 Professor Dayton Alonzo Reed, 1841-1894 Principal, Arizona Territorial Normal School Buried in Masons Cemetery, Block 14, Lot 1, Grave 2 (Grave marker photo courtesy of the Pioneers’ Cemetery Association, Inc.) Dayton Reed was born on 22 Dec 1841 in Millbrook, Wayne County, Ohio. He was one of seven children born to James Reed and Mary Ann Keister. Since Dayton’s father was a millwright, young Dayton learned this craft along with farming.
After earning his teaching credentials, Dayton moved to Belleville, Ohio where he served as a high school principal from 1866 to 1873. During that time, his sister Eliza Jane came to keep house for him after her marriage to William Douglass ended in divorce. She brought with her her young son, Beach. Dayton had married Sarah Ordway on December 27, 1871 in Richland, Ohio. However, the marriage seems to have ended with each party going his own way. By 1880, Sarah was living with her widowed father back in Belleville, Ohio. Since the census describes Sarah’s father as consumptive, she may have gone there to care for him. No evidence of divorce has been found, and Sarah did not remarry until after Dayton’s death. Around 1873, Dayton moved to Los Angeles, California, where he continued to teach for 12 years. He then moved to Arizona where he became a principal for the Phoenix Public School system in 1885. He resigned that position in 1887 to enter into the more lucrative real estate and banking business in Phoenix. On June 28, 1890, Dayton became the third principal of the Arizona Territorial Normal School (now Arizona State University) where he taught language, mathematics and pedagogy. During his brief, ten-month tenure as principal, he improved the appearance of the campus by having fencing, trees and plumbing installed. His salary was $200 a month, a generous sum for the time. Eventually, Dayton was diagnosed with consumption and was forced to resign his position because of ill health. A long-time member of the Masons, he was elevated to Grand Master of the Phoenix lodge prior to his death. He died July 12, 1894 and was buried in the Masons Cemetery (now part of the Phoenix Military and Memorial Park). Dayton’s sister, Eliza Jane Douglass, succumbed to cancer on February 3, 1895, and was buried next to him in the Masons Cemetery. © 2019 Patricia Gault. Last revised 15 March 2019. 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!
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 Anne Morrison Perley, 1865-1932 A Teacher in Puerto Rico Cremains buried in her parents’ plot in Porter Cemetery, Block 54, Lot E (Picture postcard, vintage1907, from Pinterest) Anne Morrison Perley was born January 28, 1865, in Henry County, Illinois, to Peleg Stone Perley and Nancy Eliza Morrison. Anne had three siblings: Bruce, Grace and Harriet (known as Polly).
Anne came from a family of teachers. Her grandfather, Nathanial Perley, had been an educator for over 30 years, and her father Peleg was a teacher prior to becoming a lawyer and practicing law in Henry, Illinois. Peleg Perley was the postmaster of Henry, Illinois, in the early 1880s. In 1883, he employed Anne as a postal clerk. She was attending Washington University’s College of Fine Arts in St. Louis in 1887. The Perley family moved to Arizona where Peleg continued his legal career in a milder climate. Anne traveled to Tombstone to fill the position of assistant principal at Tombstone High School in January, 1892. It was a temporary appointment, and she returned to Phoenix at the end of the school year in June. Having acquired some administrative experience, she was then hired as the assistant principal for the old Central School at 201 North Central Avenue in Phoenix. Anne remained in Phoenix, teaching, until after the death of her parents—her father in 1898 and her mother in 1900. Thereafter, she went to teach in Bisbee, returning to Phoenix in 1903. A few years later, Anne departed Arizona for New York and accepted an offer to teach in Puerto Rico. She arrived there in September 1909 aboard the Steamship Coamo. The 1910 federal census recorded her as a schoolteacher living in Pueblo Norte, Aibonito. Anne may have learned to speak Spanish during her years of teaching in Tombstone, Bisbee and Phoenix. Acquired by the United States from Spain in 1898, Puerto Rico had a need for bilingual teachers, especially after the Foraker Act of 1901 mandated that English should be the language of instruction in Puerto Rican high schools. It is not known how long Anne remained in Puerto Rico teaching. However, by 1920 she was back in Brooklyn, New York, and working as a translator for an export business. Presumably, she was by then fluent in Spanish. Anne was still living in Brooklyn in 1930 when she fell ill and was sent to a private sanitarium in Stamford, Connecticut. She died there on May 23, 1932. Her sister Grace arranged for her cremains to be returned to Arizona where she was buried in her parents’ cemetery plot in Porter Cemetery. © 2019 by Patricia Gault. Last revised 15 March 2019. 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!  Mary Florence Card Mann, about 1841 –1897 Artist and Educator Buried in Loosley Cemetery, exact location not known. (Image generated by Val Wilson using an AI chatbot) Mary Florence was born about 1841 in Oswego, New York. She was the fourth of five children born to Daniel and Jane C. Shapley Card, farmers.
