People
Collection for person entities.
Pages
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- Mary Anna "Minnie" (Laird) Smith
- She was born in Ohio to Joseph A. Laird. Her father was a farmer. In her marriage record, her mother is given as Elizabeth Kitchen. Her mother died in 1868, when Minnie was eight years old. US Census records show her father remarried to a woman named Sarah. The 1880 US Census shows Minnie teaching school at the age of nineteen. She married Franklin R. Smith in 1884. in 1892, she moved with her husband Franklin R. Smith to Colorado Springs, Colorado because he suffered from tuberculosis. They moved to Grand Junction in 1895, and lived in several locations. In her home next to a saloon on Main Street, she once had to forcibly remove a drunken man from the floor who had climbed into her apartment through the window. They lived in the Crawford Addition, in a location near the Masonic Temple, and finally at 1130 Chipeta Avenue. She was a seamstress, and took in sewing until her husband could get his medical practice established. She helped her husband with an apple orchard that he had established in Fruitridge, and was very particular about how the apples were packed. When her husband’s health failed, they moved to a ranch in Imperial Valley, California. She moved back to Grand Junction after he died. She was a member of the Congregational Church in Grand Junction and a very religious woman. She believed that the rapture would happen in her lifetime, and that she would be given a kingdom to rule over, because she had lived an exemplary life. When she found out she was dying, she discarded all of her religious beliefs and would not let a minister see her on her death bed. Grandmother of Lina Mae (Smith) Biggs and Silmon L. Smith.
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- Mary Anne Hickman
- The proprietor of a boarding house, run in an old adobe house in Palisade, Colorado. She primarily boarded miners, providing hot meals that could be eaten in a dining area and lunch buckets that could be taken to the mines. The boarding house was located on land owned by Arthur Reed Lloyd.
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- Mary Balbina Farrell
- Sister Mary Balbina Farrell, a member of the Sisters of Charity of Leavenworth, Kansas, came to Grand Junction, Colorado in 1895 to establish a hospital. She had served previously at a Leadville elementary school operated by the sisters. She was 36 years old when she arrived in Grand Junction. She was the primarily person responsible for the planning of the project. Today she is honored with a statue in Grand Junction's Legends of Grand Junction's sculpture series downtown.
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- Mary Belle (Powers) Plaisted
- Mary was born in Phillips County, Kansas to Michael Henry Powers and Mary Louisa (Hoover) Powers. Her father was a farmer and a “proud Irishman.” She was one of nine children. She recalled her childhood in Kansas as a warm, safe one in which she never lacked for anything. Sometime after her father's death in 1902, when Mary was six, the family moved to Colorado. The family relocated to the Milldale area around Grand Junction's sugar beet factory and also lived for a time in Delta County after the marriage of Maria Powers to Theophilus “Cap” Head. Mary Belle married Charles Kessinger in Delta County at age fifteen. She had four sons with Charles before their divorce in 1921. According to Mary, he was not a good provider. The family lived in poverty. At the age of 18 she found herself begging for food and relying on the kindness of others to survive. She also took whatever odd jobs she could find. She did housework for others and the family ate “broken meats” (leftovers). She was allowed by the guard along the railroad tracks to pick up coal that had fallen from trains. She moved frequently. For awhile, she and her children lived in an enclave of Italian Americans on Chuluota Avenue in the Riverside Neighborhood. There, she found her neighbors very supportive and helpful. She married Thomas C. Pierce, a Loma rancher, in 1928, when she was 32. They moved to the Loma in 1929. US Census records show she and her children living with him in 1930. They evidently divorced, and she then married Neal Plaisted in 1940. Their marriage lasted seven years. In the 1980's, she became involved in the Partners Restitution Project, in which young people who have gotten in trouble are partnered with elderly people.