Joannes Baptiste Steyaert was born 7 October 1859 in Evergen, Belgium—a very small village. He and his wife, Matilda Van Damme, had a total of eight children, whose birthplaces provide a map of the family’s journey from Belgium to Arizona.

The three eldest children—Marie Victoria, Emil Johan, and Augustine Bernard--were born in Belgium. The fourth child, Marie Leona, and the fifth child, Benjamin Paul, arrived in 1890 and 1891 while the family was living in Winnipeg, Canada. The Steyaerts seem to have gravitated to heavily forested areas, suggesting occupations associated with lumber.

By the time the seventh and eighth children, Medard Tracy and Joseph Julius, were born in 1894 and 1897, the family was in De Pere, Wisconsin. In the summer of 1897, the Steyaert family left Wisconsin for Arizona with newborn Joseph. Within just a few weeks of their arrival, Joannes fell desperately ill. After a protracted bout with typhoid which exhausted the family’s financial resources, he died on July 21, 1897, and was buried in the Loosley Cemetery. His daughter Marie Victoria died of pneumonia a few months later, on November 21, 1897, and was buried in the same cemetery.

This left Matilda Steyaert destitute, with seven children to support. They ranged from Emil, almost 12, to Joseph, a mere babe in arms. The local newspaper, the Arizona Republican, appealed to its readership to assist the family.  The Steyaerts were listed intermittently as indigent between 1898 and 1900.

In time, however, the Steyaert children became old enough to support themselves. In 1913, the boys built a fine house, designed by Howard B. Claflin, for their mother at 1021 East Washington. The ten-room brick bungalow is said to have had screened sleeping porches and much built-in cabinetry. Owing to the use of an innovative truss, the front porch offered an unobstructed view of the street.

Ben and Gus Steyaert became locomotive engineers for the Santa Fe Railway and the Southern Pacific Railroad respectively. Emil was by turns a miner, prospector and truck driver for Union Oil. Joseph Julius worked as a heavy equipment operator. Only Medard and Frank carried on the family tradition of working with wood. In 1928, Medard was managing a planing mill at 1501 South Central, which made cabinets and office furniture. 

With her children grown up, Matilda converted her bungalow on East Washington into a boarding house and rented rooms to guests regardless of race. After her death on 27 July 1941, the house was sold to Golden and Elvira Swindall, who continued Matilda’s legacy of providing accommodations to African American guests who were not welcome at the segregated hotels in downtown Phoenix. The Swindall Tourist Inn was listed in the famous ‘Green Book’ for Negro travelers; Count Basie, Dizzy Gillespie, and Jackie Robinson are believed to have stayed there. Bought in 1996 to serve as the headquarters for the Desert Mashies golf club, the house is now on the National Register of Historic Places.

© 2020 by Donna L. Carr. Last revised 20 December 2020.

Photo of Steyaert/Swindall House courtesy of Donna Carr

Bryan Philip Darell Duppa was born October 9, 1832, in Paris, France, where his parents, Baldwin Francis Duppa and Catherine Darell, were living at the time. The family seat, Hollingsbourne House, was in Maidstone, Kent, England. It was to this mansion that Duppa came as a three-year-old in 1835.
 
Duppa received a classical education at Cambridge University, where he studied literature and learned French, Spanish, Italian and German, in addition to the required Greek and Latin. 
 
Since he had an older brother, Baldwin, who would inherit the family estate, Duppa was free to travel. After a grand tour of Europe, he visited his uncle George’s sheep station in New Zealand. This might have whetted his appetite for further adventure.
 
By December 1863, Duppa was in Prescott, Arizona. He became friends with Jack Swilling and may have come with him to the Salt River Valley in 1867. Recognizing the area’s potential for growth, Duppa homesteaded 175 acres near what is now downtown Phoenix and, in 1870, built an adobe dwelling at what is now 115 West Sherman.
 
Both he and Swilling were much interested in the evidence of a vanished Hohokam culture on the banks of the Salt River—specifically, its system of canals. When the question of what to name the new settlement arose, Duppa proposed Phoenix, for it suggested a city rising from the ashes of a previous civilization. Duppa is also credited with having named Tempe.
 
Tall and thin, Duppa was an eccentric man with a flair for the dramatic. Locals took to calling Duppa a ‘lord’ because of his impeccable English accent and classical education. His besetting vice was drink, however. A ‘remittance man’, Duppa received a generous allowance from his family in England. Every four months, a check was sent to his friend Dr. O. J. Thibodo, who paid Duppa’s bills before handing over what was left. Duppa invariably spent it all on drink and gambling.
 
In 1872, Duppa sold his homestead in Phoenix to John B. Montgomery and moved to New River, north of Phoenix, where he ran a stage station. The station was no more than a crude ramada with brush walls and hardly a stick of furniture. Passing through the area, Captain John G.  Bourke described Duppa as “hospitable to a fault and not afraid of man or devil…or Apache Indian”.
 
