LAURA'S STORY: ~THE STORY~---related-pages---site navigation
A brief and incomplete biography of Laura:
Here's the only good photograph that we have of Laura as an adult, taken in 1948, when she was 67 years old:
Laura always comes across as the odd man out in the family. The rest of the siblings went out and about in the world. Laura didn’t; she stayed in Canton. The rest of the siblings deleted their father from their lives. Laura didn’t. The other four siblings divided up into pairs: Will and Eva were particularly close, and Alma and Fred were particularly close. Fred was very fond of Laura, but given the choice, he lived near Alma.
There’s a gap in the sibling line. The birth years are:
Will 1875
Alma 1877
Fred 1879
Laura 1881
--
Eva 1885
In order to complete the pattern, there should have been a brother in 1883. But there wasn’t, and I’ve never come across any indication that there was ever any sign of a sibling in the four-year gap between Laura and Eva. Maybe if there had been one, that would have been the sibling that Laura would have been close to, but the cosmos missed an opportunity.
However that may have been, Laura was still very much in touch with her mother and her siblings, with occasional visits. AG visited her as a child with her father Fred, and remembered her as a kind and loving person, like AG’s maternal grandmother.
Laura was born in on January 29, 1881. Mama Margaret commented in a 1909 letter to Will that Laura had problems with her disposition but worked through them:
"I think you have the best disposition and poor Laura the worst, but her religion has helped her to overcome all that was ugly and disagreeable."
Mama Margaret always liked to believe that religion helped, so I don’t know what the real story is. There is no doubt that Laura was religious; it crops up in the stories about her, and in newspaper articles she is mentioned in local meetings supporting Methodist missionary efforts.
Laura was probably in her early teens when her father’s anger management issues really started taking hold. Here’s what we have from Mama Margaret’s divorce petition. The “he” in the initial sentence is, of course, Papa Charles, also called the defendant, and the plaintiff is Mama Margaret.
That in the month of December, 1895, at their residence in Canton, Ohio, he was guilty of extreme cruelty toward the plaintiff in this: That he struck her over the head with a wash basin, threw water on her, called her a —- liar, a —- brute, a —- mule, a hypocrite and many other names of a similar character, all of which the plaintiff cannot now recall; that when he struck her with the wash basin, as aforesaid, she was protected from further injury by him from her son William, who interfered for the purpose of preventing any further injury, when the defendant seized the butcher knife and undertook to use the same on his son, William, but was prevented from doing so by his daughter, Laura, and by his son escaping from the house.
Laura would have been just under sixteen years old at this time, dealing with her father who was wielding a butcher knife. Over the next few years there were other instances of abuse by her father of her mother and occasionally of Laura and her siblings, but this is the only instance in which Laura’s name is mentioned specifically in the divorce petition. There is also mention of Mama Margaret fleeing more than once to the bedroom of the daughters late at night. It must have been horrific.
The divorce petition was made in 1900, and probably granted later that year.
In 1903 Eva reported that Laura had gone to St. Louis to do Traveler’s Aid work in the Deaconess Hospital there. Her obituary says she went to the Epworth Evangelistic Institute She ended up going to the world's first osteopathic college, A.T. Still University in Kirksville, Missouri, founded in 1892, a couple of hundred miles northwest of St. Louis. It may be that her father loaned her some money for her schooling.
She seems to have been stricter than her siblings. She came home from Missouri on vacation in May of 1906, and Alma wrote to Will (who was teaching at West Point at the time):
I wish you could have been here the other night to see Mr. Hammond shock Laura. She came Tuesday morning and he was playing tennis Tuesday afternoon and stayed to supper. He laid himself out to shock her and I guess he did it. The rest of us were vastly amused except for Mama + Laura. They didn’t altogether enjoy it. It was a shame to start in teasing her the first day but it was exceedingly funny. Mama told him he couldn’t smoke here after Laura came and I am afraid he had a wicked desire to get even.
