MARY FRANCES CANFIELD

1862 - 1937

MARY FRANCES CANFIELD, was born in New Lancaster, Miami (Lykins) County, Kansas on March 19, 1862, to John Montgomery Canfield and Ellinor Johnson. She died near Oklahoma City, Oklahoma County, Oklahoma, sometime on March 30, 1937. She is said to be buried in Bethany, Oklahoma, however her grave has not been found.

Mary Frances Canfield married John Calvin Van Horn before 1882, in Miami County, Kansas.

Children of Mary Frances Canfield and John Calvin Van Horn are:

1. Verna E., b. 1882, d. 1970

2. Myrtle

3. Johnnie (died in infancy)

4. Marcus Tenney, b. 1893, d. 1980

5. Pearl Margaret, b. 1896 or 1898, d. 1990

6. John Francis, b. 1902, d. 1919

Mary Frances Canfield moved to Texas with her husband and children in 1898, when her parents settled in the Aldine, Harris County, Texas, area. Later, she joined her husband, John, and lived in McAlester, Indian Territory (now Oklahoma) from about 1904 until about 1909.

Mary Frances Canfield separated from John Calvin Van Horn in about 1908, and at that time she ran a boarding house on West Cherokee Street, trying to keep a roof over her head for her children. The boarding house was located next to the railroad tracks, on which her children, Marcus Tenney and Pearl Margaret, played on.

In 1909, Mary Frances gathered up two of her children and went back to Texas. Her oldest daughter, Verna, had married Joe Moorhead the year before, and Myrtle chose to go back to Kansas and stay with aunts and uncles living there. Marcus Tenney chose to stay with his father, John Calvin, in McAlester, and only Pearl Margaret and John Francis went with their mother.

Two years after they got back to Houston, Pearl married, and Mary Frances took her son, John, and went to live on a chicken ranch, caring for the house for a windower and also caring for his chickens. She wrote two separate letters to her sister-in-law in Washington State describing the sometimes hard, sometimes hilarious situations she found herself in as care-giver to flocks of chickens! That job didn't last long, and she moved to West Street in Magnolia Park in Houston.

Mary Frances Canfield-Van Horn was also on tap to help the family of Pearl, her daughter, when the Spanish influenza hit in 1918. She moved in with her daughter's family to care for Pearl who had been hit with the disease and needed help caring for young Mary Frances Parsons, her four-year-old daughter. Mary Frances and John gave up their home in Magnolia Park and moved in bag and baggage. After having been there for only a few weeks, seventeen-year-old John Francis caught the flu and died in January, 1919. That left Mary Frances alone, with her family either dead or scattered.

After Pearl recovered sufficiently, Mary Frances went to live with first her daughter, Myrtle, who lived near Oklahoma City at that time, and also spent time with her son, Marcus Tenney, and his family who were living near Wright City, Oklahoma. When Marcus Tenney decided to move to East Texas, Myrtle came and took her mother back to the Oklahoma City area where Mary Frances died.

Sometime after the letters were written to her sister-in-law, it is told that a kerosene stove blew up in Mary Frances' face and rendered her blind. When she stayed with her son, Marcus, they had to tie a rope outside from trees to the house to the barn and back again for Mary Frances to hold onto to find her way around.

The final resting place of Mary Frances Canfield-Van Horn is not known. Her daughter, Myrtle, contacted the family at the time of her death and told them she was buried on a pretty little hill in a Bethany, Oklahoma, cemetery. That grave has been searched for and not found. Myrtle herself left Oklahoma and lived in California for the remainder of her years, and no further information regarding the remains of Mary Frances was learned.