Obediah Summers (1845–1896): Re-Interred Black Civil War Veteran

Obediah Summers, Sacramento Bee, 1889

Civil War Grand Army of the Republic plot

Obediah Summers was born enslaved in Kentucky in 1845. When the Civil War came, he escaped the South and joined the Union Army—one of the tens of thousands of Black men who wagered their lives on the dangerous idea that freedom could be seized, not granted. He survived the war, learned to read and write with ferocity, and reinvented himself in California as a minister, political force, and public speaker whose voice carried far beyond the pulpit.

By the 1870s and 1880s, Summers had become a leading figure in Black civic life in Northern California. He served as pastor of Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, rose to Presiding Elder of the A.M.E. Church in California, and was appointed the first black chaplain of the California State Assembly in recognition of his political work and oratory. Newspapers described him—often with begrudging admiration—as “self-made,” a man who had clawed his way from slavery into prominence.

Summers also found himself at the center of a bitter and very public inheritance battle in 1889. When Eliza Scott, a Black woman who had amassed a considerable estate, died and named Summers her executor and beneficiary, the trustees of his own church sued him, claiming the money belonged to the congregation, not the man. The dispute dragged through the courts with what one paper described as “much spirit,” but Summers prevailed. 

He died suddenly in Oakland in March 1896, just fifty-one years old, reportedly from liver disease. 

At Mountain View Cemetery, Summers—Union Army veteran—was placed not with his fellow Civil War soldiers, but in the cemetery’s “unendowed” section, a potter’s field reserved for the poor. Over time, his grave was forgotten, his marker reduced to a modest stone that misspelled his name. The segregation he had escaped in life followed him, quietly, into death.

More than a century later, Oakland historian Dennis Evanosky and Summers’ descendants discovered the error. In 2004, after painstaking research and advocacy, Summers’ remains were exhumed and re-interred in the Grand Army of the Republic plot among other Civil War veterans—where he should have been all along. The ceremony was described as “righting a wrong,” a rare instance where the historical record was not merely corrected on paper, but physically amended in the earth.

The U.S. government provided an official military headstone under long-standing federal policy guaranteeing burial markers for honorably discharged veterans, regardless of race, rank, or ability to pay.  

Obediah Summers now rests among soldiers who fought the same war, under the same flag, for the same fragile promise of citizenship. 

Sources:
The Sacramento Bee (Oct. 19, 1889), “Obediah Has Won”; Marysville Democrat (Mar. 17, 1896), “Died at Oakland”; Oakland Tribune (Oct. 18, 2004), “Righting a Wrong / Oakland man fights for Civil War vet,” pp. 1 & 5; Mountain View Cemetery burial and re-interment records; United States Colored Troops service statistics (National Archives). 

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Black Soldiers in the Civil War

Approximately 180,000 Black men served in the Union Army and another 20,000 in the Union Navy, making up about 10 percent of all Union forces by the end of the war. Most served in segregated United States Colored Troops (USCT) units and were often paid less, given harsher labor, and denied promotions—but their service proved decisive in tipping the balance toward Union victory.

By contrast, only a few thousand Black men served the Confederacy, and nearly all did so as enslaved laborers—teamsters, cooks, fortification workers—rather than as recognized soldiers. Formal authorization for Black Confederate soldiers did not occur until March 1865, just weeks before the war ended, and resulted in almost no meaningful enlistment. The overwhelming historical record shows that Black military service in the Civil War was a Union phenomenon, driven by the pursuit of freedom and citizenship rather than loyalty to the Confederate cause.

Obediah Summers’ choice to escape slavery and fight for the Union placed him squarely within this larger, transformative movement—one that reshaped the meaning of American democracy, even when the nation struggled to honor it afterward.

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Lady Mary Kirkham Yarde-Buller (1849-1904): Beauty, Royal Titles, and Scandal end in a Sanitarium

Plot 6, Lot 172, Grave 3

Once the toast of San Francisco drawing rooms, Lady Mary Kirkham Yarde-Buller burned brightly, extravagantly—and at last, alone.

She arrived in this world wrapped in privilege and promise, born in 1849 to one of California’s most powerful pioneer families. Lady Mary Kirkham Yarde-Buller—known in her youth simply as Leilah Kirkham—was raised amid wealth, diplomacy, and social ambition, the daughter of General Ralph Kirkham, a man whose name still clings to streets and institutions like a civic watermark. From the beginning, hers was a life meant to be admired, envied, and watched.

And watched she was.

In the 1870s and ’80s, Leilah Kirkham reigned as one of San Francisco’s celebrated belles, a striking young woman whose beauty and bearing drew suitors like moths to gaslight. Marriage carried her across the Atlantic and into the English aristocracy, where she acquired the title Lady Yarde-Buller and a husband whose name promised stability, respectability, and restraint. None of it lasted.