In 1904, her mother and siblings left Canton and moved to Oberlin, and then in 1908 they moved further afield. Mama Margaret and Alma went to Massachusetts, and Eva went to New York. Meanwhile Fred started medical school in Battle Creek, Michigan, and Will travelled to various places for the Army. But when Laura graduated from osteopathic college in 1909, she returned to Canton. Perhaps she had an agreement for setting up a practice there. There was some paper that she was sending around the family at this time for all of their signatures. Perhaps it had something to do with references for setting up the practice.
She was able to take a break before starting up. Mama Margaret wrote to Will in June 1909:
And I was so glad you sent Laura such a generous check for it will enable her to take a good rest before she begins to practise. She has had a hard year because she was tired out at the beginning of it. She worked all last summer - had no rest at all, so she is resting now.
This was about the time that Eva got married to Frank Evans in New York, and before the wedding Laura was curious and concerned for her younger sister. Fred reported to Will in September 1909 that she took action from afar:
Laura’s particular friend at Kirksville called to see him at Laura’s request and gave a very good account of her experience and impression.
Laura took the Ohio State Board exam in December of 1909, a four-day ordeal. The Stark County Democrat reported in their January 6, 1910 issue:
Miss Laura E. Stokey of Alliance, formerly of Canton, has been granted a certificate as an osteopath by the state medical board.
In 1910 Will wrote to his family that he was engaged to be married to Sarah Margaret Clarke, a Christian Scientist. Mama Margaret was staying with Laura at the time, while Alma was on a long trip to England. Mama Margaret asked Laura what she thought of Christian Science. Laura responded that it was neither Christian nor science. I’ve seen that written elsewhere, so perhaps she picked it up at osteopathic college. There was, after all, a Christian Science college in St. Louis, founded in 1889, so the osteopathic students might well have talked about it.
Some other members of the family later showed an interest in or sympathy for Christian Science. Laura never did.
When Will's wife died in 1912, Laura told Papa Charles. If she had not done so, would anybody have told him? It seems unlikely.
Papa Charles died in January 1916, and Laura held a funeral for him at her house.
Laura was quite capable. That is my mother’s memory of her, and that is how she seems to me. Here’s her account of an incident in the spring of 1917:
About three weeks ago, we had an accident to my automobile. No one was in it, at the time. I was busy with a patient, and had left the car out in front of the house, because I expected to need it soon. A runaway team dashed up over our lawn and overturned a tree. The tongue of the wagon rammed the front fender at the right; the bracket that holds the lamp was broken off, and several other things damaged. The engine was unharmed. I went out when I heard the noise, and found out whose team it was; also looked for a witness, in case one was needed. There happened to be a mail-carrier at the place, so I “got his number.” I reported to Steiner Coal Co., whose team did the damage, and they agreed to pay, without any protest, when I showed the estimate that was made by the firm repairing the car. It will cost them about $58. We expect to have the car this week. It has been hard to make my trips out, without it.
So, she had an automobile, which she drove herself. When a coal wagon ran into it out of the blue, she went out, assessed the damage, and confronted the wagon driver (with a team of excited horses somewhere in the vicinity) and got the necessary information from him, and found a witness to the accident, just in case. Then she got an repair estimate from a garage, and took it to the company responsible for the wagon and got an agreement from them, without any trouble, to reimburse. Definitely not a clinging vine.
In May 1924, Mama Margaret happened to be in Cincinnati en route to the funeral of her younger brother Jim when she died unexpectedly of an intestinal blockage. Laura’s other siblings were, of course, far away - Will in Atlanta, Alma in Massachusetts, Fred in Angola, and Eva in Philadelphia. Mama Margaret was buried in Canton. Will came to help deal with this sad event, and my impression is that Alma and Eva came for the funeral as well. Laura dealt with all the other relatives who came from out of town for the funeral. Laura wrote to Will and Kathleen afterwards:
I received a letter from Dr. Edwards. She was very loath to make out a bill, but I had insisted, so she made a nominal charge of ten dollars. I shall send her at least fifteen dollars. It would be impossible to meet the obligation, and clear my indebtedness to her, for she gave so freely of her services and her time, and so did Dr. Crotty and Miss Attee and so many other people. I have a deep sense of gratitude to many people for many things - evidences of their kindly, comforting sympathy expressed in various ways - too numerous to mention.
