Phillip BARTON

Inscription:

PHILLIP
Nov. 27, 1879
Nov. 13, 1938
LYDIA A.
ANDERSON
DEC. 29, 1884
MAY 6, 1981
BARTON

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Barton Family Information - Compiled by C. Kirkstadt, Jan 1997: Phillip Barton - Was about 10 years old when his mother married Philip Hixson. He was 24 years old when he married Lydia. His mother died May 18, 1938. Phillip died Nov. 13, 1938 of a gunshot wound. Phillip was born in Crystal Spring, Pennsylvania. Phillip's death certificate gives Date of Birth as Nov. 27, 1897, however he died in 1938 at age 58 and therefore was born in 1879 (not 1897). His gravestone, in Sterling CO., shows Nov. 27, 1879.

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From Colorado Death Certificate:
Name: Phillip Barton
Residence: 25 mi SE Sterling, Colo.
Date of Birth: Nov. 27, 1897 (submitters note: This date on the death certificate is wrong - should be Nov. 27, 1879)
Age: 58 years, 11 months, 6 days
Trade: Farmer
Birthplace: Penn.
Name of Father: ?
Birthplace of Father: ?
Maiden Name of Mother: ?
Birthplace of Mother: ?
Informant: Mrs. Liddia Barton
Burial Place: Sterling, Colo.
Burial Date: Nov. 17, 1938
Undertaker: A. D. Jackson & Son
Date of Death: Nov. 13, 1938
Time: 2:35 p.m.
Cause of Death: Gun shot wound in forehead (suicide)
Where did injury occur: Home
Manner of injury: 22 cal. rifle
Signed A. D. Jackson & Son

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News Article (from Monday, November 14, 1938 newspaper in Sterling, Colorado): PHILIP BARTON, HARDING FARMER, DIES OF GUNSHOT
Philip Barton, 58 years old, well known farmer who has lived for thirty years south of the Harding school, died Sunday afternoon at a hospital in Sterling of a gunshot wound, which Coroner A. D. Jackson said apparently was self-inflicted.
Mr. Barton had been in ill health, having recently been a hospital patient in Sterling, and was despondent, according to statements of members of his family.
Mr. and Mrs. Barton and a son were at home Sunday morning when Mr. Barton went into the front room. Hearing a noise, Mrs. Barton and son entered the room and found Mr. Barton on the floor, a small-calibre rifle under the body. The coroner was called and brought Mr. Barton to a hospital where he died at 2:35 o'clock.
The wound was in the roof of the mouth and the bullet left the head between the eyes, the coroner said.
Mr. Barton, during his long residence in the Harding region, was known as a leading farmer. A large planting of Western Yellow pines was a distinguishing feature of his place.
Surviving Mr. Barton are his wife, Mrs. Lydia Koenig Barton, two sons, Charles E. Barton of Sterling and Rutherford W. Barton, who divides time between Sterling and the home place, and a daughter, Mrs. John Busig of Parkdale, Ore.
Funeral arrangements, in charge of the A. D. Jackson & Son mortuary, had not been completed this afternoon.

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Lydia Anderson (Phillip's wife) Obituary from, Friday, May 8, 1981 Sterling (Colorado) Journal-Advocate: Funeral services for former area resident Lydia Ann Barton Andersen, 96, will be held 2 p.m. Monday at Chaney-Walters Funeral Home. Rev. Dennis Sillaman will officiate. Burial will follow in Riverside Cemetery. Mrs. Andersen died Wednesday in Sunnyvale, Calif. She was a resident of Redwood, Calif., at the time of her death. She was born Dec. 29, 1884 in Canada to Pete and Madaline Heist Koenig. Mrs. Andersen came to the LeRoy community with her parents from Canada, where they homesteaded. On Sept. 1, 1903 she married Phillip Barton. After her marriage, the couple homesteaded in the LeRoy community where they farmed for several years. Mr. Barton died in 1938. In 1949, Mrs. Andersen moved to California where she lived until her death. She is survived by a daughter, Bertha Busig McConnell, Vancouver, Wash.; two sons, Charles E. Barton, Sterling, and Rutherford W. Barton, Redwood City, Calif.; four brothers, Ervin H. Koenig, Portland, Ore., Simon P. Koenig, Sterling, Percy Koenig of Austin, Texas and John Koenig, Greeley; a sister, Elsie Buss, Sterling; 11 grandchildren, 35 great-grandchildren and eight great-great-grandchildren. Chaney-Walters Funeral Home is in charge of arrangements.

