In the early spring of 1884, a chartered boxcar rolled westward out of New York bound for the Washington Territory. In its front compartment stood a kitchen range, a table and benches, two beds, a chest of drawers, and Jennie Strong's rocking chair; in its rear were a team of horses, two cows, some chickens, and a bred sow, together with hay, grain, and farming equipment. Riding along were Walter Strong, a carpenter who had made up his mind to leave the settled farm country of New York for a place he had only heard of, called Spokane Falls; his wife, Jennie Newman; their three small children; his aging mother; his wife's brother; and a family friend. It was a decision that would define the rest of their lives, and this chapter follows that boxcar and the family it carried across a continent.
Walter and Jennie in New York
Walter Strong was born on 6 February 1855 at Farmersville Station, in Cattaraugus County, New York — a rural community some sixty miles southwest of Rochester and roughly a hundred and fifty miles from New York City. He was the son of Ezra Strong Jr. and Priscilla Crandall, and he grew up during the turbulent middle decades of the nineteenth century, the years of slavery, the Civil War, and the presidency and assassination of Abraham Lincoln. He received such education as the public schools of the region afforded and learned the trade of a carpenter, a skill that would serve him well on a frontier where every homestead had to be built by hand.
His wife was born Jeanette Newman — known through her life as Jennie — on 12 December 1859 in Freedom, in the same county, the daughter of Franklin Newman and Hannah Easton. The Newmans lived in Freedom at the time of the 1860 census, when Jennie was still an infant, and by 1870 the household had settled in Farmersville, where she spent the remainder of her girlhood. Cattaraugus County in those years was a landscape of family farms, dairy pastures, and small crossroads villages tucked among the hills of the state's southwestern corner, and a rural upbringing there meant a life bound to the seasons.
On Saturday, 3 July 1875 — the day before the Fourth of July — Walter married Jennie at Farmersville Station. She was fifteen, a young age even by the standards of her day, though not an unheard-of one in rural communities where households formed early and hands were needed on the land. It would have been a summer wedding filled with good food and celebration on the eve of the national holiday. For nearly a decade the couple stayed rooted in Cattaraugus County, where Walter farmed and where their first three children — Franklin Dewitt, Grace Ruby, and Mattie Pearl — were born.
The Boxcar West
In the spring of 1884, Walter and Jennie resolved to begin a new life in the far Northwest. Chester Arthur was president, and the country beyond the Mississippi was still largely wild. The land they were bound for was covered with virgin pine forest, home to the Spokane Indians and abundant game; at the site of the future city there stood only the Spokane Falls Trading Post, where drinking water was hauled from the river in whiskey barrels. To carry themselves and their whole way of life westward, the Strongs chartered a boxcar on the railroad. The men slept in the back on the hay, while Jennie and the children — Grace, Mattie, and Dewitt — slept in the front.
They did not travel alone. Walter's mother, Priscilla, herself born in New York in 1796 and by then a woman of advanced years, came west with them, as did Jennie's brother Carl Newman and a family friend named Jack Cook. The journey was long and tiring; they bought supplies where they could along the way, arriving in Spokane in late March as the last of the winter snow was leaving. Finding the March winds still cold, they lingered near Spokane Falls until spring, then on 21 April 1884 moved out to Wild Rose Prairie, a stretch of some fifteen square miles north of the city and about six miles south of Deer Park. At first they lived in a tent in the heart of the prairie, while Carl and Jack stayed behind in Spokane to find work, the family funds by then running very low.
Homestead on Wild Rose Prairie
Life on the prairie was one of long days of back-breaking labor for men and women alike. Salmon were pitchforked from the creeks and smoked for winter; deer, rabbit, pheasant, and bear were plentiful; wild hay was cut with scythe and wooden rake; and stumps were grubbed out by hand and burned to clear the land. Supplies were carried home on men's backs from Spokane until stores and post offices slowly appeared at Hazard, Deer Park, and beyond.
The homestead did not come easily. Walter first filed on a tract in the heart of the prairie, next to the Hazard place where the tent stood, but another man later settled on part of it and filed as well, and the competing claims had to be settled in court at Seattle. When Walter's lawyer returned by train, he signaled from the slowing car as it passed through Spokane Falls that the case had been won — but Walter misunderstood the gesture and believed he had lost. It was likely during this uncertain period, around 1886, that the family briefly returned to Spokane Falls, where their son William was born. The same summer brought an Indian scare, when the settlers of the prairie — some fifteen large families — gathered at the fortified Fort Tarbert and Fort Griffith and lived together until soldiers arrived. The homestead deed was finally secured in 1889, and on that land the family remained for the rest of their lives.
