The Family Connection to the 120th Anniversary of the Founding of Fairfax

            Several historical sources give "1903" as the year of the founding of Fairfax . This month seemed a good time to highlight the beginning of Fairfax's post office along with Grandpa Gates's early job in his mid-20s.

             My paternal grandpa, Edmund Gates, 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 whose post office opened on February 16, 1903!* The forward-looking pioneers who had relocated from Gray Horse to this new government townsite kept Edmund, Sr. busy installing plumbing in their new homes and businesses. 

The first postmark from the opening day of the
Fairfax Post Office. Scanned from A Field of 
Cane, The Early Years of Fairfax, Oklahoma
1903-1913

            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.

          Many years earlier, 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 time in Edmund, Sr.'s young life, he lived with Edith's family in Illinois. 

            The extended trip for little preschool-aged Edmund, Sr. was planned by his father, John Fredrick. Both of my grandfather’s parents were deaf, but Great-Grandpa John Fredrick did not lose his hearing until age 14 due to illness. He knew that his eldest child could hear and needed to learn to speak with his vocal cords and not just his hands. In those days, this seemed the best way to prepare little Edmund, Sr. for the world ahead of him but left Elizabeth, my great-grandmother, inconsolable as her little boy rode away to Illinois. 

As a preschooler, Grandpa soon formed a strong bond with the family of his uncle, Robert Gates in Illinois. His wife and children, Ira, Edith, and Lois welcomed the disquieted little one. Edith, at around age seven or eight appeared to help him adjust after being uprooted from his own family in Mulberry, Kansas. The family prepared him to return to his younger siblings and teach the them to speak. Just as important, the readiness his aunt and uncle and the cousins provided proved invaluable as he began school soon after his return to Kansas.

Edmund, Sr. seemed to have been influenced to come to the new town from Kansas by his closeness to Edith. Even though she was a cousin, she seemed more like a big sister to Grandpa. The ways her family helped him learn to speak opened a whole new vista to Grandpa and enabled him, as a young child, to return to his family’s farm in Kansas and teach Merry (pronounced like Marie), aged 4, and Ella, aged 1, to speak. Grandpa would later teach his only brother, John, born about a year after Grandpa returned, the many skills needed to navigate a hearing world.

Edith Gates Harrington and her husband, A.C.,
in a photograph taken in 1936. Edith, a daughter
of Robert Bell Gates, the uncle of my grandpa,
Edmund Gates, Sr. Edith was seven years older 
than Grandpa. She was born in Woodbine,
Illinois, in 1870. 

            Some viewed older men of yesteryear as gruff and insensitive. How easily Grandpa could have experienced detachment disorder as he was uprooted not once but twice from two different families with whom he had bonded  - his own family and then the family of his Uncle Robert! Yet at least three of his daughters, my aunts, spoke to me with deep affection in their voices for their beloved "Papa" indicating with their words and tone how they loved him for being a good father.

              These verses from the letter written by James, the half-brother of Jesus, reminds us of the way to deal with difficulties as believers. May James 1:2-4 become the beacon to guide our lives when we seem to be in dark, treacherous moments of our lives.

Dear ones, is your life full of difficulties and temptations? Then be happy, for when the way is rough, your patience has a chance to grow. So let it grow, and don't try to squirm out of your problems. For when your patience is finally in full bloom, then you will be ready for anything, strong in character, full and complete.

The Living Bible

*Source of beginning date of the Post Office at Fairfax, Oklahoma https://about.usps.com/