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My Life (complete) (Written by Bertha Mae Barton, daughter of Phillip and Lydia Koenig Barton (Anderson) in 1966 when she was 62, edited):
Lydia Koenig and Phillip Barton met in Greeley, Colorado and September 1, 1903 they were married. After their marriage they went to Crystal Spring, Pennsylvania, my fathers home. Then on December 3, 1904, I, Bertha, was born. Fifteen months later on February 28, 1906 my brother Charles was born.
In 1907 my parents left Crystal Spring for Sterling, Colorado, my mothers home town. I don't remember the trip, which was by train, but although I was only three I can yet recall my first Christmas in Colorado. We were living on my grandfather's (Peter Koenig) farm just east of town, between the railroad tracks and the Platte River (I believe the house is still there.)
A year of so later my parents acquired some homestead land about 20 miles southeast of Sterling. There was nothing on the land except a dugout, with a dirt floor, but we lived in it for several months, until, with the help of friends and neighbors (which were few and far between), Dad managed to put in a cement floor. Later he added a room above ground, which served as our kitchen and living room. My dad plowed the land with a one horse plow, bought some adjoining land and became a very successful farmer.
June 16, 1910 my brother, Rutherford, was born. I was six by then, had never enjoyed playing will dolls, but liked anything that was real and alive, especially babies, so helped a great deal in caring for the new arrival, but i still had to carry on with my share of the farm and household chores.
By the time i was eight my parents had acquired some cattle, so i learned to milk cows. Charles and I would drive the herd out to free pasture. Tired of walking two or three miles a day we broke a yearling steer to ride, and rode it one entire summer. The next season Dad bought us a pony, i guess the steer went to market.
After I finished grade school my folks moved to town. I lived at my uncle and aunts, Ed and Simon Koenig, most of the time I attended Sterling High School, as my parents went back on the farm. After graduation, I went back to school another year and took a post graduate course. In the meantime I had met a young man who lived west of Sterling. His name was John Busig.
It was January 18, 1925 that John and I were married and on October 17 that same year I became a mother. Our son Harold Wayne was born at Mrs. Busse's maternity home. Ten months, a week and a day later on August 25, 1926 another boy arrived. We had hoped for a girl this time, so we didn't have a name for him, but finally decided on Kenneth Eugene. We were living on a dry land farm about eight miles west of Sterling and crops were not always good, but that didn't scare the stork away. On July 19, 1928 I went back to Mrs. Busse's for the third time. This time it was a little auburn haired girl, Ruth Evelyn, who we called Ruthie. She is now Mrs. Jack Lander. Again we hung out our white flag, but I guess the stork just didn't see it, because thirteen months later, August 21, 1929 I was back at Mrs. Busse's. This time another girl. We named her Delores Mae. She is now Mrs. Donald Helton. She is known as Lorry and she is still our baby. Mrs. Busse had told me if I were the first one to come back to her for the fifth time she would take care of me free of charge. Dr. Latta was the pediatrician for all four of our babies.
In the fall of 1934, when Colorado became part of the Dust Bowl we packed up our few belongings and moved our family to a place near Hood River, Oregon. Then later to Parkdale, Oregon near Mt. Hood.
It was while we were living at Parkdale that I lost my Dad. He died November 13, 1938 at the age of 58. Sometimes the death of a loved one, we sorrow at the blows life has dealt him and we wish he might have had a second chance, and so it was with him. I like to think that where ever he may be, I am still his one and only girl. My mother Lydia is living 20 miles south of San Francisco near Rutherford and his family and is a very young great grandmother of 82.
Pearl Harbor changed the face of the earth, and so it changed our lives too. The next fall (1942) we moved to Vancouver, Washington where John, Pop as we now call him, went to work in the shipyards and it wasn't long until Harold and Kenneth joined the Navy. After the boys left for war I went to work in a shopping center as manager of the bakery section. The girls were in high school and they helped in the bakery after school and on Saturdays.
It wasn't long after the war ended before the kids were all married. The grandchildren were arriving, about two a year, until there were twelve, nine boys and three girls. They are all near us except Lorry's family of two boys and a girl. They live in Auburn, Washington where Don has a mortuary and Lorry works part time in the hospital as a nurse. We usually manage to get them all together at Christmas time, what a time with ten teenagers. I have ceased trying to prepare big Christmas dinners, instead we have cold meats, salads, snacks and desserts, with coffee and cranberry punch, usually on Christmas Eve or when the gifts are opened.
I have never had much time for hobbies and I don't like hobbies that cut us off from the world. I like sports and the competition they entail, so about ten years ago, when women all over the country began bowling, I too joined a bowling league. I'm still trying to maintain more than a 136 average. I also like to swim, but I'm no bathing beauty. I have always had a secret desire to try my hand at the easel, but as for my secret vices, I would rather keep them a secret.
Pop has retired, so now I have twice the man on half the income and as for him, instead of wine, women and song, it is fishing, social security, and television. When life gets monotonous we load up our little travel trailer and go to the beach or to the hills. Sometimes in the fall we go to Colorado and in the winter to Arizona or California. We like trailer traveling, especially when we can travel with friends and relatives, and hope to continue our journeys, but we intend to maintain our home in Vancouver, because we enjoy living near the children and grandchildren.
I have resolved to try to adjust myself to the fact that i am now 62 years old. There may be other resolutions I should make, and there are probably mistakes and personal faults I haven't mentioned, but this is a synopsis of the life I have lived thus far.