Eventually, Duppa returned to Phoenix where he lived humbly on a farm near the Salt River. He died January 30, 1892, at the home of his old friend Dr. Thibodo.
 
Duppa was originally buried in the Odd Fellows cemetery but, in 1901, the Daughters of the American Revolution had his body moved to Greenwood Cemetery at 2300 W. Van Buren. Once the Pioneer & Military Memorial Park was established, citizens banded together and petitioned to have the remains of the “Father of Phoenix” returned. An elaborate solid copper burial vault and a new casket were provided and, on November 26, 1991, a procession of officials and historical reenactors accompanied the horse-drawn hearse that bore Duppa to his final resting place.
 
© 2012 by Debe Branning and Donna Carr. Last revised 11/22/2012.

Frederick “Fred” was born August 18, 1831 in Jugenheim, Germany, to Bartholomew Balsz and Phillipine Gerisch.  The couple had eleven children born between 1814 and 1836, several of whom came to the United States.  Frederick’s mother Philippine is believed to have died around 1836 in Germany shortly after the birth of her last child, David. Bartholomew, a butcher, then immigrated to the United States with some of their younger children, settling in St. Louis, Missouri. 

Young Fred is thought to have married at the age of 17 in St. Louis and had a son he named Frederick, Jr. The name of Fred’s first wife is unknown, but she died about 1849.

Soon thereafter, Fred left his son with family and went west with his brother David, who would have been 13 years old.  The brothers drove a team of oxen along the California Trail to Sacramento, where they found work as butchers. They remained there until Fred eloped with his second wife, Mercedes Gonzales, around 1860. The couple had three boys and one girl before Mercedes died about 1867. Shortly after, Fred married Eliza Tapia who was about 16 years of age on November 12, 1867. She bore him five more children before her death in 1878.

By this time, Fred’s younger brother David had opened a slaughterhouse north of Phoenix in the Arizona Territory, so Fred moved his family there. Between Fred the butcher and David the cattleman, they had the perfect vertical business model.

Fred married his fourth wife, Sotela Bracamonte, on October 29, 1879 in Phoenix. She was about 17 years old; he was 48. Fred and Sotela would add at least ten more children to the family. Between Fred’s family and David’s family, they had enough children to open their own school--Balsz School—which still exists today in Phoenix.

Fred continued to work as a butcher, going into business for a short time with Frank D. Wells in Phoenix. That partnership was dissolved in 1884, by which time Fred’s sons were in business with him. 

Sotela died February 8, 1899, in Phoenix of heart disease and was buried in the family plot in the Independent Order of Odd Fellows. Fred did not remarry this time, but he had plenty of children to care for him in his final years. The number of children he fathered fluctuates by different accounts, but in 1906 he said he had had 19 children by his four wives.

Fred died at the home of his son Joseph on June 13, 1910. He had suffered a bout of pneumonia the year prior and never fully recovered. He was buried next to Sotela.

© 2020 by Patty Gault. Last revised June 28, 2020

Grave marker photo courtesy of the Pioneers’ Cemetery Association

To obtain a copy of the sources used for this article, please contact the PCA to make a suggested donation.

​Samuel Korrick was born in April, 1871, in Grodno, then part of tsarist Russia. After coming to the United States around 1890, he worked briefly as a dry goods clerk in New York before moving on to another store in El Paso.
 
In 1895, Korrick was on his way to California when he stopped in Phoenix. Something about the up-and-coming city attracted him, and he decided to stay.
 
Despite his relative youth, he was able to combine his previous experience in the dry goods business with a flair for merchandising, determination and hard work. He set up his first store in a narrow space at 218 East Washington Street. To make his shop sound more sophisticated, he called it the New York Store.
 
Korrick was a savvy businessman. Newspaper advertisements for his store trumpeted quality merchandise, low prices, seasonal and annual clearance sales. The ads noted his buying trips to Eastern markets, which must have added a certain cachet for his customers.  
 
Korrick was more than just a successful merchant. He joined the Freemasons and the Elks, and he donated handsomely to Sisters’ Hospital, now St. Joseph’s. He was active in the local Jewish community and ran newspaper notices announcing the Jewish high holy days.
 
Running the New York Store left Korrick little time for a private life; he never married. As the business expanded, he brought his younger brother Charles over from Russia in 1899. Charles became his understudy in running the business. 
 
Tragically, Korrick’s health began to decline in 1901 and he died on March 23, 1903, at the age of 32. According to Korrick’s obituary, no other man had "left such a deep impression upon the mercantile life of Phoenix."  Customers and competitors alike esteemed him as an honest and upright businessman.
 
Korrick’s funeral service was an ecumenical affair. After the reading of Jewish rites, a Methodist minister delivered a eulogy. The hearse was accompanied by a long cortege, and Korrick was interred in accordance with Masonic rites in the Masons Cemetery.   
 
© Derek Horn and Debe Branning. Last revised May 21, 2023.

Photo of Charles and Sam Korrick, about 1901, courtesy of the Korrick family

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
​
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