The union collapsed amid whispers of incompatibility, financial recklessness, and emotional instability. Divorce followed—still a scandal in both England and America—and Lady Yarde-Buller returned to public view not as a contrite exile, but as a woman determined to live loudly, lavishly, and on her own terms. Newspapers tracked her movements with thinly veiled fascination, chronicling her travels, her feuds, and her increasingly erratic behavior. 

Money flowed through her hands as if it were water. She spent freely, generously, and often inexplicably—at one point accused of flinging coins into public streets, an act that delighted onlookers and horrified relatives in equal measure. Lawsuits followed. Guardianship petitions were filed. Sisters, in-laws, and attorneys squared off in courtrooms over allowances, arrears, and the uncomfortable question of Lady Yarde-Buller’s mental competence.

There was a second marriage—brief, troubled, and ill-fated—adding another chapter to her reputation as a woman forever at odds with convention and consequence. Each legal skirmish seemed to tighten the net around her independence, as relatives and judges alike tried to rein in a life they no longer understood, and perhaps never had.

By the turn of the century, the glitter had faded. Lady Yarde-Buller drifted between Europe and California, her once-famous beauty dulled by illness and exhaustion. In November 1904, the story ended quietly and grimly: death in a sanitarium in Livermore, far from the salons and ballrooms where she had once commanded every eye.

The newspapers were merciless and fascinated to the last, recounting her “strange and dramatic career” with the same appetite that had followed her triumphs decades earlier. The belle of San Francisco society had become a cautionary tale—of privilege without peace, freedom without anchor, and a woman whose refusal to live small made her impossible to contain.

Lady Mary Kirkham Yarde-Buller left no quiet legacy. She left headlines, court records, and a life that flickered brilliantly before collapsing into shadow. In death, as in life, she remained impossible to ignore.

Sources: San Francisco Call Bulletin (Nov. 16, 1904, pp. 1–2); San Francisco Examiner (Apr. 14, 1898); Oakland Enquirer (Apr. 16, 1896); San Francisco Call Bulletin (Aug. 27, 1899).

George Osbourne (1848-1916) aka George Gedge: Noted West Coast Actor; Famous as Father Serra

George Osbourne

Plot 14, Lot 224

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The curtain rises on a man born for the stage—perhaps even born before the stage was ready for him. George Osbourne, known earlier in life as George Gedge, arrived in San Francisco not as an actor but as a symbol. Brought ashore from Tasmania in 1849, he was repeatedly described in later years as the first white male child brought into San Francisco from any outside port, a living footnote to a city barely past tents and tideflats . [The assertion—repeated uncritically in later obituaries—that he was the first white male child brought into San Francisco belongs to the era’s fondness for racialized founding myths, where arrival and identity were used as shorthand for civic destiny rather than verifiable historical milestones].

Osbourne did not begin his working life in greasepaint. He trained as a mining engineer and worked the Comstock, surrounded by men chasing ore and fortune. But the theater—insatiable and unforgiving—found him anyway. Under the encouragement of impresario James Keene, he abandoned engineering, adopted the name George Osbourne, and entered a profession that would carry him across the Pacific Coast and onto nearly every significant stage west of the Rockies.

Mission Play in San Francisco Chronicle

Two roles defined him. One was Edmond Dantès, the Count of Monte Cristo, a part tailor-made for sweeping gestures, righteous fury, and grand reversals of fate. The other was quieter, heavier, and ultimately inseparable from his name: Father Junípero Serra in The Mission Play. For years, Osbourne embodied Serra at San Gabriel, so completely that when he died in 1916, newspapers announced it as the passing of “the Mission player,” as though the role itself had finally aged beyond endurance .

Behind the footlights, however, the drama curdled.

In 1886, Osbourne’s wife filed for divorce in Oakland, alleging extreme cruelty. The complaint—brutal even by the standards of a century fond of euphemism—accused him of threats, beatings, and chasing her through their home with a loaded pistol. She revealed in court that “George Osbourne” was a professional mask, and that his real name was George Gedge. The suit briefly collapsed after reconciliation, only to erupt again, leaving behind a record that reads like a melodrama without an intermission.

Yet Osbourne’s professional life endured, in part because San Francisco theater was forgiving to its stars.

Ad for the Count of Monte Cristo featuring Osbourne

In San Francisco, Osbourne was closely associated with the Alcazar Theatre, one of the city’s most important playhouses at the turn of the century. The Alcazar was a proving ground for serious actors, known for its stock companies and demanding audiences. Osbourne not only performed there but became a familiar and respected figure among its patrons, appearing in repertory productions and benefit performances alike .

Notably, the Alcazar had earlier been associated with Edwin Booth, the greatest American tragedian of the 19th century and brother of John Wilkes Booth. Booth’s appearances there helped establish the Alcazar’s reputation as a serious dramatic house, placing Osbourne—by inheritance if not by scale—within a lineage of actors who treated the stage as something closer to a vocation than a trade. By the time Osbourne was performing there regularly, the Alcazar was a place where reputations were made slowly and sustained by discipline, not novelty.

