Nevada Genealogy Trails Washoe County Florence Humphrey Church Biography

Member of the Nevada Historical Society
By J. E. C.

A MICHIGAN GIRL IN WESTERN SERVICE
The recent deaths of Gertrude Buck, '94, and of FLORENCE HUMPHREY CHURCH, some time member of the class of '93, at the extremes of the United States, illustrates the far-flung and varied influence of the University of Michigan.*

Back in the early 90's these two women were members of a close-knit group of five girls representative of the best traditions of Michigan homes, but with aptitude and outlook quite diverse. All went their several ways to service. Two have lived full lives without a twilight ; the others are still carrying on.

Florence Humphrey's life consisted of two complementary elements, love and service, and for these she gave her life. Drawn by her deeply religious nature to the Student Volunteer Service under Robert Speer, she left the University of Michigan in her junior year to enter the newly developing Y service as secretary at Bay City. In 1894 she joined her college mate, J. E. Church, Jr., '92, Professor of Classics at the University of Nevada, and blended her life interests with his.

To her earlier studies at Oberlin and Michigan she added a university residence at Munich and obtained the degrees of B.A. and M.A. at Nevada, thus gaining a breadth of view and maturity of training that fitted her for the executive leadership that came to her unbidden. She became a founder and president of the Nevada Woman's Faculty Club, vice-president of the University of Nevada Alumni Association, president of the Reno Twentieth Century Club, vice-president of the Nevada Suffrage Association and W. C. T. U., when campaigns for suffrage and prohibition reached their successful conclusion, president of the Nevada Federation of Women's Clubs and their National Director, a founder and vice-president of the Intermountain and Coast Federation of Women's Clubs, and spokesman of the far western States at the biennial council of the General Federation of Women's Clubs.

In a word, she became the champion and servant of womankind. Service with her became rare leadership, for she had the faculty of understanding the heart of women and drew from each her best endeavor even when the intercourse must be mainly by letter. Honors also sat lightly upon her, but duties became a sacred obligation. Consequently, duties clamored ever at her door. Perhaps the greatest tributes paid her were from the Governor of Nevada, who placed in her care the correspondence that brought the Nevada Legislators together, mostly at their own expense, to ratify the national amendment enfranchising women, and the spontaneous expression of regret from even the remote clubs of the State that their leader was gone. Pioneering is not necessarily limited to the West, as is shown by Gertrude Buck's service in the East. Perhaps rather it is a spirit emanating from college training. At any rate, it was richly abundant in Florence Humphrey, despite an innate shrinking from criticism and longing for peace.

In addition to pioneering in mass movements, she did the things that were then counted strange and unusual, but are now growing popular as the beauties of nature are being gradually revealed and understood. True to her instinct at Michigan that led her and her mates to sight some distant point in the landscape and then go cross-lots on a journey of discovery, she was one of the first women to ride horseback more than one thousand miles along the Sierra from Yosemite to Shasta, descending into the one and scaling the other. Once she glorified her Christmas week by camping amid the mountain crests carpeted with fairy snow and canopied by night with gleaming stars, and reluctantly admitted that she was unfitted for winter mountaineering only when the clambering reached the extreme of fifteen hours per day. Eventually her ashes will rest, like Helen Hunt Jackson's, on a mountain peak, overlooking Lake Tahoe and the glories of the universe.

Though cut off in her prime, she lived an ideally double life, for she inspired her husband to love and to teach literature and art in its intimate relationship to the human soul. That her life and her love may grow even more rich after her, a memorial art library is being assembled that will interpret the beauties of the mountains and the lakes and the deserts to the lonely dweller, who has a gallery of nature's masterpieces at his door, providing he has the eye to behold. To this also will be added the masterpieces of man in order that beauty of color may join the beauty of sound in idealizing the isolated home life of the West.

*Reprinted from the "Michigan Alumnus." " Professor of English. Vassar College. One of the originators of the "Little Theatre" movement.

Source:
Nevada Historical Society Papers
By Nevada Historical Society
Published by State Printing Office, 1922
Contributed by Kim Torp