that she signed on without having read the script. “The thing that excites me the most,” says Shuch, “is the question about whether Pearl was thinking up the whole thing or whether it was an authentic experience. There are accounts saying she was deluded, and accounts saying she was authentic. … The play doesn’t make a judgment. … In one moment we can have a certain assumption and the next second that assumption can shift.”

Nowadays we’d be analytic about someone like Pearl Curran, and her claims to be a medium, muses Carter. “We’d say it’s a multiple personality thing. We’d say she was a faker, and we hate that. We’d psychologize it and diagnose it and manage it that way.”

Will some in the audience believe she was possessed? “I hope so,” says Carter. “I’d like there to be a feeling of mystery.”

Patience Worth, Sept. 9-Oct. 2,

Thick House, 1695 18th St. 456-8892.  www.symmetrytheatre.com

Laura Ingalls Wilder

29 Jun

"I am beginning to learn that it is the sweet, simple things of life which are the real ones after all." Laura Ingalls Wilder

If you were in elementary school in the past thirty years, chances are you read about Laura Ingalls Wilder. Her Little House books have impacted thousands of kids – the easy to read stories sweep readers away to Laura’s childhood as a pioneer on the frontier. She wrote the books in Mansfield, Missouri.

Laura came to Missouri in 1894, a wife and mother in her 20s. Married nearly 10 years, Laura had a young daughter- Rose. Laura and her husband Almonzo put a down payment on a piece of undeveloped property and decided to try and make a go of life in the Missouri Ozarks. They named their farm the Rocky Ridge Farm. No strangers to hard work, Laura and Almonzo tried all sorts of things to make a living. They farmed, started an orchard, and supplemented their income by taking jobs in Mansfield. Eventually with help from their parents, they were able to purchase a house which got them ahead financially.

After life was a little more comfortable for the Wilders, Laura started writing. In 1911 she submitted an article to the Missouri Ruralist and was employed as a regular columnist. Her column, “As a Farm Woman Thinks,” gained popularity because of her pragmatic approach to women’s issues of the day. Laura’s daughter, Rose had also started writing around the same time. Its widely accepted that Laura and Rose collaborated on Laura’s articles for the magazine.

In the late 1920′s and early 30′s, Laura started writing about her childhood. She wasn’t trying to change the world or do a big show about recording history, but as she got older and after her sister died, she was compelled to reflect. Laura wrote about herself and her family traveling and living on the frontier. Laura had immense personal experience to draw from – she was born in Wisconsin in 1867. Her father was a pioneer – not afraid of moving into uncharted land to settle his family and attempt to make a living. Laura moved with her family to Kansas, Minnesota and finally settled in South Dakota. Laura experienced what was probably typical for any pioneer kid at the time – what was extraordinary was her skill at storytelling.

Laura's books were the base for the Little House TV series that ran from 1974-1983

She describes all the joys and struggles that made up her family’s pioneer experience. She described her sisters, her little brother and her parents – she wrote about their hard times: struggling to survive winters, trying to find food and other supplies, but she also described the good times – the games they played, the jokes they shared, the love and simple togetherness of what seemed an ideal, close family.

Laura’s first attempts at finding a publisher weren’t successful, but with unsuccessful attempts came revisions. It is likely that her daughter Rose helped Laura revise the books and prepared them for publishing. Little House in the Big Woods was first published in 1931, with several sequels to follow. The books have been in continual print and have been translated into 40 different languages. There is still today some debate over whether Rose or Laura actually wrote the Little House books, but that debate doesn’t make the books any less fantastic.

Laura died on February 10, 1957, three days after her 90th birthday. She is buried in the Mansfield Cemetery.

Laura Ingalls Wilder

You can visit Laura’s home, where she wrote the Little House books in Mansfield, Missouri in the 1930s.

Visit Laura in the Hall of Famous Missourians in the State Capitol, Jefferson City.

Women’s History Tour Tomorrow!

