​Rev. Hans Jurgen Ehlers, 1826 -1902
Presbyterian Minister

Buried in Rosedale, exact location unknown

(Image created using Bing Chatbot)
​

Hans Jurgen Ehlers was born around 1826 in the Duchy of Holstein. It might have been the lure of gold that brought him to the United States, for he became a naturalized citizen on September 20, 1860, in Yreka, California. 
 
The 1870 federal census of Yreka shows him engaged in mining and living with a woman named Olive. How Ehlers’ relationship with Olive ended is not known but, on November 30, 1879, he married Elizabeth Gorrsen in San Francisco. 
 
Initially, Ehlers was a Methodist, but eventually he became affiliated with the Presbyterian church. Ehlers seems not to have been a particularly successful (or devoted?) minister of the Gospel, as he apparently held other jobs during his lifetime.
 
In 1880, Ehlers was recorded as preaching in Florence, Arizona. By 1886, he was living in Yuma, Arizona, where he served for a time as a chaplain at the territorial penitentiary there.  
 
The Ehlers family moved to Phoenix in October, 1889. In 1890, he was elected one of several school trustees in Maricopa County.
 
On December 12, 1893, Ehlers filed final proof on a homestead. On July 7, 1896, the Ehlerses’ seven-year-old son, Joseph William, accidentally shot himself with a rifle. A doctor was summoned, but the boy died before he arrived. Little Joseph was probably buried in City Loosley Cemetery, it being the closest. Shortly thereafter, Ehlers and his wife quitclaimed their homestead to E. Irvine and moved into Phoenix.
 
The Ehlerses’ oldest son Henry was a rebellious youth. By age 16, he had been involved in numerous petty thefts before being convicted of second-degree burglary. On November 20, 1898, he was sentenced to two years in the territorial prison at Yuma. Discharged at the end of his sentence, he evidently had not learned his lesson. He and an accomplice were believed to have robbed the New River and Goddard stage stations only a short time later.  Ehlers then fled to California. He is said to have committed suicide in 1902 after murdering his wife.
 
Rev. Ehlers was about 76 when he died in Phoenix of pneumonia. He was buried in Rosedale Cemetery, although there is no grave marker. No probate record has been found, so perhaps he had little to leave. Not long thereafter, his widow Elizabeth took their remaining two children and relocated to California.
 
© 2025 by Patricia Gault and Donna L. Carr. Last revised 24 April 2025.

​If you would like assistance researching our interred, you can find more information on our website. You can contact us at [email protected] at any time. Thank you for your interest to preserve the history of Arizona's pioneers!

Rev. L. Phillip Smithey, about 1855-1889
Methodist Missionary
 
Buried in Masons Cemetery, Block 8, Lot 1, Grave 4

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

Louis Phillip Smithey was born on October 24, 1855 or 1857, in Jetersville, Amelia County, Virginia. He was a younger son of Royal Smithey and his wife Mary Ann Elizabeth Hubbard. On the eve of the Civil War, Royal was employed as an overseer for George W. Jones, a wealthy farmer in Nottoway County. After the war, he returned to farming.
 
Phil Smithey seems to have been in somewhat delicate health as a boy, but early in life he aspired to go into the ministry. His older brother William also became a minister.
 
Following his father’s death in 1883, young Smithey enrolled in Vanderbilt University in Nashville. It was a Methodist Episcopal college, and Smithey took classes in the theological department. However, ill health impelled him to go west after a year. Moving to California, he served as a deacon in Azusa and Duarte. By 1887, his phthisis (tuberculosis) had advanced and he was suffering from pulmonary hemorrhages.
 
Seeking a drier climate, Phil Smithey moved to Prescott, Arizona, in the fall of 1887 and engaged in missionary work in what was then a wide-open frontier town. Though uncompromising against sin, he was said to have been of a cheerful disposition and ever sympathetic towards others. 
 
Thanks to Arizona’s salubrious climate, he lived for another two years and gained a small but devoted following among the residents of Prescott. Nevertheless, his health, never robust, continued to decline. When death became imminent, some advised him to go home to his family in Virginia, but he insisted on remaining in Arizona.
 
Smithey moved to Phoenix in August, 1889, and died two months later, on October 12. He was buried in the Masons Cemetery.
 
© 2025 by Donna L. Carr. Last revised 24 March 2025.

​If you would like assistance researching our interred, you can find more information on our website. You can contact us at [email protected] at any time. Thank you for your interest to preserve the history of Arizona's pioneers!

​Rev. Freeman D. Rickerson, 1837-1892
Baptist Minister
 
Buried in Masons Cemetery, Block 9, Lot 3, Grave 1

(Image created using Bing AI)

Freeman D. Rickerson was born on the 23rd of November, 1837, in Watertown, Jefferson County, New York. He was the son of Daniel Wilcox Rickerson and his second wife, Malina Corpe. 
 
Rickerson received his theological education in Rochester, which had a Baptist seminary founded in 1850 (Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School today). Instead of remaining in New York state, however, Rickerson felt called to minister in the Midwest. He moved to Des Moines, Iowa, where he was licensed to preach in October of 1858. After serving a period as an assistant pastor in Grinnell, Iowa, he was ordained in April 1859. Thereafter, he was instrumental in founding and/or serving Baptist congregations in Illinois, Iowa, and Missouri.
 