Image from L.A. Morning Tribune

George Osbourne Jr., his son, followed him onto the stage, becoming an actor in his own right and a member of touring repertory companies. In January 1904, while performing in Detroit, the younger Osbourne fell suddenly ill and died at just twenty-six years of age. Newspapers reported that he was suffering from a “peritoneal difficulty”, a term used at the time for what modern medicine would most likely identify as acute peritonitis—a severe inflammation of the abdominal lining, often caused by infection, ruptured appendix, or internal injury, and frequently fatal before the advent of antibiotics or modern surgery.

The death was swift. He had complained only briefly, a physician was summoned too late, and the curtain fell without warning. His father learned of his death while rehearsing at the Alcazar, read the letter, and—knowing no understudy could replace him—finished the performance that night, carrying grief like a prop no one else could see.

When George Osbourne died in San Francisco in 1916, he left behind a modest estate and an outsized reputation. His career, spanning nearly forty years, closed as it had opened: with headlines, reminiscence, and the quiet certainty that the stage had taken everything it wanted.

Father and son—two actors, two lives shaped by applause and absence. One arrived in San Francisco as a symbolic first, carried ashore into a developing city. The other died far from home, undone by an illness modern medicine would now treat routinely. What remains are clippings, playbills, and the faint echo of voices that once filled the Alcazar, reminding us that early California theater was not merely entertainment, but inheritance—and, sometimes, a curse.

Sources: Solano-Napa News Chronicle (George Gedge will), Vallejo Evening News obituary, Los Angeles Times obituary, San Francisco Chronicle (Jan. 12, 1904), San Francisco Call-Bulletin, The Morning Times (Oakland), San Francisco Examiner, San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Tribune

John Davis Wagenet (1892–1974) Architect with ties to Julia Morgan

Ruth & John Wagener

Plot 52D

John Davis Wagenet was an architect whose career unfolded largely out of public view, yet whose work and training places him squarely within one of the most important architectural lineages in California history.

Born on November 24, 1892, in Cincinnati, Ohio, Wagenet came of age at precisely the moment when architecture in the American West was professionalizing, formalizing, and finding its voice. He made his way west and enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied architecture during the 1910s, a period when Beaux-Arts principles, structural rigor, and regional adaptation were being actively debated and refined. 

San Simeon (San Simeon Chamber of Commerce ©)

After Berkeley, Wagenet entered the professional orbit of Julia Morgan, the pioneering architect whose office trained a generation of designers. Working as a draftsman in Morgan’s design office, Wagenet was exposed to large-scale institutional work, exacting construction standards, and the collaborative studio culture required for projects of national ambition. Contemporary references and later historical accounts credit him with participating—at least in part—in work connected to Hearst Castle, placing him among the many skilled but largely anonymous hands behind that extraordinary enterprise.

By the 1920s, Wagenet had established his own architectural practice in Oakland, maintaining offices in the Financial Center Building downtown. His work focused primarily on residential and neighborhood-scale commissions, particularly in the East Bay and Contra Costa County, where new suburbs were rising amid rolling hills and newly subdivided tracts.

The Wagenet Home, 1597 Fernwood in Oakland

One of his most personal commissions appears to have been his own family home at 1597 Fernwood Drive in Oakland’s Montclair district, a picturesque Tudor-style residence completed in 1928. With its steeply pitched roof, half-timbering, and careful siting among mature trees, the house reflects both Morgan’s influence and Wagenet’s own sensitivity to landscape and domestic scale. It stands today as a rare, tangible signature of an architect who otherwise left few overt calling cards.

Wagenet’s most prominent known public project emerged just over the Berkeley hills in Walnut Creek. In the early 1930s, local developer Robert Noble Burgess commissioned Wagenet to design an adobe-brick clubhouse for the newly developing Lakewood neighborhood. Envisioned as both a social center and a sales tool, the roughly 4,000-square-foot structure was, at the time, reportedly the most expensive house ever sold in Walnut Creek. With its Mediterranean-influenced massing and dramatic lakeside setting, the building served as a focal point for community life and a showcase for aspirational suburban living.

Despite these accomplishments, Wagenet never sought architectural celebrity. He joined the American Institute of Architects later in his career and appears to have practiced steadily but quietly, content to build well rather than build a reputation. Like many architects trained in the Morgan office, his legacy survives more clearly in buildings than in headlines.

In 1924, Wagenet married Ruth Roselle Macomber, and the couple remained together for decades, sharing a life that spanned profound changes in California’s built environment—from pre-automobile suburbs to the postwar boom. John Davis Wagenet died in Oakland on July 21, 1974, at the age of 81, and was buried alongside Ruth at Mountain View Cemetery, surrounded many of the architects and planners of his era, including Julia Morgan, Bernard Maybeck, Geoffrey Bangs and Carl Warneke.

Sources: Find a Grave memorial for John Davis Wagenet; UC Berkeley “Blue & Gold” yearbook listing “John D. at Berkeley 1914”; Walnut Creek Historical Society Lakewood clubhouse description; historical real-estate documentation and images for 1597 Fernwood Drive, Oakland; Julia Morgan Architectural History Project references.