It’s not essential information, perhaps, but I like it.
There was some sort of illness in 1927, possibly affecting her mind temporarily. This information comes from a letter from Aunt Rebecca Provines Taggart, who was not on the scene but only heard about it, so it's not exactly definite.
Laura came to Massachusetts in the summer of 1929 for a visit, staying at Fernbank, Alma’s cottage in Woods Hole. Fred was there, with his new wife Sibyl. Both of them had recently returned from several years of missionary work in Africa, so I imagine that part of the reason for Laura's visit was to see her brother. Sibyl's parents were there as well. They were quite religious, so I can easily imagine Laura getting along well with them, assuming there were no doctrinal differences between the Hoskings (Presbyterian) and Laura (Methodist).
There is a story that came down in the family that Laura was utterly shocked by the bathing suits the women wore in Woods Hole, so much so that she never came to Fernbank again. I suspect that there's only a grain of truth to that story. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that Alma exaggerated it out of all proportion. Alma wasn't terribly sympathetic to Laura's religiousness.
We have a postcard that Laura sent to Will's daughter Kay after the Woods Hole visit. There's no way of knowing for sure if Laura sent postcards to all of her nieces and nephews at the time, or if she sent just the one to Kay. I'm inclined to believe that Kay was the only one to get a postcard because Kay was the Junior Reporter, always looking for stories, but I don't know.
When Alma and Eva visited their late mother’s sister Rebecca in western Pennsylvania in 1934, driving from Massachusetts, Laura drove there from Canton. Alma and Eva then drove to Canton to revisit childhood memories, so Laura was going out of her way to see her aunt and cousins. I think Alma occasionally sent her money, but that's a several-years-old memory of a letter that I read. I'll look for it.
She traveled to Massachusetts in January 1948 for her niece Kay’s wedding. It was very cold weather, but Laura made the trip. One of our few pictures of her is from this event, with Eva, Fred, and Alma. I think there's another picture somewhere that includes my maternal grandmother. Another thing to keep an eye out for.
Laura seems to have always had somebody living with her. Perhaps it was a paid companion/housekeeper, but it seems like more of a friend. But, being a warm and loving person, maybe she treated a companion/housekeeper like a friend. There seem to have been different people over the years. In 1917, when she wrote to congratulate her sister-in-law Kathleen on the birth of Billy, she said:
Last evening I mailed a package to you for that precious baby. We hunted the town over, to find the prettiest set here, for the best is hardly good enough for our boy.
Then in 1929, in her postcard to Kay, she said:
Today we had to drive to East Liverpool to bring our twelve-year-old Rodney to the dentist. School begins, at Hammondsville, next Tuesday, so he must be ready for that.
In 1949, in a January letter to Kay, she said:
We had a very quiet Christmas here, - Miss Redding her sister and I. We had been invited to spend the day at her brother's home, near Wooster, but the trip was too much because of the uncertainty of the weather, and therefore, of the roads.
I asked AG, but she knew nothing about it. So I asked Barbara, who grew up in Pittsburgh, reasonably close to Canton, since her father, Bill, was a professor at Carnegie Tech.
Aunt Laura’s companion was Rosamond Irey. I don’t know how long she lived with Aunt Laura, but always remember her being there when we’d visit. She was Aunt Laura’s eyes, and wrote all the correspondence I got back from Aunt Laura – not that much, but Aunt Laura would always ask us to keep in touch and let her know what was going on, so very occasionally I’d write to her. I haven’t even reread all the old letters I’ve saved for so many years now – who knows what I’ll find in them. Rosamond would prepare the light lunch or snacks I remember on visits.
So we seem to have the mother of a 12-year-old son in 1929, Miss Redding in 1949, and Rosamond Irey in the 1950s and 1960s.
Laura died in January 1975. Will's elder son Bill lived fairly nearby, in Pittsburgh. Barbara said:
Daddy never mentioned Aunt Laura’s funeral without a description of getting there. Canton is about two hours from Pittsburgh, probably a bit longer that day with inclement January weather and he was trying to listen to his beloved Pittsburgh Steelers playing in their first Super Bowl and having a hard time getting good reception. They did win!
