Early Jobs of Edmund Gates, Sr.

   Edmund, Sr. came to Fairfax in the early 1900s and helped A.C. Hunsaker on plumbing jobs. In the book From a Field of Cane, The Early Years of Fairfax, Oklahoma 1903-1913, A.C. Hunsaker is identified as one of the early founders of Fairfax starting his long-running hardware, furniture, and undertaking businesses. Initially, these all operated out of the same building. Whether you needed a casket or gasket, you could get it from A.C. Hunsaker in the brand-spanking new town founded on February 16,1903! The forward-looking pioneers who had relocated from Gray Horse to this new government townsite would have kept Edmund, Sr. busy installing plumbing in their new homes and businesses.

   Edmund, Sr.’s cousin, Edith Gates Harrington, and her family had settled in Fairfax. Her husband A.C.--who coincidentally  had the same initials as Mr. Hunsaker, Grandpa's boss-- was installing acetylene lights. In the early 20^th century, streetlights and lights in buildings were often acetylene lights.
  In Edith's preteen years, Edmund, Sr. had been taken to her family's home from his own home where only sign language was used by his deaf parents.  For a period of time in Edmund, Sr.'s young life, in order to learn to speak, he had lived with Edith's family in Illinois. Edmund, Sr. seemed to have been influenced to come to the new town by his closeness to Edith. (My blog on December 1, 2013  Early Days of Edmund Gates, Sr. details the time Edmund, Sr. lived with Edith's family.)

Edith Gates Harrington and her husband, A.C. in

a photograph taken in 1936. Edith was a daughter

 of Edmund, Sr.'s uncle, Robert Bell Gates. Edith was

 seven years older than Edmund, Sr. She was born in

Woodbine, Illinois, in 1870.

  Edmund, Sr. evidently then headed back home to Kansas only to be once again disillusioned with a family farm partnership with his father, John Fredrick, and his brother, John. (See blog post of September 1, 2013, entitled He Was Paid for His Wheat in GOLD! to read of an earlier business disagreement with John.) My grandfather, Edmund, Sr. was driven to succeed and wanted to reinvest as much as possible in the family farm operation to increase productivity. John, his brother, wanted to sell cattle to buy a ring for his girlfriend, Ethel. Grandpa viewed this as a frivilous, extravagant, and totally impractical reason to sell livestock, and therefore a business move he could in no way support.

John Fredrick Gates, Jr., the only brother of Edmund, Sr.,

was born on September 12, 1882, in Mulberry, Kansas.

   Upset over John's decision, Edmund, Sr. went to Montrose, Colorado, to help dynamite out and build the Gunnison Tunnel. History shows this project took the lives of many men who built it. The Gunnison Tunnel was constructed from 1904-1909. He mentioned later to Edmund, Jr., my father, that he damaged his ears working on the Gunnison Tunnel. Evidently, Grandpa’s hearing impairment was not entirely due to heredity.