Robert Hunter (1941–2019): Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Lyricist for the Grateful Dead

Robert Hunter and Grateful Dead album cover

Plot 11A Grave 245

Robert Hunter (1941–2019) never took the stage with the band that made him famous, yet few figures loom larger in American popular music. As the principal lyricist for the Grateful Dead, Hunter gave voice to a singular mythic America—restless, haunted, tender, and perpetually on the road.

Born Robert C. Burns in 1941, Hunter found an early kindred spirit in Jerry Garcia. When Garcia and friends formed the Grateful Dead in 1965, Hunter was already writing poems and songs steeped in folk balladry, Beat surrealism, and biblical cadence. What followed was one of the most enduring collaborations in modern songwriting: Garcia supplied the melodies; Hunter supplied the worlds.

Robert Hunger and Jerry Garcia (photo: Jay Blakesberg)

Beginning with Aoxomoxoa (1969), Hunter’s lyrics became inseparable from the Dead’s identity. He wrote the words to songs that would become touchstones for generations—Dark Star, Ripple, Truckin', China Cat Sunflower, Uncle John's Band, and Terrapin Station. These were not merely lyrics but living texts—sung, argued over, annotated, and carried like talismans.

Hunter’s words were literary without being precious. They drew freely from Americana, the King James Bible, frontier lore, tarot, and the blues, yet always sounded spoken rather than written. His songs held space for ambiguity, inviting listeners to find themselves inside the lines. As Rolling Stone later observed, he was “one of rock’s most ambitious and dazzling lyricists.”

Though forever linked to the Dead, Hunter’s reach extended far beyond them. He collaborated repeatedly with Bob Dylan, co-writing songs for Dylan’s albums Down in the Groove, Together Through Life, and Tempest. He also wrote with artists as varied as Jim Lauderdale, Little Feat, Los Lobos, and Mickey Hart, always bringing his unmistakable voice to new musical landscapes.

Recognition came—eventually. In 1994, Hunter was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with the Grateful Dead, the only non-performer ever inducted as a full member of a band. In 2013, he received the Americana Music Association Lifetime Achievement Award, performing “Ripple” himself. Two years later, Hunter and Garcia were inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, with Garcia’s daughter Trixie accepting on her father’s behalf as Hunter once again sang the song that had become his benediction.

Late in life, Hunter toured solo not for acclaim but necessity, facing mounting medical bills after a spinal cord abscess and subsequent surgeries. It was a quietly poignant coda for a man whose words had enriched millions.

Robert Hunter died in 2019 at his home in San Rafael, California, at age 78. He left behind no single creed—only verses, fragments, riddles, and invitations. Like the best folk poets, he trusted the listener to finish the song.

Sources: Find a Grave memorial for Robert Hunter; Rolling Stone obituary; Americana Music Association Lifetime Achievement Award citation; Songwriters Hall of Fame records; Alan Paul, “Eyes of the World: An Interview with Robert Hunter,” Substack.

Joseph E. Baker (1847-1914): Civil War Veteran and Oakland Tribune Editorial Writer

Plot 17, Lots 77-78

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Joseph Eugene Baker was one of those men whose influence was felt daily by thousands, yet whose name rarely traveled beyond the byline. For years, Oakland readers encountered his mind more often than his face—through editorials that shaped civic opinion, sharpened political debate, and reflected the moral confidence of a city still defining itself.

Born in the East in the early 1840s, Baker came of age during the turmoil of the Civil War. Like many of his generation, the conflict marked him permanently. He served during the war years and emerged with a lifelong seriousness about public duty, politics, and the responsibilities of citizenship—qualities that later infused his editorial work with a tone both principled and forceful. By the time he reached California, he was already a man formed by national crisis.

Baker’s early years in the West were restless and varied. He moved through mining camps and frontier towns—Ploche, Tybo, Sonora, Bodie—absorbing the landscapes, the dangers, and the personalities of the Sierra and desert regions. These experiences sharpened his descriptive powers. One of his most celebrated pieces was a firsthand account of a massive avalanche near a mountain lake, a scene he rendered with such precision and force that contemporaries compared it favorably to the great European accounts of Alpine disasters. The episode revealed what would become his hallmark: the ability to combine vivid observation with disciplined prose.

Journalism became his true vocation. Baker worked for a succession of newspapers, including the Alta California, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Oakland Times. Eventually, he found his professional home at The Oakland Tribune, where he rose to prominence as an editorial writer. His columns were widely read and deeply respected, not only for their clarity but for their moral certainty. He wrote as a man convinced that journalism was a public trust, and that newspapers existed to serve the general good—not merely to entertain or inflame.

In the broader landscape of American journalism, Baker belonged to a golden age of editorial writing. Nationally, figures such as Horace Greeley, E. L. Godkin, Henry Watterson, and Joseph Pulitzer shaped public debate with essays that blended politics, philosophy, and moral instruction. Baker was not a household name like Greeley or Pulitzer, but within California—and especially Oakland—he occupied a similar role: a trusted interpreter of events, a guardian of standards, and a reminder that democracy depended on informed readers. 

