# Following the Sun **From Yorkshire to the Pacific** Spence • Swallow • Anderson Our story now changes to a different branch of the family. Back to England, back to the line that will merge with the Strong line. Over roughly two and a half centuries, the Spence family traveled from the parish country of West Yorkshire to the far edge of the Pacific Northwest, carried westward by the same restless currents that moved so many working families of the age. Their story begins in an old English market town, threads through the farming prairies of the Midwest, and unfolds across the mining camps, railheads, and ranch valleys of the American West — a journey that, in its final generation, tied the Spence line to the Strongs through the marriage of Josephine Lillian Spence. ## Yorkshire Beginnings The family's earliest known roots lie in the parish country of Yorkshire, with **Richard Spence**, born at Warmfield in 1718, standing at the head of the line as it can now be followed. From him it passed through **Robert Spence**, born about 1756, who married **Sarah Taylor** at Pontefract in 1776, and then to **Edward Spence**, born about 1777 at Knottingley, who married **Mary Milner** in 1798. For roughly a century — from the late 1700s into the middle years of the nineteenth century — the intertwined Spence and Swallow families made their home in and around Pontefract, in the West Riding. Marriages were solemnized here in the 1770s and 1780s, children were born and christened through the 1830s and 1840s, and the census enumerators of 1841 and 1851 still found the family rooted in the town before many of them turned their faces westward. Pontefract sat on a low ridge in the fertile lowlands south and east of Leeds, in a district whose flat, well-drained soils gave way to some of the richest market-gardening ground in the north of England. Its name — from the Latin for "broken bridge" — hints at its long antiquity, and by the era this family knew it the town was already old, layered with centuries of history. Its ruined castle, slighted after the English Civil War of the previous century, still loomed as a grassy, tumbled monument, a reminder that this had once been one of the great strongholds of the north, the place where Richard II met his end. But by the late eighteenth century Pontefract was a market town of only a few thousand souls, comparatively genteel and agricultural in feeling — a place of tradesmen, market gardeners, maltsters, and small manufacturers rather than a smoke-blackened mill town. The land around Pontefract was famous above all for liquorice, whose long roots suited the deep, sandy loam. From it came the town's best-known product, the small round sweets known as Pontefract cakes, stamped with the image of the castle. Alongside liquorice the town supported malting and brewing, tanning, and the ordinary trades of a market center, while beneath the surface ran the coal of the great Yorkshire coalfield, which through the first half of the nineteenth century drew laboring families in and gave the countryside a harder, more industrial edge. Men accustomed to the handling of teams and wagons were a familiar part of the working population — the kind of practical, mobile trades that later served emigrants well on the overland trails of the American West. Life turned on the parish and its registers, and the century the family spent here was one of enormous upheaval: the wars against France, the hunger and unrest that followed the peace of 1815, the Corn Laws and depressions of the 1820s and 1830s, and the Reform agitation and Chartism that stirred the West Riding. By the 1840s — the decade in which the youngest Spence children were being born — Britain was in the grip of the Hungry Forties, a stretch of poor harvests and deep uncertainty. It was precisely in these years that families like this one decided to leave. ## John Mathew Spence and Margaret Swallow The bridge between the old country and the new was **John Mathew Spence**, born in 1805 at Knottingley, a small town on the River Aire known for its glassworks, limekilns, and river trade. He was the son of **Edward Spence** and **Mary Milner**, and a boy growing up there in the years around the close of the Napoleonic Wars would have known the rhythms of a busy inland port and the hard labor that supported it. His wife, **Margaret Swallow**, began her own life in Pontefract, born on 13 March 1805 to **Christopher Swallow** and **Elizabeth Fetherston**. The two married at Pontefract on 28 July 1830, and the town remained the center of their life in England for more than two decades. Together they raised a large family of eight — Matthew, Thomas, **John W**., James C. "Doc," William E., Joseph, Dorothy, and Edward — and the census enumerations of 1841 and 1851 found them settled in the town, a rootedness that suggests John had found reliable work and a place in the community. That world changed suddenly in 1852. The Spences arrived at New York on 19 May of that year, part of the great tide of English emigration flowing toward the American interior. The family did not remain at the port but pressed inland, and by 1860 they had settled at Prairie City in White County, Indiana — prairie farming country in the young state's northwest, where deep soils and open land offered an independence rarely available to a working man in Pontefract. The pull of the West did not release its hold. At some point after 1860 John moved on to California, an arduous journey for a man already past fifty, making his home in the fertile Sacramento Valley of Butte County. He died there on 25 September 1867 at Gridley, at the age of sixty-two, and was buried in the farming country of the Far West. Margaret's later years traced the same restless mobility: she appears at Kimshew in Butte County in 1870, in Humboldt, Nevada, in 1875, and at Tehama in 1880 before her death at Gridley on 27 December 1889, at the age of eighty-four. She was buried there, a long way from the