A biography
Lura was born in Mount Ayr, Iowa, the day after Christmas in 1875, the firstborn of six children. She and the next three children were born in Mount Ayr, where their father worked as a teamster. When she was 5, her maternal aunt America Comer moved near them and was soon married to William’s cousin, Wm. M. Maudlin. In 1883 both families moved to Kingman County, Kansas, where Lura’s mother “Emma” bore two more children, for a total of 3 girls and 3 boys. Her father worked as a farmer and contractor, and he served as county treasurer.
New land was available in the Southwest corner of Kansas, so in 1886, when Lura was 10, the Brown and Maudlin families moved there and claimed homesteads in what became Stanton County. Their farm was 12 miles from Johnson City, which became the county seat. Eventually a railroad line was extended to Johnson City.
In January of 1889, Lura’s mother Emma became ill with tuberculosis. No doubt Lura had to help more with the housework and child care, as well as help care for her mother. On November 16, 1889, her mother passed away.
Lura and her siblings and her Maudlin cousins went to Mt Tabar School. Her father WJ Brown, along with William Maudlin, were on the school board. The school had 21 students, and Lura was the top student, with a 98.5% average and 100% in deportment. A mile to the south of the Brown homestead, in section 5, was a small, 8-student school on the Heimlen homestead, called Heimlen School. The teacher was Robert Warthen. He had a homestead 12 miles to the north in Hamilton County, but was teaching at this school. On March 8, 1890, the schools in the township had a spelling bee. If Robert and Lura hadn’t already met, then they would have met at this event. In any case, a relationship ensued. It was interrupted, however, by gold fever. Prospectors had discovered gold and silver in the mountains of Colorado, and many of the young men had gone there to seek their fortune. Robert went there as well, presumably after the school year ended. He seems to have found a good job, reportedly in law enforcement, and he wanted to live there long-term. On the 22nd of November 1890, the Johnson City Journal reported that Robert had returned from Colorado, then on the 23rd he and Lura were married. He was 26; she was not yet 15. The marriage was reported in the Syracuse Journal as follows, no doubt written by Robert’s sister Kate:
“On Sunday, the 23rd of Nov. Robert S. Warthen and Miss Lura Brown were united in marriage by Probate Judge Garner at the residence of the bride’s father. W. J. Brown, near Johnson City, Kansas. The bride is an accomplished young lady well known in Johnson and adjoining counties. She is greatly missed by the school friends whose tears accompanied the smiling lips that kissed a good-bye and wished a happy future. The groom is an early settler of Hamilton County and with his wife will continue to hold down his homestead near Kendall. Standing at the head of his profession as a farmer and teacher, his many friends wish him equal success as the head of a family. May this happy young couple have a long and blissful life.”
They made their home in Hamilton County, presumably on Robert’s homestead there (at NE¼ of section 14 of township 26S, R39W). He must have been farming it since 1886, because he was granted the patent for it in August of 1891.

The new couple remained in Stanton County through Christmas, staying perhaps at her father’s farm. Robert’s brothers had moved to Kearny County in 1890 so they could claim homesteads near the Arkansas River and irrigate their crops. So at the beginning of 1891 the young couple moved to Deerfield to spend the winter there with Robert’s brother Charles “Ed” Warthen and his wife Sulie, who was a teacher. When conditions were favorable, they moved to Colorado, going at first to Gardner. As the next winter approached, Lura came back to Kansas. She visited her relatives in Stanton County, as reported there on January 9, 1892, then moved to Syracuse, where Robert’s sister Kate was county superintendent of schools. There she lodged in a boarding house and enrolled in Syracuse School to continue her education. While there she subscribed to the Johnson City Journal to keep up with events at home. At that time her widowed father was Stanton County Treasurer and Chairman of the county’s republican caucus, so he was often in the news. But according to The Syracuse Journal, in April of 1892, Lura left Kansas to meet up with Robert in Jamestown, Colorado, near Boulder City. Many of the gold and silver mines were there.
Around August of 1893, the couple returned to Kansas to visit Robert’s family near Lakin, Kansas. Lura was pregnant, and they probably didn’t want to wait any longer to make the trip. Robert returned to Colorado, to their new home in the Cripple Creek district of Teller County, while Lura remained a while in Lakin. On September 1st she went to Stanton County to visit her family and friends for two weeks. While there she paid for a year’s subscription to the newspaper, to be sent to her in Colorado. Then she rejoined her husband. In March of 1895 her Brown family left Stanton County and moved to Pauls Valley, in what was then called Indian Territory, and later Oklahoma. Two years after that, to Lura’s consternation, her father married a young woman nearly her age and began another family.