3 Jun

Boone family women are focus on tour at Nathan Boone Homestead State Historic Site June 4

Volume 39-162 (For Immediate Release)
For more information: 573-751-1010

JEFFERSON CITY, MO. MAY 24, 2011 — Learn about the women of the Boone family during a special guided tour at Nathan Boone Homestead State Historic Site near Ash Grove on Saturday, June 4. The tour will begin at 2 p.m. and last approximately one hour. The guide will be Greta Russell, editor of the Missouri Women’s History Blog. Admission is free and the public is invited to attend.

Foremost among the women in Nathan Boone’s life was his wife, Olive. The two were married in Kentucky in 1799, and traveled alone to Missouri just weeks later. Nathan Boone was 18 years old and Olive was 16. While Nathan devoted his energies to hunting, surveying and other pursuits that kept him away from home for long periods of time, Olive quickly learned to adapt to life on the early Missouri frontier. The couple remained together for 57 years until Nathan’s death in 1856. Eleven of their 14 children were daughters. The tour will focus on the story of Olive’s life as well as the story of Nathan Boone’s mother, Rebecca Boone, his mother-in-law Marjory Van Bibber, and several of their daughters.

Nathan Boone Homestead State Historic Site preserves the last home and graves of Nathan and Olive Boone. The historic site is located 1.5 miles north of Ash Grove on State Highway V.

For more information about the event, call the historic site at 417-751-3266. For information about the Missouri Women’s History Blog, go to missourwomen.org. For more information on Missouri state parks and historic sites, call the Department of Natural Resources toll free at 800-334-6946 (voice) or 800-379-2419 (Telecommunications Device for the Deaf), or visit mostateparks.com.

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Book Review – Calamity Jane: The Woman and the Legend

14 May

Calamity Jane: The Woman and the Legend

by James D. McLaird, University of Oklahoma Press, 2005

 Most biographies of well-known figures tend to fall into two categories: those that build their subject up, and those that tear them down.  That makes it all the more refreshing to read a book like James D. McLaird’s Calamity Jane, which simply looks on in fascination as an unusual and tumultuous life unfolds.

 McLaird spent several years chasing the story of Calamity Jane, and it shows.  Calamity never stayed in one place long, but wherever she went, she usually did something worth mentioning in the newspapers.  McLaird uses these reports as his primary source for information, a job that must have required scouring the archives of dozens of early boomtown papers in South Dakota, Montana, and Wyoming.  He also blends in remembrances from Calamity’s friends and contemporaries. 

 The only places where the book falls short are the rare moments when McLaird succumbs to the historian’s weakness for overstating his case.  From time to time, he seems to feel under pressure to explain why it’s worthwhile to have a biography of Calamity Jane, since she didn’t do all the things attributed to her. 

In defending himself, he first casts Calamity as a representative of the common female experience in the West, then makes her a symbol for the poor in the 19th century, and finally decides to frame his book as a case study in American mythmaking.  All of these are somewhat true, but they undervalue the book’s interest as a straightforward biography.

 McLaird deals with Calamity Jane’s legend throughout the book, aptly incorporating it into the story he’s already telling.  Rather than just omitting accounts that are probably fictional, McLaird takes the time to sift through and evaluate them, adding extra depth to the book.  One of the most interesting chapters is set two decades after Calamity’s death, and painstakingly details the forgery of her journal and letters.  It’s an excellent example of the sheer craft involved in researching and writing this biography.  And if it doesn’t convince you that McLaird knows what he’s doing, flip through the thirty-plus pages of detailed notes and bibliography.  You’ll be impressed.

 I’d say this is the “definitive” story of Calamity Jane, but McLaird never really manages to define her.  I mean that as a compliment.  He dutifully chronicles everything, even if doing so upends his own attempts at definition.  Calamity emerges as complex, contradictory, and human.  I wish more historical figures received the same treatment.

Olive Boone

29 Mar

Olive Boone survived childbirth- 14 times.