Politically, Baker was a staunch Democrat, but not a blind partisan. Friends noted that his loyalty to the party never eclipsed his judgment. He supported candidates he believed to be honest and capable, even when doing so placed him at odds with political expediency. The esteem in which he was held was such that when Governor George Pardee appointed him to a position at Folsom State Prison, it was accepted as a mark of trust rather than patronage—the only public office he ever held, and one he neither sought nor exploited.

On March 19, 1914, Joseph Eugene Baker died at his Oakland home following a stroke of apoplexy. He was in his early seventies. His death prompted an outpouring of respect from colleagues and rivals alike. Newspapers across California remarked not only on his intellectual power, but on his integrity, his loyalty to friends, and his unwavering belief in the civic mission of the press.

All three of his children became notable public figures in their own right. His daughter Margaret Baker Woodson became president and then board chairman of A.P. Woodson Oil Company, his son Cecil Baker was a Major in the Marines during WWI, and his daughter Gene Baker McComas became a noted landscape painter, muralist and journalist. 

Today, Baker rests quietly, remembered mostly through the fading columns of old newspapers and a modest grave marker. Yet for decades, his words helped shape the conscience of Oakland. In a city growing rapidly and sometimes recklessly, Joseph E. Baker stood as a steady voice—firm, literate, and unafraid to tell his readers what he believed the truth to be.

Sources: Oakland Tribune obituary (March 19–20, 1914); Oakland Los Angeles Journal obituary; NewspaperArchive.com; Find a Grave, Joseph Eugene Baker memorial; National Park Service's Civil War records.

Simeon Meads (1849-1940): Inventor and Prohibition Candidate for Governor

Simeon Meads and Grave marker

Plot 25, Lot 186

Simeon Pease Meads was born on January 11, 1849, in South Limington, Maine, at a moment when the boundaries between science, moral reform, and public life were far more porous than they would later become. He belonged to a recognizable American type of the late nineteenth century: the earnest educator–inventor who believed that rational instruction and personal virtue could improve not only individual lives, but the republic itself.

Meads made his professional home in California, where he built a long career in public education. By the late 1880s he was teaching at Oakland High School, and in 1891 he rose to the post of vice-principal. His interests extended well beyond classroom management. A practical scientist by temperament, he devised and patented an electric alarm clock designed to ring bells simultaneously throughout a school building—an innovation meant to impose order and efficiency on the daily rhythms of education.

Mead's Autobiography

His intellectual ambitions were equally evident in print. In 1884 he published Chemical Primer: An Elementary Work for Use in High Schools, Academies, and Medical Colleges, a concise and methodical introduction that reflected the period’s confidence in structured scientific learning. He later revised and expanded this work as Elements of Chemistry (1891), and followed it with Elements of Physics for Use in Secondary Schools in 1894. These textbooks placed Meads squarely within a generation of educators who sought to bring modern science into American classrooms at a time when chemistry and physics were still novel subjects for many students.

From 1908 to 1916, Meads served as principal of Cole Grammar School in West Oakland, closing out his formal educational career as an administrator rather than a polemicist. Yet outside the schoolhouse, he was increasingly drawn to moral reform—specifically temperance. Like many educators of his era, Meads believed that alcohol undermined personal discipline, family stability, and civic virtue, and that scientific reasoning supported total abstinence.

That conviction carried him into politics under the banner of the Prohibition Party. In 1902 he was the party’s nominee for lieutenant governor of California, and in 1910 he headed the Prohibition ticket as its candidate for governor. His 1910 campaign included street-corner speeches, church appearances, and factory-gate addresses, reflecting the party’s reliance on moral suasion rather than political machinery. Meads did not come close to victory. The election was dominated by Republican Hiram Johnson, who won decisively amid the progressive wave sweeping California, while Democratic and Socialist candidates divided much of the remaining vote. Meads finished far back in the totals, his support amounting to only a small fraction of the electorate.

Yet his defeat was typical rather than exceptional. Prohibitionists in the early twentieth century rarely won high office, but they exerted an influence disproportionate to their vote totals. By keeping temperance before the public, pressing the issue in churches and schools, and aligning themselves with reformist causes, they helped normalize the idea that alcohol was a social problem requiring legislative solutions. Figures like Meads functioned less as viable governors than as moral advocates, laying groundwork that would eventually culminate in statewide and national prohibition a decade later.

Simeon Pease Meads never achieved political power, but his life traced a coherent arc: science in service of education, education in service of moral reform, and moral reform in service of the state. In that sense, his unsuccessful campaigns were not failures so much as extensions of a lifelong belief that knowledge, discipline, and virtue could—and should—be engineered into the fabric of everyday life.

