In the middle of City Loosley Cemetery stands a solitary marble headstone bearing an inscription in Chinese. It is testimony to the fact that, for a brief time, Chinese immigrants made up nearly 10% of the population of early Phoenix. Some were railroad workers who had been laid off after construction on local rail lines was completed. Others came because the political climate for Chinese was better in sparsely populated Arizona than it was in the goldmining towns of California and Nevada. They worked in small, individually-owned businesses such as restaurants, grocery stores, hand laundries and vegetable farms.  Although many of Phoenix's early Chinese residents eventually returned to China, about fifty were buried in the Pioneer & Military Memorial Park.
 
In 1993, archaeologist K. J. Schroeder asked William Tang, an associate professor at Arizona State University, to translate the inscription on the marble headstone in Loosley. Tang, a Mandarin speaker from northern China, translated it as that of Tang Xian Yuan, born in Canton province, Hoiping district, Da Lou village.
 
Years later, PCA researchers discovered the death certificate of Ong Sing Yuen, aged about 51, who died June 8, 1913, and was buried in Loosley. Since the man buried in Loosley had been born in Canton province, he would have spoken a dialect of Cantonese; 'Ong Sing Yuen' is in fact the Cantonese equivalent of the Mandarin 'Tang Xian Yuan'.
 
At the time of his death from esophageal cancer, Ong was a merchant living at 529 S. 7th Avenue. Although the pronouncing doctor listed opium smoking as a contributory cause of death, it is also possible that Ong was simply using opium to dull the pain of the malignancy that was slowly taking his life.
 
In 1997, K. C. Tang of Phoenix produced a family tree that identified Ong Sing Yuen as a collateral relative of Tang Shing. It is even possible that Ong Sing Yuen invited Tang Shing to come to Phoenix and take over his business when his health began to fail. Tang Shing became one of Phoenix's foremost Chinese-American businessmen. In 1929 he built the historic Sun Mercantile Building which still stands in downtown Phoenix. He and his wife Lucy Sing were the parents of eleven children, including Father Emery Tang and Judge Thomas Tang.
 
The Ong family has since revived its practice of honoring Ong Sing Yuen as one of its family members with a short ceremony on Ching Ming, a Chinese holiday which occurs in early April.
 
© 2017 by Donna L. Carr. Last revised 29 August 2017.

​#Asian-Pacific Islander Month, Chinese heritage
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Grave marker photo courtesy of the Pioneers’ Cemetery Association, Inc.  

Anasazi Chapter DAR honored Florence Card Mann, Arizona territorial educator, as their 2023 Woman in History. Val Wilson created a program to share her history. You can read more about Florence on the blog Behind the Epitaph and view the presentation on YouTube below. Be sure to subscribe to Val's blog to receive news when new stories are added! 

Little Daisy Ray, daughter of Moses George Green and his wife Callie Williams, was born in Phoenix on February 11, 1894. Her parents were no longer living together by 1900, when Daisy Ray was recorded on the federal census as living with her mother and a maternal uncle. She died at the age of eight on June 25, 1902, of acute nephritis, and was buried in Rosedale Cemetery, where her grave marker can still be seen.
 
According to her obituary in the Arizona Republican newspaper, “She was a bright little child and was one of the first colored children born in Phoenix. She was quite popular in school and had many friends, to whom her death is a sore bereavement. The funeral will be held this afternoon at 5:30 o’clock in the A.M.E. Church.”
 
In spite of the newspaper’s supposition, Daisy Ray was not one of the first African American children born in Phoenix; that would have been her father Moses and his four younger siblings.
 
Moses George Green was born in 1870 to Mary Green, the very first African American to become a permanent resident of the new little town of Phoenix. Mary is believed to have been born into slavery between 1845 and 1849 in Louisiana; she may have belonged to a Woodhull family. Immediately after the Civil War, however, she was in Arkansas, working as a domestic in the household of Columbus Harrison Gray and his wife, Mary Adeline Norris. Mary Green and her little daughter Fannie came with them by covered wagon from Arkansas to Arizona in August 1868.
 
Mary continued to serve as the Grays’ cook and housekeeper for another twenty years, during which time she gave birth to four more children. In 1887, she left the Greys’ employ to take up a homestead near Tempe with her adult children. Although Mary herself seems to have been illiterate—she signed her 1892 homestead patent with an X--it appears that her children received at least six years of schooling.
 
When Mary died in 1912, she was buried in Greenwood Cemetery’s Section 10, which was reserved for what might have been considered Phoenix’s ‘black bourgeoisie’. Among her descendants was great-granddaughter Helen K. Oby Mason (1912-2003), who launched Phoenix’s Black Theater Troupe in 1970.
 
© 2021 by Donna L. Carr.  Last revised 4 February 2021.
 
 ​To obtain a copy of the sources used for this article, please contact the PCA to make a suggested donation.

Grave marker photo courtesy of the Pioneers’ Cemetery Association, Inc.

