Butler County Genealogy Trails Kansas Mr. and Mrs. Allen Ralph Conley Bio

BUTLER COUNTY'S EIGHTY YEARS BIOS

MR. AND MRS. ALLEN RALPH CONLEY

She didn’t like Butler County at first. She was homesick for Indiana, for the scenes and associations of her childhood. For ten months she stuck it out, her only solace being to sit on the woodpile, “like Patience on a monument,” and write long letters to friends “back home.” She was a tender-hearted girl, and she just couldn’t get used to the change; the wide prairies, the silence, and the winds that howled up and down, as if lonesome, too. Then her parents decided to send her back to Indiana. She lived there three years, then came back, and liked Kansas better after that.

The homesick girl was Edith Agnes McCune, born in Clearcreek, near Bloomington, Indiana, May 11, 1857. She attended school in Bloomington, and when she was sixteen, came to Butler county with her parents, who homesteaded near Benton. The Dan Boydens, friends of the McCunes, heard that Edith was homesick and invited her to accompany them back to her native home in a covered wagon. She often told of the events of that trip, the meals prepared over a glowing fire in camp. After going to school three years in Bloominton she lingered there a little longer, enjoying the sojourn with her aunt and the association of her girlhood friends, and learning to sew.

When she returned to Butler County, a self-supporting young woman of nineteen, she went to El Dorado to work, living in the homes where she chanced to be sewing. But always she went to the family homestead “over Sunday.” All her life she revered that home—and then after she liked Kansas, she sometimes laughed about the long, homesick letters she had written.

She was a skillful needlewoman, and making dresses in the Seventies was hard, patient work. It took several days to make a dress, for there were ruffles and tucks, flounces and puffs; the skirts were very, very wide, the basques were very, very tight, and Oh my goodness, there were whalebones to cat-stitch on, and long rows of buttonholes! Now, you can get an invitation to a party in the morning, and make a dress for it in the afternoon. You couldn’t do that when Edith McCune was a seamstress in El Dorado.

In 1875, two years after the McCune family came to Butler County, a family came to El Dorado from Carthage, Missouri. Their name was Conley and they were of English and Irish ancestry. In the family was a young son, energetic, ambitious, and looking for work. He found it in the printshop of Thomas Benton Murdock, where he learned to set type. For several years he worked as printer, then, about 1879, he bought a small grocery store.

But the printer’s trade and the grocery business did not wholly occupy “Al” Conley’s attention. That is, not for long. There was a bridge across the Walnut River dam, at the edge of town, and there the young man went walking on Sunday afternoon. And—guess what? In the middle of the narrow bridge, face to face, that Sunday afternoon, he met a pretty girl with brown hair and dark brown eyes. Of course they got to talking – and after they decided which should make way for the other, for the path was narrow, and manners are important when one is young and gallant. Besides, people always get to talking, on a bridge, of a Sunday afternoon. She told him that she was a seamstress, and he told her he was a grocery merchant, and the – you know how it is, they just naturally got to talking of other things, and when the Sunday afternoon sun was sinking in the western sky he walked home with her, to the house where she chanced to be sewing that week.

The young seamstress with the dark brown eyes went home “over Sunday,” as everybody knew. The young grocery man had a horse and buggy, and, in the long drives to the farm near Benton, and back again to El Dorado, moonlight and twilight wrought their age-old magic. On November 21, 1880, the young grocery merchant, Allen Ralph Conley, and the young lady seamstress, Edith Anges McCune, were married at the bride’s home, and went to El Dorado to live.

In May, 1881, they built their home, one of the first homes on The Hill. The home is now occupied by their daughter, Miss Grace Conley, and it is substantially today as it was when it was built. And it is Miss Conley’s pride and comfort to keep it as little changed as possible. Miss Conley was a devoted daughter. She and her brothers revere the memory of their parents. She is a member of Susannah French Putney chapter, Daughters of the American Revolution, and of the Daughters of Union Veterans. Miss Conley is an accomplished musician and has given generously of her talent in long years of service as pianist in Christian Church services. She began as an organist in the old stone church on North Main. As a child she began her musical education under Fannie DeGrasse-Black and later was a student in the Conservatory of Music of Pueblo, Colorado.

Mr. Conley, one of the pioneer grocers of El Dorado, continued with his grocery store, in the first block on West Central, later adding a full line of queensware, in which he took much pride. In 1895 he went to Cripple Creek, Colorado, where his father was engaged in mining. He took up mining for some months, then returned to El Dorado and engaged in the grain business. In 1918 he decided he was tired of business: he would stop, and read and grow flowers and rest for a change. He stayed “retired” exactly two years, then turned his attention to insurance, which business he was engaged in up to the time of his death on August 19,1926. Mrs. Conley died in El Dorado, November 30, 1932.

Mrs. Conley was a beautiful woman, with dark brown eyes, large, lustrous dark brown eyes. Her daughter Grace, as well as four of Mrs. Conley’s granddaughters, have the dark brown eyes. She was very hospitable, liked to have company and was much beloved by young people because of her sympathetic nature and her interest in their welfare. She was a charter member of the Christian church in Benton, and sang in the church choir. She also sang for years in the choir of the little stone church on North Main Street in El Dorado. Mrs. Conley delighted in domestic work in her home, and in doing fine needlework, the delicate, close, firm stitching that so astonishes the generation used to the Ready-to-Wear shops. For fifty years, from her home directly across the street from the Central High school building, Mrs. Conley noted the growing up and graduating of two generations. She became the close friend and confidants of many of the girls and boys and was interested in the welfare of each one of them.

Mr. Conley was born in Madison, Wisconsin, march 14, 1856, the son of Harvey and Mary Ellen (Spaulding) Conley. He loved flowers and trees and was the first person in El Dorado to raise tulips, importing bulbs from Holland. Today, the town is beautified by many of the trees he planted. Being a philosopher, he liked to fish, being a student, he liked to read. He was particularly fond of knowledge or information books, as well as fiction. Like Thomas A. Edison, he enjoyed reading the encyclopedia and, like Edison, he profited much by the knowledge thus acquired. He was secretary of the Men’s Bible Class of the Christian Church Sunday School, a class so large that it had to meet in the theater. On the Sunday after Mr. Conley’s death, Rev. F. W. Condit held a memorial service in the Sunday School, and in the afternoon, a memorial service was held at which Judge Henry W. Schumacher pronounced an eloquent eulogy of his friend and fellow-worker, at the Odd Fellows Hall.

The three children of Mr. and Mrs. Conley, are Miss Grace Estelle Conley, now living in El Dorado, her birthplace; Carl Allen Conley, of Tulsa; and William Kent Conley, of Erick, Okla. The seven grandchildren are Barbara Frances Conley; Jack Noble, Ruth Louise, Allen Joe, Edith, Shirley Jane and Nancy Conley. Allen is a constantly recurring name in the Conley family.

The old McCune homestead property near Benton, where the little homesick girl lived years ago, is now a daisy field, Miss Conley says. Her mother used to drive out there to gather daisies for Decoration Day. It must have been a comfort to the gentle lady to find waving grasses and golden-hearted flowers where her old home once stood, instead of the weather-stained, decaying buildings one sometimes sees on pioneer Kansas farms. Time has dealt graciously with Edith Agnes McCune’s girlhood home. An old homestead, conscious of being long loved, could not desire a more lovely fate than to become a daisy field, a field to furnish blossoms for the sacred precincts “where the little crosses stand.”

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