Yorkshire town where her story began. ## Prairie City: A Way-Station on the Indiana Prairie For a brief interval the whole family gathered on the northwestern Indiana prairie. In 1860 John and Margaret, together with Matthew, Thomas, Edward, John, and Dorothy, were counted among the residents of Prairie City in White County — English-born newcomers, one household among the scattered farm families then filling in this corner of the state. White County lay in flat, fertile country shaped less by hills than by horizon. The name Prairie City was no accident: much of the surrounding township was open tallgrass prairie, an expanse of deep-rooted grasses that had daunted the earliest settlers and resisted the light plows of the pioneer era. Only heavier steel plows and systematic drainage would reveal the black soil to be among the richest farmland in the nation, and in 1860 that transformation was underway but far from complete. Life ran on farming, plain and simple — corn and wheat, hogs and cattle — with households largely self-provisioning and cash often scarce. The railroads pushing westward across Indiana in the 1850s gave prairie communities a restless, provisional quality, and men accustomed to the road were essential to a frontier economy that depended on wagons where rails did not yet reach. The year 1860 was one of gathering crisis, and within a year the young men of White County would be marching off to war. But for the Spences, Prairie City was a way-station rather than a destination; the same restlessness that had carried them from Yorkshire would soon carry the family onward toward the mining country of Nevada and the Pacific coast. ## The Immigrant Generation The sons and daughters of John Mathew Spence and Margaret Swallow, all born in Pontefract, came of age scattered across the frontier states, following mining country, ranch land, and the westward roads of Ohio, Indiana, Nevada, and California. The eldest, Matthew, born in 1831, moved through Indiana, Ohio, the Humboldt mining districts of Nevada, and the counties of Sutter and Butte in California, dying at Gridley in 1890. Thomas, born in 1833, followed much the same trail — from Yorkshire to Indiana and Ohio, then into Nevada's Humboldt country and on to the ranching and mining districts of northern California and the Klamath Lake region of Oregon — and lived to the age of eighty-five, dying at Orland in Glenn County, California, in 1918. James C. "Doc" Spence, born in 1838, settled in the mining country of Josephine County, Oregon — Althouse, Waldo, and Kerby — married Susan A. Higgins in 1874, and lived at Kerby until his death in 1924, also at eighty-five. William E. Spence, born in Yorkshire in 1840, came to America as a child and crossed the plains with his parents, traveling from Ohio to California. About 1868 he married Amelia Ann Taylor at Gridley, and much of the family's life was spent partly in Oregon, where they held a large stock ranch in Klamath county. He was remembered at his death as one of Orland's most respected citizens, an honored member of the I.O.O.F. lodge for forty years. Having been in failing health for some time, he died peacefully on 13 November 1911, at the age of seventy-one years, seven months, and thirteen days, his funeral conducted by the Odd Fellows. Five children survived him: Mrs. Alice M. Southwick of San Diego, Mrs. Irene Alexander of Dorris, Mrs. G. W. Harriger, W. E. Spence, and A. C. Spence of Orland. Two of the younger children did not share in the family's long American story. Joseph, born in 1841, died before 1860. Dorothy, born in 1845, and Edward, born in 1849, both spent time at Prairie City on the family's westward path; Dorothy died before 1893 and Edward in 1899. ## John W. Spence, the Family's Great Wanderer Of all the immigrant generation, it was **John W. Spence** who most fully embodied the family's restlessness. Born on 18 December 1835 at Pontefract, he was still in the town as a boy in 1841 and as a young man in 1851. By 1853 he had crossed the Atlantic and reached Defiance, Ohio — a striking leap for a young man barely out of boyhood, and one that set the tone for a life of movement. By 1860 he had pushed inland to Prairie City in Indiana, and from there his path led into the far West. He made his living as a teamster, and by 1870 he was in Humboldt County, Nevada, in the heart of the Great Basin mining frontier — country where hauling freight and moving settlers was demanding, dangerous, and essential work. He guided families and their possessions westward over long overland routes, often gone from home for months at a time. One remembered episode captures both the hardship of that life and the standing he held on the frontier: while John was away on one of these long journeys, his family in Elk, Washington fell into want and went hungry, and local Indians, learning of their distress, brought them food, saying they could not let the family of John Spence go without. It speaks to the good relationship he kept with the native people among whom he lived and traveled. ## Sophia Margaret Anderson The woman John married had come to America by an entirely different road. **Sophia Margaret Anderson** was born in Stockholm on 16 December 1855, the daughter of **Martha Jansdotter**, in a busy port city where opportunity for a young woman of ordinary means was narrow. In 1873, at eighteen, she stepped ashore in America as a single girl — one among a great wave of Swedish housemaids who crossed in those years to take up domestic service. She was not entirely alone in the venture: her brother Peter had made the same journey earlier, arriving in 1864, and the presence of family already established would have eased her path. Not long after her arrival, Sophia's life turned toward the American West. She and John W. Spence married on 5 July 1875 at Toana, in Elko County, Nevada — she was twenty and he was forty. Toana was a small station town on the high desert, owing its existence to