John A. Rodgers, African American, was born around 1873 in Senatopia, Mississippi. On July 12, 1898, he enlisted in Company E, 23rd Kansas Volunteer Infantry. It was a segregated unit drawn from several Kansas communities founded by freedmen in the post-Civil War era. Black units were being sent to Cuba on the theory that African Americans would have some immunity to tropical diseases. Unfortunately, this proved not to be the case.
 
By the time the regiment reached Santiago, Cuba, in August 1898, the shooting war was already over. The 23rd Kansas was tasked with guarding 5000 defeated Spanish soldiers awaiting transport back to Spain. During much of his tour of duty in Cuba, Rodgers was laid up with dysentery and then malaria.
 
On March 1, 1899, the 23rd Kansas boarded a transport ship for New York City. Rodgers was discharged on April 10 at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. He moved to Hot Springs, Arkansas, where he married a woman named Annie Pickett on October 3, 1900.
 
Rodgers’s military service had left him debilitated and unfit for heavy physical labor. Pension records show that he was 6 feet 4 inches , unusually tall for that era.  He became a tailor, possibly because readymade clothing did not fit him and he had to sew his own anyway. 
 
On May 26, 1906, Rodgers applied for and received a disability pension (Invalid Certificate #1022317). Owing to his bout with dysentery in Cuba, he was afflicted with large, protruding piles (hemorrhoids). Initially, he received $10 a month. Over the years, payment was increased to $17 a month.
 
In mid 1908, John Rodgers was experiencing heart problems, although he was only 35 years old. He left his wife in Hot Springs and went to Los Angeles, possibly to the Old Soldiers Home in Sawtelle. Thereafter, he moved to Phoenix, Arizona, where he rented a room at 30 North 2nd Avenue. To support himself, he placed ads in the local newspaper, asking for work repairing old carpets and refurbishing used clothing.
 
John A. Rodgers died on November 14, 1908, of aortic insufficiency, mitral regurgitation, and hypertrophy of the left ventricle.  He was buried in Rosedale Cemetery.
 
Several days after Rodgers’ death, Marshal Moore of Phoenix received an urgent letter from a Mrs. Jennie Reeves, asking the marshal to take charge of Rodgers’ body and effects. She also said that the deceased was a military veteran and asked that Rodgers’ body be returned to Arkansas for burial or sent to the National Cemetery. Her request could not be accommodated, however, because Rodgers was already buried and no one could attest to Mrs. Reeves’ legal rights to Rodgers’ property.
 
© 2022 by Donna Carr.  Last revised 1 November 2022.

​To obtain a copy of the sources used for this article, please contact the PCA to make a suggested donation.
 
Image: Army Invalid card for John A. Rodgers, 1908, National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)

The Belt Cook family were African Americans who lived in Phoenix from 1887 on. 
 
Belt Cook was a light-skinned mulatto, born between 1845 and December 1846 in Maryland. Around 1866, he married Rebecca Hall, who had been born in Pennsylvania. He and Rebecca had fifteen children, nine of whom lived to adulthood. 
 
The birthplaces of the Cook children show that the family moved back and forth across the country between 1869 and 1887, living in Nevada and California before finally coming to Arizona. Since Belt and his son Charles were barbers and one of Belt’s sons-in-law was a porter, they may have been employed by the railroads or simply followed the railroads west.
 
Belt Cook’s skill as a barber made it possible for him to find employment readily. In 1869, the family was living in Austin, Nevada, in a mixed race community with other porters, skilled craftsmen and even lawyers as neighbors.  By 1873, the family was in Los Angeles, California.
 
1881 saw the Cook family residing in the boom town of Globe, Arizona. However, as placer mining gave way to large-scale operations like the Old Dominion mine, Globe reverted to the status of a small frontier town, and the Cooks moved on to Phoenix in 1887.
 
The Cook children seem to have received a good education for the times. In 1900, son Elias Belt Cook was a member of the McKinley Club, a political organization of prominent colored men.
 
No matter their position in the community, though, the Cooks were still subject to the illnesses of the day.  Daughter Eva died in 1894 of what was probably meningitis. Charles’s wife Lola succumbed to tuberculosis in 1897. Daughter Lillie passed away in 1902, and son William Thomas died of tuberculosis in 1909. All are buried in the Pioneer & Military Memorial Cemetery, as is Belt Cook’s older brother Elias.
 
Entries in a 1912 city directory show Belt Cook as a barber at 20 North 2nd Street. Charles was a barber just a few blocks away at 3 East Jefferson. By 1920, Belt and Rebecca were retired and living with their eldest son John.
 
Belt Cook died February 28, 1929, and Rebecca died in 1933. They, as well as their son Elias, are buried in Greenwood Cemetery. At least one of their surviving daughters, Mary Elizabeth Cook Roberts, was still living in Phoenix when she passed away in 1953.
 
© 2021 by Donna L. Carr.  Last revised 24 February 2021.
 
To obtain a copy of the sources used for this article, please contact the PCA to make a suggested donation.

Free graphic courtesy of ClipArt Library