Mary Florence (she went by Florence most of her adult life) entered the Oswego Normal and Training School in her late teens, graduating in 1863 with a teaching degree. By 1867, she was earning $500 a year as a schoolteacher in Cuba, New York. Sometime in the 1870s, she married Henry D. Mann, a physician and surgeon. The young couple moved to Tiffin, Ohio, where Henry attended Heidelberg College. Later, he did his residency at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor before graduating from the Medical College in Albany, New York. He practiced for a short time in Ohio and Illinois before settling in Terre Haute, Indiana. Florence continued to teach for a few years after marrying, but she is listed as a housewife on the 1880 federal census of Terre Haute. At some point thereafter, she and Henry separated but did not divorce. In 1890, Florence came to Phoenix and was hired to teach in the Phoenix school system. Based on newspaper articles, she became well known as an educator. Besides teaching in the elementary schools, she often provided professional council and training at the Maricopa County Teachers’ Institutes, where she excelled in mechanical and industrial drawing. She even persuaded the Phoenix school board to open a free night school for children over the age of 10 who were unable to attend day classes because of family obligations. In 1893, Florence was appointed to the Maricopa Advisory Committee on Textbooks and School Law. Her duties included selecting the textbooks to be used throughout the district. After retiring from teaching, she opened an art studio in Phoenix. A gifted artist, she painted many scenes of animals and the “wild and untamed west” in oils and watercolors and she continued to volunteer at the night school she had started. Florence died unexpectedly around 8 PM on March 22, 1897, while on her way home from seeing her students at the night school. Passersby heard her cry out in the alley beside the Ford Hotel on Washington Street and 2nd Avenue, Phoenix, Arizona, but she was gone before medical help arrived. Her doctor opined that she had died of an apoplexy—probably a cerebral hemorrhage caused by a burst aneurysm—as there were no signs of any trauma. She was 56 years old. Her obituary, published in the newspaper the next day, remarked that although she had few intimates, she was well regarded on account of her kindly nature and her superior mental qualities. She was buried in an unmarked grave in Loosley Cemetery, and her many original paintings were sold to cover the cost of her funeral. © 2019 by Val Wilson. Last revised 29 December 2019. 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!  Mary “Minnie" Perry Bassett 1878-1903 Schoolteacher Buried in Masons Cemetery, Block 23, Lot 2, Grave 8 (Image created in Bing AI) Mary Adeline Perry was born December 21, 1878, in Badger Springs, Arizona to William Henry Perry and Mary Agnes Clark. William Perry was a rancher whose land later became part of Perry Mesa within the Agua Fria National Monument. Mary was one of nine children according to a homestead claim her father filed in 1889.
She and her sisters—Grace, Maud, Agnes and Charlotte “Lottie”—eventually attended Tempe Normal School (now Arizona State University). Education for women was obviously valued in the Perry household. Mary graduated in 1899 and became a schoolteacher. One of her first teaching posts was in Arizola, Arizona. Mary often visited friends in the Arizola area. There was known to be a mountain lion in the area which had been taking livestock for some time. One day, Mary was alone and on foot near the Bellamy ranch when the lion appeared in her path. Mary was certain that she was going to be attacked until she suddenly remembered reading about “the power of the human eyes on savage beasts.” Mary looked the lion right in the eye and it turned and fled. The lion, when later shot by a hunting party, was found to measure eight feet from nose to tail. While teaching in Cordes, Arizona, Mary met Joseph Reuben Bassett, a cowboy who was working cattle on a nearby ranch. They were married in Phoenix on April 17, 1902. The young couple was living in Safford, Arizona, when on January 24, 1903, they welcomed a son, Walter, into their household. Unfortunately, Mary never recovered from the birth. She died on February 4, 1903 in Safford, with childbirth listed as the cause. She was buried in Masons Cemetery in Phoenix. Although Joseph R. Bassett remarried a few years later, apparently little Walter was raised by his sister and her husband. Joseph died at the Pioneers’ Home in Prescott, Arizona, in 1957. Mary’s father, William Henry Perry outlived her by many years. When he died in 1929, his ashes were scattered over Perry Mesa. © 2020 by Patricia Gault. Last revised 12 April 2020. 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!  Maude Ball, 1864-1899 Teaching Instructor Buried in A.O.U.W. Cemetery, Block 21, Lot 2, Grave 4 (Photo Courtesy of Pioneers’ Cemetery Association) Maude was born June 21, 1864, in Marshall, Michigan, to Dr. Alexander Rawson Ball and Delilah née Weld. She was the youngest of their ten children. Maude’s father was a well-regarded homeopathic physician until his death at the age of 79 in 1902. Her sister Hannah became a homeopath like her father, and sister Fannie trained as a teacher.
By 1880, the Ball family was living in Mason, Shiawassee County, Michigan. Maude herself graduated with a teaching degree in 1882 and eventually became an educator of teachers at Michigan State Normal School (now Eastern Michigan University) for several years. She then transferred to Whitewater Normal School (now University of Wisconsin--Whitewater) around 1897and served as secretary of the teachers association. Maude’s sister Delilah had married George Homer Jones in 1874. On December 12, 1898, he died suddenly at the home of his mother in Michigan. By September 1899, Maude was suffering from tubercular laryngitis, so her widowed sister Delilah accompanied her to Phoenix, Arizona Territory. Like so many others who came to Phoenix during that time, Maude had been hoping that she would recover in the warm Arizona climate. However, she died on December 26, 1899, at the home of her sister Delilah in Phoenix. © 2020 by Patricia Gault, last revised 5 May 2020. 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! |