Actually, it was visiting hours; the funeral was the following day. But I still like the story.
There’s a gap in the sibling line. The birth years are:
Will 1875
Alma 1877
Fred 1879
Laura 1881
--
Eva 1885
In order to complete the pattern, there should have been a brother in 1883. But there wasn’t, and I’ve never come across any indication that there was ever any sign of a sibling in the four-year gap between Laura and Eva. Maybe if there had been one, that would have been the sibling that Laura would have been close to, but the cosmos missed an opportunity.
However that may have been, Laura was still very much in touch with her mother and her siblings, with occasional visits. AG visited her as a child with her father Fred, and remembered her as a kind and loving person, like AG’s maternal grandmother.
Laura was born in on January 29, 1881. Mama Margaret commented in a 1909 letter to Will that Laura had problems with her disposition but worked through them:
"I think you have the best disposition and poor Laura the worst, but her religion has helped her to overcome all that was ugly and disagreeable."
Mama Margaret always liked to believe that religion helped, so I don’t know what the real story is. There is no doubt that Laura was religious; it crops up in the stories about her, and in newspaper articles she is mentioned in local meetings supporting Methodist missionary efforts.
Laura was probably in her early teens when her father’s anger management issues really started taking hold. Here’s what we have from Mama Margaret’s divorce petition. The “he” in the initial sentence is, of course, Papa Charles, also called the defendant, and the plaintiff is Mama Margaret.
That in the month of December, 1895, at their residence in Canton, Ohio, he was guilty of extreme cruelty toward the plaintiff in this: That he struck her over the head with a wash basin, threw water on her, called her a —- liar, a —- brute, a —- mule, a hypocrite and many other names of a similar character, all of which the plaintiff cannot now recall; that when he struck her with the wash basin, as aforesaid, she was protected from further injury by him from her son William, who interfered for the purpose of preventing any further injury, when the defendant seized the butcher knife and undertook to use the same on his son, William, but was prevented from doing so by his daughter, Laura, and by his son escaping from the house.
Laura would have been just under sixteen years old at this time, dealing with her father who was wielding a butcher knife. Over the next few years there were other instances of abuse by her father of her mother and occasionally of Laura and her siblings, but this is the only instance in which Laura’s name is mentioned specifically in the divorce petition. There is also mention of Mama Margaret fleeing more than once to the bedroom of the daughters late at night. It must have been horrific.
The divorce petition was made in 1900, and probably granted later that year.
In 1903 Eva reported that Laura had gone to St. Louis to do Traveler’s Aid work in the Deaconess Hospital there. Her obituary says she went to the Epworth Evangelistic Institute She ended up going to the world's first osteopathic college, A.T. Still University in Kirksville, Missouri, founded in 1892, a couple of hundred miles northwest of St. Louis. It may be that her father loaned her some money for her schooling.
She seems to have been stricter than her siblings. She came home from Missouri on vacation in May of 1906, and Alma wrote to Will (who was teaching at West Point at the time):
I wish you could have been here the other night to see Mr. Hammond shock Laura. She came Tuesday morning and he was playing tennis Tuesday afternoon and stayed to supper. He laid himself out to shock her and I guess he did it. The rest of us were vastly amused except for Mama + Laura. They didn’t altogether enjoy it. It was a shame to start in teasing her the first day but it was exceedingly funny. Mama told him he couldn’t smoke here after Laura came and I am afraid he had a wicked desire to get even.
In 1904, her mother and siblings left Canton and moved to Oberlin, and then in 1908 they moved further afield. Mama Margaret and Alma went to Massachusetts, and Eva went to New York. Meanwhile Fred started medical school in Battle Creek, Michigan, and Will travelled to various places for the Army. But when Laura graduated from osteopathic college in 1909, she returned to Canton. Perhaps she had an agreement for setting up a practice there. There was some paper that she was sending around the family at this time for all of their signatures. Perhaps it had something to do with references for setting up the practice.
She was able to take a break before starting up. Mama Margaret wrote to Will in June 1909:
And I was so glad you sent Laura such a generous check for it will enable her to take a good rest before she begins to practise. She has had a hard year because she was tired out at the beginning of it. She worked all last summer - had no rest at all, so she is resting now.