“I was married on the 26th of September, 1799. On the first of October, without any company but my husband, I started to Missouri, or Upper Louisiana. We had two ponies and our packhorse. [We arrived] in St. Louis the last of October. We went to St. Charles County and located about twenty miles above St. Charles. We crossed the river at St. Charles by placing our goods on a skiff. My husband rowed and I steered and held the horse by the bridle. It was rather a perilous trip for so young a couple. I was just sixteen, my husband eighteen.”

Olive VanBibber was 16 when she left her family in Ohio and headed to Louisiana Territory (Spanish territory that would  become Missouri). She was freshly married to Nathan Boone (yes of that Boone family). When they arrived in St. Charles County the newlyweds traded a horse, saddle and bridle for 640 acres and started life together. Nathan headed out further west doing whatever men did on the frontier, and Olive and a slave girl set up house in a little log cabin by a spring.

Nathan Boone: “In the spring of 1800 I built this cabin. It was small, without a floor, and as the spring rains began, water came in. Occasionally the puddles on the floor were several inches deep. My dear wife, Olive, and her Negro girl got poles to lay down for string pieces, then peeled elm bark and laid it down as a floor, the rough side up to prevent its warping or rolling up. That winter and spring she and her Negro girl cut all the wood and fed the cattle while my father and I were absent hunting.”

You can visit Olive's stone house near Defiance, Missouri

Olive’s experience hacking out a living in the wilderness isn’t that unique – hundreds of women did it- but we’ve no clue what most went through. Thanks to Lyman Draper (who was researching her father-in-law Daniel), we know a bit about what life was like for a woman in Missouri 200 years ago.

“When she wanted a sieve, she peeled a piece of bark from a hickory tree, bent it together to a proper size in circular shape, lapped the ends, and stitched them with bark strings. She then tanned a deer skin with ashes, stretched it tightly over the hoop, and fastened it securely. Then with a heated wire she burned holes through the skin and then had a sieve which answered a very good purpose.”

Olive Boone was a tough woman. She solved problems, managed the household and farm, had a baby every other year for most of her life (14 in all) and was primary caretaker for her family- all at a time when women had no legal rights.

“My wife, Olive Boone, had a loom but no convenient place to put it, so she took possession of the deserted shop while my father and I were away hunting. The weather was cold, and there was no fireplace in the old shop; the Negro girl was sent to the nearest neighbor a mile off to obtain the loan of a crosscut saw, with which Olive and the girl cut through several courses of logs until a suitable-sized aperture for a fireplace was made. Then with stones for the fireplace, sticks for the chimney and mud for mortar these lone women erected a chimney, the draft of which proved decidedly the best of any on the farm.”

Nathan Boone Homestead State Historic Site, Ash Grove Missouri

Their little log cabin was eventually replaced with a large 4 story limestone house – and you can visit the home along Highway F between Defiance and New Melle. Quite a change from a mud filled log cabin, this home would have seen the births of several of her children, and the death of her father-in-law Daniel Boone.

When Olive and Nathan were in their 50′s, they sold their big stone house and moved to Greene County, Missouri. They built a log cabin and lived out their years around family. They are both buried near the cabin in what is today Nathan Boone Homestead State Historic Site.

Olive's grave near her log cabin, Ash Grove, Missouri

Women’s History Month

9 Mar

Missouri Women's History Exhibit at MSU

It’s that time of year again!  There are so many great Women’s History Month activities– reading the 19th amendment aloud in front of a crackling fire, going to the mall to sit on Susan B. Anthony’s lap–  that it’s easy to get overwhelmed.  It’s important to remember the true purpose of the season: coming out to support your local Women’s History blog!  So why not attend one of  our upcoming programs?

Pioneering Missouri Women — Missouri State Museum (in the State Capitol), Jefferson City, March 12, 1:30 pm.  This tour of the capitol will leave from the tour desk.  Call 573-751-2854 for more information.

