Butler County Genealogy Trails Kansas Nat Frank Frazier Bio

BUTLER COUNTY'S EIGHTY YEARS BIOS

NAT FRANK FRAZIER, JR.

(transcribed by Lori DeWinkler)

Nat Frank Frazier, president of the Citizens State Bank, one of the strongest and most reliably progressive financial institutions in Kansas; identified with oil development on a large scale in the El Dorado field and in Oklahoma; and extensively engaged in livestock and farming, is a native of this city, having been born March 13, 1882. A delightful personality, a genuine consideration for others and an uncompromising integrity and loyalty to friendships are his chief characteristics.

Mr. Frazier received his early education in the El Dorado grades and the hig school, after which he was enrolled in the Lake Forest Academy, Lake Forest, Illinois, from which he was graduated with the Class of 1903. Like his father, the distinguished Nathan Frank Frazier, founder of the Citizens State Bank and who helped to claim the old West to civilization, Nat F. Frazier, in his young manhood, was not content to take a subordinate position in a bank and settle down to the routine of developing into a staid and substantial citizen. Instead, he became the nominal private secretary of the elder Frazier and created duties which carried him into the old Indian and Oklahoma territories, the mining districts of Joplin and into other sections which afforded changing scenes and reasonably sufficing advernture.

The year following his graduation, or in 1904, and the succeeding five years, he devoted to the inspection of his father’s real estate, oil interests and mining properties in the vicinities of Bartlesville, Nowata, Sapulpa and in other areas of the then semi-savage districts of the former Osage, Iowa, Choctaw and Cherokee Indian reservations. He largely acted for his father in the operations of the Bartlesville Oil & Development company and also the Frazier & Powell Oil Company. During the next ten years, the years following his father’s death, in 1907, he gave a more personal and mature attention to these properties and, as officer and director of numerous concerns and in association with his brother, the late Ray E Frazier, caused them to yield most substantial profits.

In 1908, he became vice-president of the Citizens State Bank and upon his brother’s death in 1919, succeeded to its presidency, which position he now occupies. With the assumption of the presidency of the Citizens State Bank, with its enormous duties, together with the direction of his extensive farming and livestock interests and oil developments, few men in the state have greater responsibilities. And plus these individual interests, unhappy fate has added others. Upon the death of his brother, Ray, the management of this huge estate, in an advisory character with the widow, Mrs. Henrietta Frazier, became a part of his duties, and later, upon the death of J. B. Adams, chairman of the board of the Butler County State Bank, he has been acting in an advisory capacity to Mrs. Adams, a sister, who was Miss Edna Frazier. But regardless of these myriad strictly business duties, Mr. Frazier, recognizing his responsibilities as a public spirited citizen, cooperates with the Chamber of Commerce, the local Rotary Service club, the direction of the Kafir Corn Carnival and all other laudable local progress movements. He also is a member of the County and State Bankers Associations and the American Bankers Association. His fraternal affiliations are confined to the Masonic lodge, in which he has risen to the thirty-second degree with memberships in Patmos, No. 97, A. F. & A. M., El Dorado, and the Consistory and Midian Shrine Temple, Wichita. In religion, he prefers the doctrines of the Christian church. Politically, he is a Republican.

Mr. Frazier is of earliest American Quaker stock and the soon of Nathan Frank and Emma (Crook) Frazier. The ancestral line is included in the sketch of N. F. Frazier, Sr., on the preceding pages of this book. He was married, September 28, 1905, to Miss Zona Brown. Mrs. Frazier is a native of El Dorado and the daughter of Henry T. and Mattie (Flenner) Brown, the former born in Pennsylvania, June 12, 1853, and the latter in Illinois. H. T. Brown came to Kansas when 19 years old and died here May 13, 1917. Mrs. Brown was the daughter of William P. and Jennie (Reddick) Flenner. William P. Flenner was a Civl War veteran on the Union side and the founder of the old Butler County Advocate, only Democratic newspaper published here and which now is extinct. He died in 1919.

Three children have been born of the marriage of Mr. and Mrs. Frazier. They are: Sarah Margaret, a graduate in the 1930 class of University of Kansas, Lawrence, who was married April 25, 1932, to Dr. Robert Allen McCurdy and lives in Cleveland, Ohio; Nathan Frank III, who was married June 14, 1933, to Aileen Wilson of El Dorado, and will be graduated in the spring of 1935 from University of Kansas; and William Thatcher Frazier, a student in El Dorado Junior College. Dr. and Mrs. McCurdy have a daughter, Margaret Frazier who was born August 30, 1933.