Sources: Prohibitionists.org, “Simeon P. Meads Bio and Vote Totals”; Chemical Primer (1884); Elements of Chemistry (1891); Elements of Physics for Use in Secondary Schools (1894); Oakland public school records; Los Angeles Herald, Oct. 23, 1910; California Secretary of State election returns (1910).

Doc Jennison (1834-1884): Jayhawker Who Fought Slavery Without Restraint

Plot 36. Lot 163

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Charles Ransford “Doc” Jennison began as one of the most ardent Free-State men in Kansas, at a moment when Free-State meant armed, hunted, and convinced that violence was not only justified but necessary. In the 1850s he stood among the principal supporters of John Brown, helping supply money, manpower, and protection to a movement that believed slavery could be destroyed only by blood.

Where Brown was apocalyptic and self-sacrificing, Jennison was practical and ambitious. Brown accepted martyrdom as inevitable; Jennison expected victory — and spoils.

During the Kansas–Missouri border war, Jennison organized armed bands whose name soon became their reputation. To Kansans, a Jayhawker was an anti-slavery guerrilla; to Missourians, a thief and arsonist. Jennison collapsed the distinction so completely that his name itself became a term of art. A “Jennison Jayhawker” was understood to mean a Free-State fighter who did not merely defeat the enemy but destroyed his home, his property, and his future.

When the Civil War began, Jennison raised cavalry units that operated along the Missouri border under Union authority. His men burned dwellings, seized livestock and goods, entered private homes without cause, and punished suspected disloyalty without trial. Even within the brutal logic of border warfare, his conduct stood out.

Federal authorities eventually intervened. Jennison was formally charged with ordering the destruction of civilian homes, permitting widespread pillage, allowing prisoners in Union custody to be lynched, selling government property for personal benefit, encouraging desertion, and publicly denouncing Union leadership. In 1862, he was court-martialed at Leavenworth and dishonorably dismissed from the United States Army — a rare and pointed rebuke for a man who claimed to embody loyalty.

Jennison occupies the uneasy ground between two better-known figures of the border war. William Quantrill, his Confederate counterpart, embraced terror openly and made no claim to moral restraint. Quantrill slaughtered in the name of the South and never pretended otherwise. Brown, at the opposite pole, killed for principle and accepted death as payment. Jennison insisted he was righteous — and entitled. His violence was ideological, but also personal; political, but also profitable.

After the war, Jennison reinvented himself as a respectable public figure. In 1871 he served a term in the Kansas State Senate, a testament to how porous the line between wartime brutality and peacetime legitimacy could be on the frontier. His legislative career, however, was undistinguished. He sponsored no major reforms, authored no landmark statutes, and left little record beyond his presence. His value lay less in governance than in symbolism — a reminder that the Free-State cause had been won by men willing to do what others would not.

His end was abrupt and unheroic. In 1875, Jennison was shot and killed during a saloon altercation in Colorado. He was buried at Mount Muncie Cemetery in Leavenworth, Kansas, among the people who best remembered both his zeal and his excesses.

Jennison's final resting place (unmarked)

In 1916, decades after his death, his body was disinterred and reburied at Mountain View Cemetery beside his wife, who had recently died there. The move carried him far from the borderlands he once terrorized, depositing a Kansas guerrilla on the Pacific edge of the country he tried to save by fire.

Jennison fought slavery — and in doing so, became something the Union itself could not tolerate. He was neither martyr nor mere outlaw, but something more unsettling: a man whose cause was just, whose methods were not, and whose name became shorthand for the moment when righteousness curdled into license.

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Sources:

Leavenworth Times (KS), May 9, 1916; Emporia News, May 17, 1862; Daily Milwaukee News, July 8, 1865; Burlington Daily Hawk-Eye Gazette, March 26, 1875; Chicago Daily Tribune, Dec. 1, 1878; Washington National Tribune, July 10, 1884; Kansas Adjutant General Records; U.S. Army court-martial proceedings; Find A Grave, Charles Ransford Jennison; contemporary Kansas–Missouri border war histories.

Ernest Granville Booth (1898-1959): The Double Life of a Convict Author

Plot 5, Grave 63, S 1/2

Ernest Granville Booth lived as if he were one of his own characters—half in shadow, half in print, always one bad decision away from the bars closing behind him again. Born in 1898, Booth became one of the strangest literary success stories of the Depression era: a man who robbed banks by day, broke bones trying to escape by night, and wrote with such clarity and bite that America briefly forgot he was doing it all from inside Folsom and San Quentin.

He entered prison young and stayed long. In 1924, the same day he married Valverda, a former San Francisco schoolteacher, Booth robbed an Oakland bank. The honeymoon never happened. Within hours he was arrested, sentenced to twenty-five years, and sent into California’s hardest institutions. What should have been the beginning of domestic life became instead a long correspondence conducted through bars, censors, and parole boards. Thirteen years later, when he finally walked free, newspapers called it a “belated honeymoon,” as if time itself had merely been paused rather than destroyed.