Women’s History Tour of MSU — Missouri State University, Springfield, March 15, 12:30 pm.  This tour of the MSU campus will begin in Craig Hall.  Call 417-380-8749 for more information.

You can also stop by the MSU Campus and see the Missouri women’s history exhibit we installed on the second floor of the Meyer library.  It’ll be up all March.  Or just check out the web version.  And if you’d like to see some of the other Women’s History Month activities going on throughout the state, visit our events page.

Pioneering Missouri Women — March 12

3 Mar

The Missouri State Museum

The Missouri Women’s History Blog is partnering with the Missouri State Museum to host a ”Pioneering Missouri Women” tour of the State Capitol March 12 at 1:30 p.m.  The program will be presented by Greta Russell, editor at missouriwomen.org, and is recognition of Women’s History Month.

The tour will focus on Missouri women as pioneers in culture, education, and activism.  Tours will begin at the State Museum tour desk on the first floor rotunda of the State Capitol.

The Missouri State Museum is located on the first floor of the Capitol building at 201 West Capitol Avenue, 573-751-2854.

Clara Stover

13 Feb

"I love you" is now said with dental bills

This Valentine’s Day, the odds are good that you’ll succumb to the temptations of a Missouri Woman.  And they’ll probably be in a heart-shaped box.  Starting from next to nothing, chocolate queen Clara Stover went on to redefine how the world says “I love you”. 

She was born Clara Lewis, in rural Iowa in 1882.  Her parents were farmers, but she had bigger dreams.  Over her father’s objections, she borrowed tuition money and moved to Iowa City to study music.  There she met Russell Stover.  He had just dropped out of college to become a candy and tobacco salesman.  But Russell was also a big dreamer, and the two hit it off.

Clara and Russell married in 1911 and, as a wedding gift, received… a farm.  In Canada.  Needless to say, that didn’t go well.  Russell and Clara soon returned to the States, where Russell went back to learning the business of candy.  He and Clara began their own confectionery experiments in their Chicago apartment, using “a large marble slab, some kettles, and a garden spade”.  History does not relate the purpose of the garden spade; we can only presume it was used for nougat mining.

While Russell was busy introducing the world to the Eskimo Pie, Clara was growing more and more skilled in the art of dipping chocolates.  She and Russell had been selling these sweets on the weekends, for extra cash.  In 1923, they decided to make them their main focus.  They moved to Denver and opened “Mrs. Stover’s Bungalow Candies”.  Clara became president and secretary of the new business, continuing to work out of her own kitchen.  Somehow, she also found time to raise five orphans and her adopted daughter, Gloria.

Clara Stover

The chocolates were immediately and wildly popular.  To keep up with demand, the Stovers opened a factory in Denver.  And then another in Kansas City.  Clara now spent most of her time travelling around the country, supervising production and scouting out new candy innovations.  By 1929, Russell and Clara owned two factories, some twenty-five stores, and a fleet of motorcycles with houses on them.  Nothing could stop the Stovers, short of a catastrophic economic collapse… Oh, right.  1929.

When the stock market crashed, it hit Clara and Russell hard.  They lost their house in Denver, their luxury apartment in Chicago, and half of their stores.  But their loss was Missouri’s gain.  The Stovers moved their headquarters to Kansas City, determined to cut costs and rebuild their chocolate empire.  They succeeded, but somewhere along the way, Clara’s name was taken off the candy box.  The newly organized company was simply called “Russell Stover”.  Clara was no less active, though.  After Russell’s death in 1954, she ran the company by herself for another seven years.  Clara died in 1975, at age 93.

Yes, their tombs do look disturbingly like their candy boxes.

If you want to pay Valentine’s Day respects to Clara, you can visit her tomb in Mt. Moriah Cemetery in Kansas City.  And if you don’t mind crossing the state line (and feeling extremely poor), you can also drive by the Stover Mansion in Mission Hills, Kansas. 

Alternately, you could just keep shoving your face full of chocolate.

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