Ancestors

Walter Crane Morris

Walter Crane Morris was born at Albright, on the Cheat River in Preston County, West Virginia, on 19 May 1870. His death certificate names his parents as S. Newton Morris and Mary Howell, both born in West Virginia. The family lived on the river near Tunnelton, and Walter went to a country school in Kingwood district with his brother Charles M. Morris and his sister Grace. In February 1890 the teacher's report listed all three among the pupils who had recited twenty-five perfect lessons that month.

As a young man in Kingwood he belonged to the Good Templars, a temperance lodge whose members pledged never to drink, and in 1893 they made him chaplain. In February 1895, when the Epworth League of the Methodist church held a Sunday service in the county jail for its four prisoners, Walter led the singing. In August 1896 he came home to Kingwood after several months away in Indiana and Michigan.

By early 1898 he was a jeweler at Tunnelton. His brother Charles ran a Bee Hive store there, a general store of small goods, and Walter had his jewelry shop inside it. The two brothers had put up a two-story frame building between the post office and the Guseman Hotel.

That spring he eloped with Sarah Florence Davis, called Flo, the daughter of Ben Davis of Tunnelton. She was sixteen. She went to Rowlesburg as if to visit friends, Walter took a train east, she boarded the same train, and they were married at Oakland, over the state line in Maryland. Nobody knew for several days. They set up house in the new building at Tunnelton.

They had seven children: Agatha Lucile (1899), Ellsworth Crane (1902), Harry Edwin (1904), Mary Elizabeth (1907), Margaret Matilda (1911), David Davis (1915) and Sarah Catherine (1921). By 1901 Walter was the jeweler at Terra Alta, and in 1905 he rented a room there for a jewelry and sewing machine business. In 1908, back at Kingwood, he was first vice president of the Democrats' Bryan and Bennett club, formed to campaign for William Jennings Bryan, the party's candidate for president. By 1914 he travelled the county for the Singer Sewing Machine Company, looking after its accounts.

Two of the children died young. Agatha Lucile died on 23 March 1912, aged 13. Mary Elizabeth died at Kingwood on 2 June 1914, aged 7, of an abscess on the brain. Both were buried in the Morris lot at Maplewood Cemetery in Kingwood. Sarah Catherine was born at Kingwood on 11 July 1921, when Walter was 51.

By the 1940s Walter and Sarah lived in the town of Reedsville. He died there of heart failure at half past six in the evening on 25 February 1943, aged 72. His wife was 61. A Morgantown funeral director, Fred L. Jenkins, buried him on 28 February 1943 at Maplewood Cemetery in Kingwood. He lies in Lot 24 of the old west section, with his daughters Agatha and Mary Elizabeth. His wife, his daughter Sarah Catherine and her husband Harold Zinn were later buried there too.

If Walter Crane Morris is in your family, start your own tree.

Cite: Heirology, "Walter Crane Morris (1870-1943)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/walter-crane-morris-1870-1943-113c8c.