This was about the time that Eva got married to Frank Evans in New York, and before the wedding Laura was curious and concerned for her younger sister. Fred reported to Will in September 1909 that she took action from afar:
Laura’s particular friend at Kirksville called to see him at Laura’s request and gave a very good account of her experience and impression.
Laura took the Ohio State Board exam in December of 1909, a four-day ordeal. The Stark County Democrat reported in their January 6, 1910 issue:
Miss Laura E. Stokey of Alliance, formerly of Canton, has been granted a certificate as an osteopath by the state medical board.
In 1910 Will wrote to his family that he was engaged to be married to Sarah Margaret Clarke, a Christian Scientist. Mama Margaret was staying with Laura at the time, while Alma was on a long trip to England. Mama Margaret asked Laura what she thought of Christian Science. Laura responded that it was neither Christian nor science. I’ve seen that written elsewhere, so perhaps she picked it up at osteopathic college. There was, after all, a Christian Science college in St. Louis, founded in 1889, so the osteopathic students might well have talked about it.
Some other members of the family later showed an interest in or sympathy for Christian Science. Laura never did.
When Will's wife died in 1912, Laura told Papa Charles. If she had not done so, would anybody have told him? It seems unlikely.
Papa Charles died in January 1916, and Laura held a funeral for him at her house.
Laura was quite capable. That is my mother’s memory of her, and that is how she seems to me. Here’s her account of an incident in the spring of 1917:
About three weeks ago, we had an accident to my automobile. No one was in it, at the time. I was busy with a patient, and had left the car out in front of the house, because I expected to need it soon. A runaway team dashed up over our lawn and overturned a tree. The tongue of the wagon rammed the front fender at the right; the bracket that holds the lamp was broken off, and several other things damaged. The engine was unharmed. I went out when I heard the noise, and found out whose team it was; also looked for a witness, in case one was needed. There happened to be a mail-carrier at the place, so I “got his number.” I reported to Steiner Coal Co., whose team did the damage, and they agreed to pay, without any protest, when I showed the estimate that was made by the firm repairing the car. It will cost them about $58. We expect to have the car this week. It has been hard to make my trips out, without it.
So, she had an automobile, which she drove herself. When a coal wagon ran into it out of the blue, she went out, assessed the damage, and confronted the wagon driver (with a team of excited horses somewhere in the vicinity) and got the necessary information from him, and found a witness to the accident, just in case. Then she got an repair estimate from a garage, and took it to the company responsible for the wagon and got an agreement from them, without any trouble, to reimburse. Definitely not a clinging vine.
In May 1924, Mama Margaret happened to be in Cincinnati en route to the funeral of her younger brother Jim when she died unexpectedly of an intestinal blockage. Laura’s other siblings were, of course, far away - Will in Atlanta, Alma in Massachusetts, Fred in Angola, and Eva in Philadelphia. Mama Margaret was buried in Canton. Will came to help deal with this sad event, and my impression is that Alma and Eva came for the funeral as well. Laura dealt with all the other relatives who came from out of town for the funeral. Laura wrote to Will and Kathleen afterwards:
I received a letter from Dr. Edwards. She was very loath to make out a bill, but I had insisted, so she made a nominal charge of ten dollars. I shall send her at least fifteen dollars. It would be impossible to meet the obligation, and clear my indebtedness to her, for she gave so freely of her services and her time, and so did Dr. Crotty and Miss Attee and so many other people. I have a deep sense of gratitude to many people for many things - evidences of their kindly, comforting sympathy expressed in various ways - too numerous to mention.
It’s not essential information, perhaps, but I like it.
There was some sort of illness in 1927, possibly affecting her mind temporarily. This information comes from a letter from Aunt Rebecca Provines Taggart, who was not on the scene but only heard about it, so it's not exactly definite.
Laura came to Massachusetts in the summer of 1929 for a visit, staying at Fernbank, Alma’s cottage in Woods Hole. Fred was there, with his new wife Sibyl. Both of them had recently returned from several years of missionary work in Africa, so I imagine that part of the reason for Laura's visit was to see her brother. Sibyl's parents were there as well. They were quite religious, so I can easily imagine Laura getting along well with them, assuming there were no doctrinal differences between the Hoskings (Presbyterian) and Laura (Methodist).
