Anna “Annie” Frances Brown

1860s–1870s

Born 11 September 1864 in Jesup, Iowa, to Isaac Horace Brown and Isabella Elizabeth Brown. Lived in Parish, New York, in the early 1870s and in Illinois around 1876.

1880s

In school in St. Paul, Nebraska, in 1880. Around 1884 persuaded her family to move to Colorado and take up timber claims.

1890s

Married Jay Charles Grahm in Yuma, Colorado, on 4 March 1890, days before her brother Bert died. Registered her own timber claim in 1892 and settled near Fort Morgan. Children Ralph, Gladys, Beulah, and Ethel were born.

1900s

Raised her family near Fort Morgan, where Fern (1902) and Clarence (1908) were born.

1910s–1920s

Moved to Fox Island, Washington, in 1910 and ran the household on the family's strawberry farm. Lost her son Clarence in 1922. Died on Fox Island on 30 August 1926.

A Family on the Move

Anna Frances Brown, called Annie, was born on September 11, 1864, in Jesup, Buchanan County, Iowa, the daughter of Isaac Horace Brown and Isabella Elizabeth Brown. Her family moved often. They were in Parish, Oswego County, New York, in the early 1870s, where her brother Jake was born, and in Cordova, Illinois, when her brother Bert was born in 1876. By 1880 they had settled at St. Paul, Howard County, Nebraska, where Annie went to school. She also had a brother or sister named Anty, and two others, Will and Turner, were raised in the family.

Around 1884, the family remembered, it was Annie's idea that they should move to Colorado and take up timber claims. In May 1885 she and her father came back to St. Paul from a trip to Dakota Territory. On March 4, 1890, in Yuma, Colorado, she married Jay Charles Grahm, a former Pennsylvanian; six days later her fourteen-year-old brother Bert died at Cope, Colorado.

Fort Morgan

In 1892 Annie registered a timber claim of more than 160 acres in eastern Colorado in her own name. Drought drove the Grahms off the claims, but Annie kept her land for years, selling part of it as late as 1920. The family built a home on Platte Avenue near Fort Morgan, with a small garden and a field of sugar beets, and later a five-room house on Jay's forty acres east of town. Annie made most of the family's clothes. Her children were Ralph, Gladys (1894), Beulah (1897), Ethel (1899), Fern (1902), and Clarence (1908).

In the spring of 1899 she spent three months with her parents in St. Paul, Nebraska, where her daughter Ethel was born that April. In March 1902 she was seriously ill but recovered under Dr. Jones's care, and in 1903 she signed the petition to form an irrigation district for Fort Morgan.

Fox Island

In 1910 the family decided to move to Washington, to be near Annie's parents and away from Colorado's hot summers and cold winters. Annie took the children ahead by train to Tacoma and then by boat to her parents' home at Joe's Bay; the children were thrilled by the boat, but she would not let them near the railing. They lived with her parents for two months until Jay arrived, and then settled on a 22-acre farm at Sylvan, on Fox Island, where strawberries were the main crop.

Annie ran the household for sixteen years without electricity or refrigeration. In the early 1920s she loved the slow ride on the Day Island boat into Tacoma, which stopped at every dock for passengers and mail and gave her a break from her work and a chance to visit with the other passengers. At Christmas she and her daughter Fern made up every bed and two cots in the attic and did all the baking ahead. When the tree came in from the woods they trimmed it with strings of popcorn and red madrone berries, paper chains, silver rope, and candles in snap-on holders, and then cooked supper for the family arriving by ferry. Her son Clarence died in July 1922, at thirteen, and Fern wrote that her mother was never the same afterward.

Death

Annie had not been well for months but would not see a doctor. On August 30, 1926, she carried a basket of fruit and vegetables to their new neighbors, the Schlaupitz family, stopping to rest under the cherry tree on the hill on the way. She was taken ill when she reached their house, and Mr. Schlaupitz ran for the Grahms. Annie died shortly after Jay got there, of uremic poisoning after months of chronic nephritis. She was sixty-one. Her funeral was held at the Sylvan church on Fox Island, and she was buried in the Fox Island cemetery; when the family left the island, she was moved to Tacoma Cemetery.