# Gridley, Butte County, California The Spence family's connection to Gridley, in California's Sacramento Valley, ran through both marriage and mortality during the late nineteenth century. For a family that otherwise moved restlessly across the American West—Ohio, Indiana, Nevada, North Dakota, Oregon, and Washington—this valley town in Butte County was one of the fixed points where the family gathered, married, and buried its dead. ## A Place to Marry On 18 October 1868, William E. Spence married Amelia Ann Taylor at Gridley. William had come to America as a child, crossing the plains with his parents in 1849 on the long overland route from Ohio to California. Amelia, born 24 May 1854, was still young when she and William began the family that would eventually scatter across California, Oregon, and beyond. The couple's long life together—more than four decades—began here in this Butte County town before the family moved on to a large stock ranch in Klamath County, Oregon, and later to Orland. ## A Place of Birth Gridley remained meaningful to the wider Spence family into the next generation. On 27 December 1889, twins James Joseph Spence and Josephine Lillian Spence were born here. Their parents, John W. Spence and Sophia Margaret Anderson, were living in Gridley that year. John, born in Pontefract, England in 1835, worked as a teamster and traveled far and wide across the West, often gone for months at a time bringing people westward. Sophia had come from Stockholm in the wave of Swedish housemaids arriving in the early 1870s, and married John in Elko, Nevada, in 1873. By 1889 their travels had brought them to Gridley, where their twin children entered the world. Josephine would carry Gridley with her as her birthplace for the rest of her life. She later married William Strong and settled north of Spokane, far from the valley where she was born. ## A Place of Burial The same day the twins were born—27 December 1889—Margaret Swallow died and was buried. That a single date holds both births and a death captures how tightly life and loss were bound together for this family in Gridley. The town also held the graves of earlier Spences. John Mathew Spence had died on 25 September 1867 and was buried here. Within weeks of the twins' birth, on 30 January 1890, Matthew Spence also died. In a few short years, Gridley became a resting place for the family's older generation even as it welcomed its newest members. ## What Gridley Meant to the Spences For a family defined by movement across the West, Gridley served as a place of return and remembrance. It was where William and Amelia began their marriage, where John and Sophia's twins were born, and where several family members were laid to rest between 1867 and 1890. Though the living Spences would ultimately move north and west—to Orland, to Klamath County, to Spokane—the town in Butte County held their beginnings and their dead alike.