There is a story that came down in the family that Laura was utterly shocked by the bathing suits the women wore in Woods Hole, so much so that she never came to Fernbank again. I suspect that there's only a grain of truth to that story. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that Alma exaggerated it out of all proportion. Alma wasn't terribly sympathetic to Laura's religiousness.
We have a postcard that Laura sent to Will's daughter Kay after the Woods Hole visit. There's no way of knowing for sure if Laura sent postcards to all of her nieces and nephews at the time, or if she sent just the one to Kay. I'm inclined to believe that Kay was the only one to get a postcard because Kay was the Junior Reporter, always looking for stories, but I don't know.
When Alma and Eva visited their late mother’s sister Rebecca in western Pennsylvania in 1934, driving from Massachusetts, Laura drove there from Canton. Alma and Eva then drove to Canton to revisit childhood memories, so Laura was going out of her way to see her aunt and cousins. I think Alma occasionally sent her money, but that's a several-years-old memory of a letter that I read. I'll look for it.
She traveled to Massachusetts in January 1948 for her niece Kay’s wedding. It was very cold weather, but Laura made the trip. One of our few pictures of her is from this event, with Eva, Fred, and Alma. I think there's another picture somewhere that includes my maternal grandmother. Another thing to keep an eye out for.
Laura seems to have always had somebody living with her. Perhaps it was a paid companion/housekeeper, but it seems like more of a friend. But, being a warm and loving person, maybe she treated a companion/housekeeper like a friend. There seem to have been different people over the years. In 1917, when she wrote to congratulate her sister-in-law Kathleen on the birth of Billy, she said:
Last evening I mailed a package to you for that precious baby. We hunted the town over, to find the prettiest set here, for the best is hardly good enough for our boy.
Then in 1929, in her postcard to Kay, she said:
Today we had to drive to East Liverpool to bring our twelve-year-old Rodney to the dentist. School begins, at Hammondsville, next Tuesday, so he must be ready for that.
In 1949, in a January letter to Kay, she said:
We had a very quiet Christmas here, - Miss Redding her sister and I. We had been invited to spend the day at her brother's home, near Wooster, but the trip was too much because of the uncertainty of the weather, and therefore, of the roads.
I asked AG, but she knew nothing about it. So I asked Barbara, who grew up in Pittsburgh, reasonably close to Canton, since her father, Bill, was a professor at Carnegie Tech.
Aunt Laura’s companion was Rosamond Irey. I don’t know how long she lived with Aunt Laura, but always remember her being there when we’d visit. She was Aunt Laura’s eyes, and wrote all the correspondence I got back from Aunt Laura – not that much, but Aunt Laura would always ask us to keep in touch and let her know what was going on, so very occasionally I’d write to her. I haven’t even reread all the old letters I’ve saved for so many years now – who knows what I’ll find in them. Rosamond would prepare the light lunch or snacks I remember on visits.
So we seem to have the mother of a 12-year-old son in 1929, Miss Redding in 1949, and Rosamond Irey in the 1950s and 1960s.
Laura died in January 1975. Will's elder son Bill lived fairly nearby, in Pittsburgh. Barbara said:
Daddy never mentioned Aunt Laura’s funeral without a description of getting there. Canton is about two hours from Pittsburgh, probably a bit longer that day with inclement January weather and he was trying to listen to his beloved Pittsburgh Steelers playing in their first Super Bowl and having a hard time getting good reception. They did win!
Actually, it was visiting hours; the funeral was the following day. But I still like the story.
LAURA'S STORY: ---the story---~RELATED PAGES~---site navigation
RELATED DOCUMENTS/PAGES:
LAURA'S STORY: ---the story---related pages~SITE NAVIGATION~
WHERE AM I?
WHAT ARE THE PREVIOUS PAGE AND THE NEXT PAGE?
WHAT ARE THE PREVIOUS STORY PAGE AND THE NEXT STORY PAGE?