# Wild Rose Prairie Strong • Spence Long before the orchards and schoolhouses of Wild Rose Prairie had settled into their familiar shapes, two families were moving toward the country north of Spokane where their children would meet and marry. The Strongs had come west in 1884, and the Spences followed the promise of farmland from California northward into Washington. Their story converges on the rolling grasslands of Wild Rose Prairie and the neighboring valleys of Stevens County, where William Henry Strong and Josephine Lillian Spence built a household and raised a large family in the first half of the twentieth century. ## Two Families Drawn West The Strong family had made their home on Wild Rose Prairie, some twenty miles north of Spokane, since **Walter Ezra Strong** and his wife, **Jeanette "Jennie" Lydia Newman**, came west in 1884. It was here, on that open prairie country still counted as frontier, that their son grew to manhood, and here that Walter remained until his death in 1921, remembered as one of the district's real pioneer settlers. **William "Will" Henry Strong** was born in Spokane on 4 February 1887, when Washington was not yet a state. His childhood unfolded on Wild Rose Prairie, and by 1892 the family's circumstances had carried them north into Stevens County; the census of 1900 found the household at Clayton, a small settlement in that same county. Growing up in these years, William learned early the practical skills of country living — handling teams and machinery, managing crops and livestock, and turning his hand to whatever the season required — in a region still filling in with railroads, timber, and farming. The bride he would eventually marry came from farther afield. **Josephine “Josie” Lillian Spence** was born on 27 December 1889 in Gridley, a small farming town in Butte County, California, and she did not enter the world alone: she was a twin, sharing that December day with her brother, James Joseph Spence. She was the daughter of **John W. Spence** and **Sophia Margaret Anderson**, and her earliest years were shaped by the fields and orchards of California's Sacramento Valley. By 1900 the Spence family had left California for the Pacific Northwest, settling in Fruitvale in Yakima County, Washington — a migration typical of families of the era, following opportunity across state lines toward newly opened agricultural districts. The move placed Josephine, still a girl, in the orchard country of central Washington and drew her family, in time, toward the country around Spokane. ## Marriage on Wild Rose Prairie On 9 September 1908, in Spokane, William Strong married Josephine Spence. He was twenty-one, she was not quite nineteen. The couple began their married life around that same year at Wild Rose Prairie — the very country in which William had grown up — before the shifting residences of the decades that followed. By 1910 they had established a household at Denison, in Spokane County. Theirs proved a lasting and fruitful union. Nine children are recorded to William and Josephine: Margaret, Kenneth William, **Thressa Lillian**, Lyle Alfred, a baby girl who did not survive, Walter Eugene, Milton Lorraine, Ronald Neile, and Juanita Ilene. Raising so many children on rural land in eastern Washington filled Josephine's days with the unrelenting labor of the farm wife — cooking, preserving, sewing, tending gardens and animals, and nursing children through the illnesses and accidents of country life. The pattern of the family's residences traces a life lived within a compact stretch of eastern Washington, moving between neighboring valleys rather than pulling up stakes for distant territory. The censuses of 1920 and 1930 found them at Riverside, in Stevens County; by the spring of 1940 they were living in Williams Valley, and they remained in Stevens County into 1950. Through decades of national upheaval — the First World War, the prosperity and hardship of the 1920s and 1930s, the drought and depression that tested farm families across the region, and a second world war — their world stayed anchored to the working farm country north of Spokane. William lived to the age of eighty, spending his final years at Deer Park in the northern reaches of Spokane County, where he died on 6 September 1967 — in the same corner of Washington where he had been born and raised. Josephine outlived him by five years, dying at Deer Park on 7 August 1972 at the age of eighty-two, and she was laid to rest in Spokane, close to the land where she had raised her children and made her home. ## The Children The younger generation of the Strong family came into the world in and around Deer Park and Riverside in the early decades of the twentieth century, and like many large families of that time and place, it knew both the joy of children and the sorrow of losing them young. Two of the Strong children did not live to grow up. Margaret was born in June 1909 and died in February 1910, before she reached her first birthday. More than a decade later, a daughter came and went on the same day — Baby Girl Strong, born and died on 14 March 1922. These brief lives are part of the family's story, though the years denied them any story of their own. The surviving children carried the Strong name forward and settled, for the most part, within the familiar borderlands of Spokane and Stevens counties. Kenneth William Strong, born at Deer Park in 1911, married Helen Olive Yingst on 26 May 1936 and lived much of his life in and around Spokane, with a period at Riverside, before his death at Spokane in 1980. Lyle Alfred Strong, born at Deer Park in 1919, married Ethelene Caroline Durheim on 22 September 1939; his life carried him through Deer Park, Spokane, Williams Valley, and Riverside before he returned to Deer Park, where he died in 2003 at the age of eighty-four. Walter Eugene Strong, born at Riverside in Stevens County in 1924, moved among Deer Park, Spokane, Williams Valley, and Wayside over the course of his life and died at Spokane in 1991. Milton Lorraine Strong, born at Riverside in 1927, married Betty Mae Sampson on 23 July 1950 — the day of his own twenty-third birthday — and lived chiefly around Deer Park, where he died in 2010. Ronald Neile Strong, born at Deer Park in 1930, married Elizabeth Jeanne Reidt on 30 July 1955; his was a short life, ending in 1963 in Benewah County, Idaho, at the age of thirty-three. The youngest, Juanita Ilene Strong, was born at Deer Park in 1932 and lived at Deer Park, Williams Valley, and elsewhere in Stevens County; she married John J. Funk on 23 April 1966 and died at Spokane in 2017, the last of her generation, at the age of eighty-four. Among the daughters was **Thressa Lillian Strong**, born at Deer Park in 1915, who grew up in Washington and attended Deer Park High School. She would marry Herman Carl Daubel in 1937, but that marriage — and the family and communities it joined the Strongs to — belongs to a later chapter. Rooted for nearly four decades on Wild Rose Prairie and in the neighboring valleys of Stevens County, the Strongs and Spences had by mid-century become a settled farming family whose children were beginning to marry outward — carrying their lines, through daughters like Thressa, into the other families whose stories this book brings together.