Belle Leverett Sanford

Mary Belle Leverett Sanford (1860-1940) is interesting to me partly because she was a writer, and partly because she was one of the last Leverett women before Carol. In her generation was also Carrie Gertrude Augur (this is my great grandfather's generation) but that's it.

She was born in Salem Nebraska just as the Civil War was getting started; her parents were pioneers in southeastern Nebraska, but came back when she was three. She might or might not have remembered being on a stagecoach at age three, with two younger brothers and a teenage babysitter, crossing a surging Nishnabotna River in western Iowa on their way home. She ended up in Wisconsin with the family on a farm in the center of the state.

At sixteen she was proposed to by a wealthy banker, George Sanford. The family was opposed to her marrying so early. On agreement she held him off as long as she could and somehow got educated at Northwestern and University of Texas. I'm not quite clear how she pulled this off. Finally she married him and they lived in his hometown, Lavalle, Wisconsin, where she had her two boys, Arthur and Raymond. There may have been another one in there too who died.

In 1892 they moved the family to Council Bluffs where he now had controlling share in First National Bank. In a world that looks at bankers with the highest regard he was at his peak. Being a wealthy banker and all, he could provide for her in raising those boys and had a lot of social status.

But the Panic of 1893 came and put everyone under a lot of pressure. One of the problems with it was that it didn't go right away; it dragged on into 1897 or so. His father came to live with them in Council Bluffs and George installed his father Joseph on the board of the bank. He had enemies at the bank. He may have needed that support on his board.

In 1898 he had to sell his shares of the bank at great loss as Citizens State Bank took it over, and took the name with it. I'm sure this was a crushing blow. And I'm not sure what he did after the takeover. Did he still have his position? It's not clear yet.

Joseph died in January of 1902, four years later, at their house. But here's the wild thing. He took the remains back to Lavalle, where Joseph was a founder and hero, and everyone made a big deal out of him. But on his return, George himself died in August of that same year. Not sure how old he was or what he died of, I'll find out. Belle was left with the two boys.

The boys were already considerably older, I'm not sure how old. ONe I believe, Arthur, was born in like 1880, as soon as she married, and so was already 22 when his father died. The other, Raymond, may have been about 16.

She died alone in CB in 1840 though I'm not sure of that. The boys were off with families and never really lived as adults in CB. Each had sons and all of those sons had sons; there were boy Sanfords all over the place.

We considered them close relatives in part because I think Will and Belle were close, and shared a lot of concerns related to their parents who came back to CB and died there. But as the Sanford clan spread far and wide we lost track of them and Arthur and Raymond after all were in our grandparents' generation and much older.

Mary Belle was a churchgoer, a Methodist, and a supporter or member of WCTU. As such she was opposed to alcohol in general. But her husband George allowed taverns in buildings he owned and the law came after those taverns at least once. It makes me wonder if this was a conflict in their marriage or if his early death was somehow attributable to alcohol. No answer to that now. But if enemies had crumbled his financial empire and left him broke and angry at the turn of the century, alcohol might have been a natural part of that scenario.

As a writer she was prolific; she wrote biographies, and she was a journalist for the Non-Pareil; she wrote many short stories. I have a few of them in typed-up form in crinkly papers in my genealogy information. Some are so crinkly pages are getting separated from each other and coming apart. This is partly why I'm trying to reconstruct what I know, quick before it's too late. If some are particularly valuable I'll find a way to preserve them.

But mostly they are Will's Trans-Mississippian: doomed to a kind of obscurity, as my book will be the only thing that even points to their existence, besides the crates of crinkly paper.