While he was in Grinnell, Rev. Rickerson met and married Eunice Langworthy. Like him, she and her family were from New York state. They eventually had a daughter, Melina May, born in 1870 in Waukegan, Illinois.
 
In addition to being a man of the cloth, Rev. Rickerson was a high-ranking Mason, advancing to the rank of commander and grand prelate in the Grand Commandery of Illinois. He was convinced that his religious faith and his Masonic ideals went hand in hand and so preached. He is said to have been learned, honest, and broad-minded, attributes not always evident in frontier preachers.
 
The Rickersons came to Phoenix in 1889, after Rev. Rickerson was appointed to fill the pulpit of the Baptist Church at 2nd Avenue and Jefferson. When he arrived, Rickerson found the church in a neglected state and the treasury empty. He remedied this by soliciting donations from more affluent churches back east, and a new building was eventually raised.
 
Rickerson proved to be tireless in his work but, after less than three years, heart disease cut short his tenure in Phoenix. Although he was known to have been in declining health, his death still came as a shock to his congregation. He was visiting at the home of B. F. McFall when he suffered an apoplexy and died on March 29, 1892. 
 
Chaplain Winfield Scott from Scottsdale preached the funeral sermon. Rickerson, being the  prelate of the Phoenix commandery at the time of his death, was buried in Masons Cemetery as befitting his high status in the order.
 
The Rickersons’ daughter Melina or “May”, as she preferred, wed John Swilling, Jr. in Phoenix in 1916. It was a second marriage for both parties. However, the union seems to have been of short duration. By 1920, May was living with her widowed mother in California.      

© 2025 by Donna L. Carr.  Last revised 31 March 2025.   
              
If you would like assistance researching our interred, you can find more information on our website. You can contact us at [email protected] at any time. Thank you for your interest to preserve the history of Arizona's pioneers!

Rev. John Fremont Ames, 1858-1892
Baptist Minister

Buried in Masons Cemetery, Block 9, Lot 3, Grave 5

(Photo Courtesy of Ames’ Descendants)

​John Fremont Ames was born 13 May 1858 in De Ruyter, New York, to Fordyce Ames and Electa Elmira Ray. He lost his mother at age 20, a tragedy which may have inspired him to enter the ministry.

After graduating from a Madison, New York, university in 1886, he married Sophie Wall on June 22nd. Sophie’s sister Zelda was married in the same service to a Fred Hendee. The newlyweds honeymooned at Niagara Falls, after which John accepted a call to work as an assistant pastor in Genoa, New York. The Ameses’ first child, Francis, was born in April 1887.

Ames was ordained to the ministry on December 9, 1887. He then decided to study theology at Rochester Theological Seminary, from which he graduated in June 1890. Having indicated that he wanted to serve a congregation that really needed him, even though it couldn’t afford to pay him a salary commensurate with his education, he accepted a call to a church in Madison, South Dakota. 

While in Madison, the Ameses had a daughter, Mary Lorena, born in 1891. Unfortunately, Sophie then developed an intractable cough and was diagnosed with tuberculosis.

In hopes of improving Sophie’s health, the family moved in 1892 to Milton, Tennessee, where they rented a house from relatives. However, Tennessee did not suit them. The rainy weather aggravated Sophie’s cough, and John disliked the racial segregation which forbade him to preach to whites and blacks at the same gathering. Ames was then offered the pastorate of a Baptist Church in Phoenix. It seemed an attractive offer as the dry climate of Arizona was said to be salubrious for invalids. Accordingly, the Ameses moved to Arizona and took up residence on the ranch of a parishioner who lived east of the city.

On July  31, 1892, Reverend Ames was in a buggy on his way to church in downtown Phoenix when he overtook a steam threshing engine on the street. When the driver blew his whistle, the unexpected noise so frightened the reverend’s horse that it took off in a mad run. As the buggy careened around the corner of Washington and Montezuma, Dr. Ames either tried to jump or was thrown from the buggy. He fell against an electric light pole with such force that he suffered head trauma and his left leg was broken below the hip. He was carried into Frakes’ Livery, where Drs. Hughes and Dameron stabilized him. However they were not optimistic about his chances for recovery.

Since Ames could not be moved, he was cared for at Mr. Elwell’s house. He regained consciousness enough to take water and medicine, but was unable to recall what had happened or to recognize family members. Though attended by three physicians, he died August 13th.

Ames’s wife Sophie, already an invalid, was prostrated by his death. She could not bear light or sound; throughout  the hot summer evenings, she sat on the porch with a wet cloth over her face. In October 1892 she declared that she was ready to join her husband. She lingered until November before passing away. The Ameses were buried in the Masons Cemetery.

© 2018 by Donna Carr. Last revised 28 April 2018.

If you would like assistance researching our interred, you can find more information on our website. You can contact us at [email protected] at any time. Thank you for your interest to preserve the history of Arizona's pioneers!