The gold strike in Cripple Creek turned out to be one of the biggest in history. From 1890 to 1893, the population there grew from five hundred to ten thousand. Like all gold-mining boom towns, it was a rough place, and family history says Bob was involved in law enforcement. Besides the crime, the area was rocked for years by the bloody Colorado labor wars between miners and mine-owners, with the national guard being sent to support first one side and then the other. It must have been a very troublesome time for a young teenaged wife like Lura. But they stayed put. On the 23rd of November 1894, Lura gave birth to their first child, May Vivian, in Cripple Creek. In 1895, the town of Goldfield was laid out on the southern edge of the Cripple Creek district, and it was quickly settled, with a post office established that May, and a church sometime afterwards. The Warthens evidently moved there as well, because on the 12th of November 1899, Vivian and Lura were baptized in the First Presbyterian Church in Goldfield. But they did not stay in Colorado much longer.
The other Warthen families were living in Southside Township in Kearny County, near the town of Lakin. So on February 14, 1900, Robert returned to Kansas and bought a farm in Southside from a family named Tuttle. This was the NW¼ of section 10 township 25S, range 36W. The location was 2 miles south of the Arkansas River, and 3 miles south of Lakin. Today it is bordered by Road 120 on the north and County Road P on the west. There they raised cattle, hogs, turkeys, and chickens, and grew white sorghum and alfalfa to feed them, using water from the river to irrigate these crops in May. The turkeys fed on the bugs that came to eat the crops. They also grew sugar beets for a nearby sugar factory and had an orchard with apples, peaches, plums. Lura would pick the fruit and sell it. In the subsequent years the local newspapers would describe Robert as a “prominent farmer and stockman,” and they would note when Lura visited town for shopping or social calls.
On Jan 7, 1903, a son was born to them, Norris Minor Warthen, called Minor.
In August of 1908, her 23-year-old brother Nathan Brown came from Oklahoma to visit.
Lura was active in the First Christian Church, where she was a teacher in the Sunday School. She also helped organize county-wide Sunday School conventions and spoke at other meetings The Lakin Investigator reported in October, 1908, “The ladies missionary society met with Mrs. Robert Warthen Wednesday. There was quite a large attendance and a very interesting meeting.”
Their daughter May Vivian went to Lakin High School, where she was active in drama and basketball. In 1912 she served at times as a substitute teacher. She graduated in 1913 from Lakin high school and began work as a school teacher at Eureka School in Lakin. She lived in town but went home to the farm on holidays. In March of 1914 she was married to Jacob Propp, an ethnic German from central Russia. When the school year ended, the couple moved to Alabama, where Jacob worked in a dairy in Dayton, Marengo County. Robert Warthen paid for The Lakin Advocate to be sent to her there. In 1919 the Propss moved to Mexia, Texas, where Jacob worked for an oil company. Later they operated a bakery..

In 1913 her father’s second wife died of tuberculosis, leaving behind two sons. The younger son, Ual Jasper Brown, was only six years old. Their father had been crippled in an accident in 1906, and he was unable to care well for himself, much less for a young boy. So the father took Ual to live with his daughter Nora in nearby Tecumseh, Oklahoma, and he went on to live with his daughter Mertie in Tonkawa, Oklahoma. Nora, however, was facing hard times, so Lura agreed to take in Ual. So Nora sent the eight-year-old Ual on a trip alone by trains from Tecomseh to Lakin. Lura and Robert became his foster parents, and their son Minor was like an older brother to Ual. The next year, 1916, their father died, leaving Ual an orphan.
In September, 1915, the newspaper in a neighboring county, The Garden City Telegram, extolled Robert Warthen's farm as a model farm and urged people to go see it.
Minor did well at school, played basketball, and won a spelling bee. In December, 1915, when not quite 13, he went to Kansas City to attend a horse school, and afterwards he began breeding horses on the family farm. In Feb of 1917, at age 15, he traveled again to Kansas City to attend the Horse Breeders Association.

In 1919 Lura was bed-ridden with a series of serious illnesses. In March the cause is unstated, but serious enough that her sister visited her. Then in April it was pneumonia, and inflammatory rheumatism in July and November. In December she became so ill that her daughter May Vivian came from Alabama to be with her. Then on Christmas her condition became so critical that she was taken to the hospital in Garden City, accompanied by her nurse. Her husband drove there as well, with his brother Ed and his wife Sulie. She was in the hospital there until the end of January, when she was well enough to go home.
On the bright side, the farm produced a bountiful alfalfa seed crop that March (1919), and Robert was able to buy a new Ford. Then in May of 1919, their son Minor graduated from high school. That was bittersweet, because he took a job as a telegraph operator with a railroad company, and the job took him away to Shawnee, Oklahoma.

