Mary Genella Baldan Navarre

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Obituary- Navarre, Mary 1

MARY GENELLA NAVARRE
Mary Navarre, mother of the Reporter editor and Joe Navarre, Rossville's route carrier, passed away shortly before 6 o’clock Monday morning.
She had lived in this community and Shawnee county many more years, than any other citizen of Ross¬ville.
Born at Westport, Mo., now Kan¬sas City, February 14, 1854, the daughter of James and Martha Baldan, she inherited the rugged consti¬tution of her sturdy Pennsylvania Dutch ancestry, and while a petite woman through choice, up to less than a year ago lived in her little home alone.
Her mother died when she was little over three years old, and until her father married Mary Ann Rice, she was taken care of by an old French woman named Chumois, and reared in the old Clinton hotel, at Indianola, which ante-dated and rivaled the present city of Topeka as a townsite.
At that time Silver Lake, Rossville and all the territory southwest nearly to Paxico was in the Pottawatomie reservation.
Her stepmother, being of Indian ancestry, owned an allotment just west of Rossville, now known as the Clarence Emert farm. There mother was reared. A few oldtimers still remember the old double log house that was her home. What schooling she got was from the Mission school at St. Marys conducted by the Madames of the Sacred Heart who later turned their property to the Jesuits for the present St. Mary’s college.
Mother was never concerned over the fact she was living in an age that saw this section developed from a wilderness to its present state of de¬velopment. She married Gregory Navarre in 1871 and eleven children were born to them. Providence decreed that none of her daughters was to live to comfort her in her last years. Just two sons, your editor, her seventh, and Joe, her elev¬enth, remain.
In 1888 or 89 her father and family moved to Oklahoma. After her husband’s death in 1902, she devoted her life to rearing her remaining children, who one by one passed on.
We could fill another column of episodes of her girlhood days when the fawn west of town was the stop¬ping place for people from the East, pushing westward: some of them even to die there and be buried in the private cemetery just southwest of the old house; the arrival of the first train here; the stirring early history of Rossville community; the arrival of the Navarre family from South Bend, Indiana, in 1866, one of the sons a few years later to be¬come her husband. Her first son was named Henry Clay Navarre, and her second was Jerome, (Polly)) to you, who died 12 years ago.
It is told her father stood off the Kansas Pacific surveyors with a shotgun when they sought to establish their 400-foot right-of-way given in a federal land grant, through his farm. As a matter of fact he made good and when a few years ago they did establish their claim to that right-of-way it was found they had had to purchase the 100 feet they now use.
Mother and Dad moved into Ross¬ville before the town was established as a city of the third class, which was in 1881, and except for a brief residence in Topeka, this has been Mother’s home since.

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