Their farm became known for years as the Edgewood Fruit Farm, where they raised cherries, plums, peaches, apples, and apricots, and sold butter and milk. Beyond farming Walter engaged in freighting, and he was counted among the industrious men of the community. His neighbor J. D. Walters, who homesteaded the adjoining property and raised strawberries, remained a close friend for life. Walter was an active worker in the fraternal lodges — a charter member of Modern Woodmen of America Lodge No. 7218 at Wayside and affiliated with the Knights of the Maccabees — while Jennie belonged to the Ladies of the Maccabees and was identified with the First Methodist Episcopal Church of Wild Rose. In an area with no doctor for many years, Jennie was often the one called upon to deliver babies; she kept instruments and was regarded as a midwife until the first physician settled at Chattaroy.
Walter's Death and Jennie's Later Years
After thirty-seven years on Wild Rose Prairie, Walter Strong died on Saturday evening, 22 October 1921, at six o'clock, following a three-week illness from internal carcinoma. He was sixty-seven years old. Funeral services were held at the Methodist Episcopal church on Wild Rose the following Monday afternoon, with the Reverend Dow DeLong in charge. The Modern Woodmen conducted the graveside rites, where more than forty cars bore relatives and friends to his resting place in Wild Rose Cemetery. He left twenty-one grandchildren residing in the immediate vicinity.
Jennie survived him by more than a decade. She lived out her later years in the Riverside district of Stevens County, where the 1930 census still records her presence, a woman of seventy who had spent more than four decades in the Washington country she and Walter had chosen. Her granddaughter Thressa remembered being close with her Grandma Jenny. Jennie died on 1 May 1934 in Spokane, at the age of seventy-four, and was buried at Deer Park.
The Children of Walter and Jennie
The eldest son, Franklin Dewitt Strong, was born on 21 April 1876 at Farmersville Station and came west as a small boy in the family boxcar. On 2 August 1900 he married Myra Cornelia Eglin. Though he lived for a time in the Wild Rose and Riverside country of his childhood, in his later years he moved to the Cowlitz County region of western Washington; at his father's death he was living at Logging Camp 17, and it was at Kelso that he died on 26 May 1940.
Grace Ruby Strong was born on 6 October 1880 at Farmersville Station and was old enough at four to be counted among the children who rode west and slept in the front of the boxcar. On 8 September 1916 she married Richard Martin Cline, becoming Mrs. R. M. Cline of Wild Rose. She lived much of her life around Wayside, near her parents' farm, and died on 25 October 1960 at Deer Park.
Mattie Pearl Strong, born on 26 June 1882 at Farmersville Station, was the youngest of the three children born in New York and the third of those who made the westward journey as small children. On Christmas Day 1903 she married Arthur John Cline, and as Mrs. Arthur Cline she made her home in Williams Valley. She died on 13 April 1958 in Spokane.
William "Will" Henry Strong was born on 4 February 1887 at Spokane Falls, during the family's uncertain interlude away from the prairie, and was raised on Wild Rose Prairie. On 9 September 1908 he married Josephine Lillian Spence. He lived a long life in the Wild Rose and Deer Park country, dying at Deer Park on 6 September 1967. His story, and that of his marriage, belongs to a later chapter.
Ethel May Strong was the first of Walter and Jennie's children born on the Washington homestead, arriving on 9 September 1891 at Riverside in Stevens County. On 16 January 1909 she married John William Yandell and was afterward known as Mrs. J. W. Yandell of Deer Park. Her life carried her for a time to Potlatch in Idaho and to Omak in Okanogan County, but she returned to the Deer Park area, where she died on 21 March 1972.
Guy Alfred Strong, born on 13 March 1896 at Riverside, was the child who lived at home at the time of his father's death, remaining close to the family land. On the last day of 1924 he married Thelma B. Lynch. He spent his life in the Stevens County country of Riverside and Williams Valley, dying on 20 September 1955 in Spokane.
The youngest, Carl "Carlie" F. Strong, was born on 15 March 1899 at Riverside but did not survive childhood. He died on 8 April 1901, just past his second birthday. In those days coffins were homemade — the men building the box and the women lining it — and the little boy was among the earliest losses the family knew on the prairie they had come so far to claim.
From a chartered boxcar and a tent on the open prairie, the Strongs built the Edgewood Fruit Farm and settled the Wild Rose, Riverside, and Deer Park country of eastern Washington, where Walter, Jennie, and most of their children lived out their lives within a few miles of one another.