Butte County arrest notice

Prison broke Booth physically before it refined him intellectually. In 1928, attempting to escape over the wall at San Quentin, he shattered both legs and lay immobilized in casts. It was there, staring at a ceiling and his own limits, that Booth decided he was finished going nowhere fast. He began to write seriously—short stories, essays, and prison sketches hammered out after quarry work and by dim lights at night. What he produced was unsparing and exact: prison not as melodrama, but as bureaucracy, boredom, cruelty, and absurdity.

Editors noticed. Most notably, Henry L. Mencken took Booth seriously enough to publish him in The American Mercury, a stamp of legitimacy few inmates ever received. Mencken admired Booth’s prose for its lack of sentimentality and its refusal to moralize. Booth wrote as a man who knew exactly how easy it was to fall, and how hard it was to stand back up when the system preferred you prone.

Booth's book "Stealing Through Life"

Booth’s major works followed a consistent theme: crime stripped of romance and prison stripped of illusion. His best-known works included We Rob a Bank and Ladies of the Mob, both published in The American Mercury, and the books Stealing Through Life and With Sirens Screaming. These were not confessions so much as anatomies—cool dissections of criminal logic, prison routine, and the thin line between competence and catastrophe. Ladies of the Mob attracted Hollywood attention and was adapted into a motion picture starring Clara Bow, turning Booth, briefly, into a profitable commodity rather than a state expense.

Booth's book With Sirens Screaming

That success helped him win parole in 1937. He walked out of Folsom a famous man, greeted by Valverda, who had waited since 1924 and served as his typist, editor, and anchor. The terms of his release were cruelly ironic: Booth was forbidden for two and a half years from writing about prisons, prison officials, or parole boards—the very subjects that had made his name. Still, he complied, settled in California’s mountain country to recover from tuberculosis, and tried to live like someone who would never hear a cell door close again.

It did not last. Booth’s life followed a pattern familiar to parole officers and noir novelists alike: reform, recognition, relapse. In the 1940s he drifted back into crime, serving both state and federal sentences for theft and bank robbery. By 1947 he was again in San Quentin, and later at Terminal Island Hospital, his lungs failing where his resolve already had. Newspapers that once celebrated his freedom now ran headlines about “new trouble,” as if trouble had ever truly left him.

Even in decline, Booth retained his acid clarity. In 1957, long after parole boards and publishers alike had tired of him, he made a small splash by complaining—almost cheerfully—about Los Angeles smog. He admitted he had once pleaded guilty to a federal charge because he preferred prison air to the brown haze hanging over the city. Later, he changed his mind. The smog, he said, was “not so bad” after all. It was a line that could have come straight from one of his books: dry, resigned, amused by the absurdity of choosing between poisons.

Article on prison authors including Booth

Booth died in 1959, worn down by illness, confinement, and the long erosion of second chances. His career places him among a small, unsettling fraternity: criminals whose intelligence and talent flourished in mainstream culture even as their lives collapsed outside it. Like the forger and memoirist Edward Bunker, or the brilliant con man Charles Ponzi, Booth proved that genius does not redeem character, and talent does not guarantee escape. Skill can sharpen the fall as easily as prevent it.

What remains is the work—lean, unsentimental, and steeped in the moral fog of its time. Booth wrote crime the way film noir would soon film it: with sympathy but no illusions, style without forgiveness. He understood prisons because he lived them, understood criminals because he was one, and understood freedom only as something briefly tasted, then lost. In the end, Ernest Granville Booth did what few men behind bars ever manage. He made himself heard. He just never learned how to stop listening to the voice that kept calling him back inside.

Sources: contemporary newspaper coverage (Associated Press, United Press, INS, Oakland Tribune, Long Beach Independent, Ogden Standard-Examiner, South Haven Daily Tribune, Corona Daily Independent, Star-News, 1917–1957); Wikipedia entry on Ernest Granville Booth; Mountain View Cemetery (Oakland) burial and interment records; California Department of Corrections historical files (Folsom Prison and San Quentin); American Mercury magazine archives; Alfred A. Knopf publication records; contemporary film and literary trade reporting. 

Russ Westover (1886-1966): Cartoonist who Drew the Rise of the Working Girl

Tillie the Tailor and Russ Westover

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Russell Channing Westover was an American cartoonist best known for creating the long-running comic strip Tillie the Toiler, one of the most successful and influential newspaper features of the twentieth century. Born in Los Angeles on August 3, 1886, Westover developed an early aptitude for drawing that repeatedly brought him into conflict with employers and instructors, but ultimately shaped his professional life. His career traced the evolution of American newspaper cartooning from local sports illustration to international syndication, and his work helped define the modern “working girl” comic strip at a moment of profound social change.

Born on August 3, 1886, in Los Angeles, the son of Channing Clisson Westover and Alice Aldrich, Westover grew up in California and attended high school in Oakland. His earliest professional break came when his refusal to stop doodling finally worked in his favor. The San Francisco Bulletin hired him as a sports illustrator, recognizing that his quick hand and sharp eye could animate box scores and ballfields. From there he moved through a carousel of Bay Area newspapers—the Oakland Herald, the Globe, the Chronicle, and the San Francisco Post—producing editorial cartoons, show-business caricatures, and his first comic strip, a baseball feature called Daffy Dan.