the Central Pacific Railroad, which had studded the sagebrush with water stops and freighting points where goods came off the rails to be hauled by wagon into the surrounding mining districts. It was exactly the kind of place a teamster's trade made necessary and a young couple's fortunes might touch only briefly — a fitting crossroads for two restless, working newcomers, an English-born teamster and a recently arrived Swedish immigrant. ## A Household Perpetually on the Move Together John and Sophia raised a remarkable family of twelve children, whose birthplaces mark the steady movement westward. Through the 1870s and into the 1880s the family was rooted for a time in Elko County, Nevada, where they married and where several children were born — Bertha May, John William, Thomas Edward, Mary Amelia "Nell," and the infant Margaret, who did not survive her birth year. Elko itself, laid out in 1868 as the Central Pacific pushed eastward, was a raw young high-desert town on the Humboldt River plain, a shipping and supply point for ranches and mining camps, strikingly cosmopolitan for its size. A household like the Spences' — an Englishman married to a young Swedish immigrant — was entirely of a piece with this mingled frontier population, and winters were hard, medical help scarce, and infant death a familiar sorrow. The family appears repeatedly at Carson City in the later 1870s and early 1880s and at Elko in 1880. Then the pattern of movement resumed. By 1885 and 1886 they had gone north to Dakota Territory, appearing in McLean County — where Sophia's brother Peter lived nearby — and at Bismarck in Burleigh County, where they remained through 1888. During those Dakota years Sophia is said to have worked in Bismarck in the household of a prominent man, perhaps Gilbert A. Pierce, then governor of the territory, again putting her skills as a domestic to use. From there the trail turned west and south again. By 1889 and 1890 the family was at Gridley in Butte County, California — the same Sacramento Valley town where John's parents had come to rest. Gridley lay in the broad, flat floor of the valley, where the Feather River watered some of the richest bottomland in California, and it had grown from a farming and railroad economy into an established agricultural town. It was there, on the last day of 1889, that twins James Joseph and **Josephine Lillian Spence** were born. In December 1892 the family was at Klamath Falls, Oregon, remaining through 1894, and the final chapter of their wandering brought them into Washington State — to Yakima County, where Sophia and the children had settled at Fruitvale by 1900, and later to Denison in Spokane County, where the family appears in 1910. Sophia did not live to see the family fully settled. She died on 17 December 1905 at Milan, in Spokane County, one day after her fiftieth birthday, and was buried there. John lived out his final years in Washington, dying on 29 August 1916 at Pateros, in Okanogan County, at the age of eighty. He was buried at Dyer, in Douglas County — a long life bracketed by two very different worlds, from an old Yorkshire market town beneath a ruined castle to the young orchard country of the Pacific Northwest. ## The Children of John W. and Sophia Spence The twelve children of this marriage spread across the mining and ranching country of Nevada, the northern plains, and the Pacific Northwest, their own lives tracing the settling of the interior West. Bertha May, the eldest, was born at Elko in 1876, married John Staton in 1895, and died at Los Angeles in 1931 after years in Washington's Grays Harbor and Yakima country. John William, born at Elko in 1878, made his life largely in and around Ontario in Malheur County, Oregon, dying there in 1950. Thomas Edward, born at Elko in 1879, lived only three years. Mary Amelia "Nell," born at Elko in 1881, married Marcus Housden in 1904 and lived across Douglas and Okanogan counties in Washington before her death at Brewster in 1965. Margaret, born at Elko in 1884, died the same year. Alice Beatrice, born at Bismarck in 1885, married Thomas Lynch in 1902 and moved between Mountain Home, Idaho, and Sherman in Ferry County, Washington, dying at Mountain Home in 1921 at the age of thirty-six. Fredrick Reif Verner, born at Bismarck in 1888, married Edna Byng in 1912 and made his home chiefly in the Emmett country of Gem County, Idaho, where he died in 1961. The twins born at Gridley on 27 December 1889 carried the line into the next century. James Joseph married Alta Weger in 1910 and settled around Mountain Home, Idaho, and Denison in Spokane County, Washington, dying at Blackfoot, Idaho, in 1967. His twin sister, Josephine Lillian, married **William "Will" Henry Strong** in 1908 and settled north of Spokane, in the Williams Valley and Riverside country of Stevens County, living to 1972 and dying at Deer Park — the marriage that joins this line to the Strongs. Three more sons followed. Richard Lyle, born at Klamath Falls in 1892, married Beatrice Shultz in 1922 and ranged widely across Washington before his death at Bremerton in 1963. Marcus De Lafayette, born at Klamath Falls in 1894, married Addie Ervin in 1915 and lived across Okanogan County and the Yakima valley, dying at Medical Lake in 1967. The youngest, Raymond Adren, was born at Yakima in 1899, married Lucille French in 1929, and centered his life on Spokane. He died there in 1975, the last of his generation. From Richard Spence of Warmfield to Raymond Adren Spence of Spokane, the family had crossed an ocean and a continent in the span of a few generations, exchanging the liquorice gardens and castle ruins of Pontefract for the sagebrush railheads of Nevada, the wheat fields of the Sacramento Valley, and the orchard country of the Pacific Northwest. It was there, in Josephine Spence's 1908 marriage to William Strong, that the wandering Spence line came to rest and joined the Strong family whose story will be picked up in a later chapter.