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Article from "Sterling Centennial Logan County Family History, 1884-1894" (edited) - The Peter Koenig Family - Peter Koenig was born in the village of Mildmay, Ontario, Canada November 17, 1860. Peter grew up speaking German as his parents Ludwig (Lewis) and Elizabeth Koenig had emigrated to Canada from Germany in the 1850s. Always ambitious, Peter apprenticed to a blacksmith at an early age and photos show his powerful chest and shoulders which developed from working the blacksmith bellows. By the time he was twenty, however, his lungs were being badly affected by the smoke of the blacksmith shop and he had to look for another occupation. His physical strength led him to become an apprentice stonemason. Most of the large homes were made of the native grey stone and his work was in great demand. Many of the homes he built in the 1880s are still occupied one hundred years later.
In 1882, he married Magdalena Heist and shortly afterward, purchased his father's farm. Peter's brother John had left Canada and had settled in Nebraska a few miles from the first homestead claim in the US. John asked his aging parents to return with him to Nebraska while he and his family were visiting Canada. When John, his wife and 13 children left in their covered wagon for their new home, the elder Koenigs went with them. Thus Peter purchased his father's farm which was the original Royal land grant. The grant had been filed under Lewis King, the Anglican version of Ludwig Koenig.
In only a few years the Westward Expansion bug bit Peter also and he and Henry Thurkhorn went to Nebraska to look for homestead land.
However, they had arrived too late and all of the land had been claimed. He was advised to look for land around the new town of Greeley, Colorado, but he found the same problem there. The only land available was across the Platte River in the sandhills several miles east of the new town of Sterling. Peter returned to Canada, loaded his belongings including a team of horses in a boxcar and he and his family moved to Colorado. By then, the family included three daughters, Maggie, Lydia, and Emma, and one son, baby Jacob Edward. One can only imagine Magdalena's thoughts as she recalled the plush woods of her Canadian home as she surveyed the endless dry prairie surrounding her new home at LeRoy. This was the third settlement of the area as the rainless summers had driven two earlier sets of homesteaders away.
Peter was businessman enough to realize that the only sure money to be made probably wouldn't be from farming, so he opened a general store.
The Evangelical Church was central in the lives of the Koenigs as it was in those of most of the settlers of German ancestry. Peter was able to put his earlier training as a stone mason to use when the new stone church was to be built.
Although all church services were conducted in German and Peter staunchly read his German Bible, Peter spoke English and he and his brother Will, who had joined the Colorado family, decided to change the pronunciation of the family name from "Kanig" to "Konig," thus making it sound more Anglicanized. The family in Nebraska and in Canada still use the German pronunciation.
Each year seemed to bring another child into the family. In the eleven years between 1889 and 1900, five boys and one girl were born. They were Elizabeth, Erwin Henry ("Fat"), Simon Peter ("Sib"), Elroy ("Short"), Clarence and Percy Malcolm ("Doc"). Then in 1905, Magdalena, expecting her eleventh child, suddenly died.
Left a widower with ten children, Peter returned to Canada to seek a wife and mother for his children. When he returned to Sterling, he brought his new wife, Margaret, Magdalena's younger sister, and her twin sons, Clinton and Clayton Astell.
In July, 1906, their first son, John Wesley, was born, and eighteen months later in January, 1908, Vergil was born.
In 1936, Margaret died and Peter remarried, he was never able to find another woman as kind as Magdalena and Margaret had been. He died May 12, 1948 leaving many descendants.

Contributed on 1/23/10

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Record #: 25707

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