Daffy Dan was a modest, loosely drawn strip, but it revealed the direction Westover was headed. It was rooted in everyday American life, populated by ordinary figures with exaggerated impulses, and driven more by character than by punchline. The strip never achieved the fame of his later work, but it trained him to tell a story in panels and to find humor in routine occupations. Even as he struggled to sell gag cartoons to national magazines like Life, Judge, and Collier’s—mostly without success—Westover was quietly developing the observational style that would define his career.

In 1908 he married Genesta Grace DeLancey, who would remain his wife for nearly six decades and quietly shape his most famous creation. Five years later, when the San Francisco Post merged with the Call, Westover joined the westward migration of ambitious cartoonists and moved to New York City. There he found steady work at the New York Herald, drawing a Sunday feature called Betty, an early example of the “girl strip,” a form still finding its footing in American newspapers. Readers responded warmly. The Herald gave him a daily strip as well, Fat Chance, and soon after he launched Snapshot Bill, his first nationally syndicated feature, about an aspiring photographer whose enthusiasm routinely exceeded his talent.

Then, once again, the ground shifted beneath him. When the Herald merged with the Tribune in 1924, Westover was out of a job. This time, however, he had a reputation. He freelanced successfully for national magazines that had once rejected him, refining his line and building confidence in his instincts. In 1920, sensing that American life itself had changed, he approached King Features Syndicate with an idea that would transform his career.

The war was over. Skirts were shorter. Offices were filling with women who earned their own wages. Westover proposed a strip about a working girl—not a society debutante or a domestic cipher, but a self-supporting office employee navigating modern life. The concept was not entirely new, but the character was. King Features accepted the strip, retitled it Tillie the Toiler, and on January 3, 1921, it debuted in the New York American.

Tillie Jones was a stenographer, a sometime fashion model, and a figure of startling modernity. She flirted, schemed, and dressed impeccably, managing to keep both her job and her independence with minimal visible “toil.” Early versions of Tillie leaned toward girlish frivolity, but she quickly evolved into a competent, capable worker who understood how to maneuver within a male-dominated workplace. Westover later acknowledged that her appearance was modeled on Genesta, though Tillie’s confidence and appetite for independence reflected a broader cultural shift rather than a single muse.

 Tillie the Toiler was not the first comic-strip working woman, but it was the first to celebrate the office girl as a social type worth admiring. At its height, the strip ran in more than six hundred newspapers worldwide. Readers wrote in asking where Tillie bought her clothes; Westover responded by creating a dress-pattern service. The strip spawned collected volumes, comic books, a novel, and two feature films—one silent, starring Marion Davies in 1927, and another in 1941. Through all of it, Tillie remained Tillie: stylish, self-supporting, and quietly subversive.

Westover supplemented Tillie with other work, including The Van Swaggers, a strip that skewered high-society pretensions, but his legacy rested firmly on Miss Jones. Offers came from rival syndicates promising more money, but he stayed with King Features. In 1951 he entered semiretirement, turning much of the daily labor over to his assistant, Bob Gustafson. By 1954 Westover withdrew entirely, allowing Gustafson to sign the strip. Tillie the Toiler continued until 1959, closing out a remarkable thirty-eight-year run.

That same year Westover and Genesta left New Rochelle, New York, where they had lived for decades, and moved to Ross, California. They had married in 1908 and celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary in 1958, with Mount Tamalpais rising behind their home. In retirement, Westover returned to the habit that had never left him: drawing. He spent long hours at the board, sketching without deadlines or syndicates, just as he had when he was young and unemployable.

Russ Westover

Russell C. Westover died on March 6, 1966, in San Rafael, California, after a short illness. He was seventy-nine years old. Newspapers remembered him as the creator of Tillie the Toiler, an internationally known strip that once ran in hundreds of papers from Spain to Japan. His earlier work—Daffy Dan, Snapshot Bill, the years of anonymous freelancing—was largely forgotten, absorbed into the prehistory of a medium he helped define.

Westover’s career traced the arc of American cartooning itself: from newspaper sports pages to mass syndication, from local humor to global circulation, from hand-drawn panels to a fully industrialized cultural form. Yet his story also carries a quieter irony. The man repeatedly fired for drawing on the job ultimately created one of the most enduring images of American working life—a woman who made her living with style, wit, and just enough mischief to keep things interesting.

Sources: San Rafael Daily Independent Journal, March 7, 1966; New York Times obituary, March 7, 1966; Martin Sheridan, Comics and Their Creators (1942); Coulton Waugh, The Comics (1947); Stephen D. Becker, Comic Art in America (1959); Ron Goulart, The Funnies (1995); Wikipedia entry on Russ Westover.; Find a Grave; Mountain View Cemetery records; Wikipedia