In January of 1921 Lura’s husband Robert became so ill that their son Minor came home to be with him and manage the farm. But Robert got worse, and in February he had to go to the hospital in Kansas City, 400 miles away, where he stayed for two weeks. After he recovered, Minor went back to Oklahoma to work as a telegraph operator, but this time he worked for a refinery in Cushing.
Things were quiet after that until the 18th of August in 1922, as described in The Lakin Independent:
“Last Friday evening a little past eight o’clock a fire was discovered in the barn belonging to J. W. Sinclair, about two miles southwest of Lakin … While Robert Warthen and wife had gone to the assistance of J. W. Sinclair their own house caught fire and was completely destroyed with all the contents. It was a total loss, as Mr. warthen carried no insurance on the house. Besides material loss there were many things destroyed that were heirlooms or keepsakes, which a lifelong association had made dear to them. While there is no money value in these things, yet they have a sentimental value, the loss of which is felt perhaps as much as the material loss.”
The Kearny County Advocate added this:
“Mr. Warthen informs us that there was no lamp left burning, and likewise the oil stove. That the conflagration at both places was of an incendiary origin is beyond cavil.”
Lura and Robert moved in with Robert’s brother Ed Warthen and his wife Sulie, which was 8 miles from Lakin. Lura’s half-brother Ual, who went to high school in Lakin, moved there and took up residence in a boarding house and got a job at a confectionary to pay for it. Robert began planning a new house, one made of brick, tiles, and stucco to make it fireproof, and in October construction was begun.
In November (1922), Lura became ill again, and Ual had to leave school for a while to help care for her and do the chores. Their son Minor came home to visit as well. But eventually Lura had to be taken to the hospital in Garden City, and her family and friends drove there to visit her. According to The Lakin Independent,
“Sunday afternoon [26 Nov 1922] when Robert Warthen, accompanied by [two of Lura’s friends] started to Garden City to visit Mrs Warthen, who is in the Bailey Hospital, he was turning a corner on the paved road when some trouble with the engine caused Mr Warthen to lose control of the car and it went into the ditch, turning completely over. It was probably fortunate for the occupants of the car that it was a sedan, as they escaped with no injuries except being badly shaken and more frightened than inured.”
In 1923 Lura became active in the newly formed Lakin Woman’s Club and spoke at some of their meetings on political topics. Meanwhile in Cushing, their son Minor met Viola Burke, and in January of 1925 they were married.
Later that year Ual Brown finished at Lakin High School. His brother Dempsey sent him a train ticket to come to Tonkawa, where Dempsey was living as well as their older half-sister Mertie. At Tonkawa he worked part time at a bank while studying at a junior college and became an accountant.
In March of 1929 Lura became ill and went again to the hospital in Garden City, and there she passed from this life. Her husband Robert, who was 11 years her senior, survived her by another 21 years. In 1934 her son Minor returned to the family farm near Lakin, with his wife Viola and son Curtis, and they helped Robert with the farm work.
Obituary from the book Diggin' Up Bones, Volume II, page 764, by Betty Barnes
Lura Brown Warthen was born at Mt. Ayer, Iowa, December 26, 1875, and departed this life at Garden City, Kansas, March 31, 1929. She moved from Iowa to Kingman County, Kansas, with her parents while a child, later moving to Stanton County, with her parents where she grew to womanhood. Here she was united in marriage to Robert S. Warthen on December 23, 1890, at her father’s home near Johnson City. From this union two children were born, May Vivian and Norris Minor. About ten years of the first of her married life were spent in Colorado. In 1898 they moved to the farm three miles south of Lakin, where she resided until her death. She leaves to mourn her death her husband, Robert S. Warthen, two children, May Vivian Propp, of Mexia, Texas, and Norris Minor Warthen of Cushing, Oklahoma, five brothers, Frank Brown of California, Arthur Brown of Duchesene, Utah, Nathan Brown of Apache, Oklahoma, Dempsey Brown of Enid, Oklahoma, U. J. Brown .of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, two sisters, Mertie Buford of Tonkawa, Oklahoma, Nora B. Glass of Oklahoma City, Oklahoma and five grandchildren, five nieces and nine nephews.
She united with the Christian Church at an early age and was a sincere and diligent worker in the church to the time of her death. Funeral services were conducted by Rev. McKeever, at the Christian Church, and interment in the Lakin Cemetery.