HISTORY
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Story by Cindy Higgins Photography by Cindy Higgins and courtesy Venecia Eubanks Sutton Price
Beth Fortner Moseley A new book provides a glimpse into one Black family’s experience in Eudora during the late 1910s and early 1920s
The Fortners lived in this home on Oak Street.
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n November 2021, author and genealogist Venecia Eubanks Sutton Price released a biography about her aunt, a Black educator raised in Eudora in the early 1900s. The book, Beth Fortner Moseley: Her Story, may be of particular interest to Eudora readers because of Moseley’s connections to people and places of Eudora. The author’s discovery and use of handwritten papers from her aunt provide invaluable insight into the life of one Black family in Eudora during the 1910s and early 1920s. The records of Beth Fortner Moseley’s story begin with her grandmother, Mary Harris Fortner. Born in 1855 to an enslaved woman and her white Missouri owner, Mary married Elijah Fortner, an emancipated slave from Missouri who settled in Eudora in 1875 with the help of abolitionists. The youngest of their eight children, George, taught high school in Tulsa (where the job opportunities and pay were better) while his wife, Nettie, lived with Mary in Eudora during the early years of their marriage. “Eudora was such a tiny place,” Price explains. “There were no jobs unless one farmed. George picked potatoes to put himself through Kansas University and certainly did not want to make it his life’s work.”
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From 1917 to 1923, George’s family and mother lived at a house built in 1910 at 635 Oak Street. The home— which still stands today—was across from the Lothholz Lumber Company. The two-story frame house had three bedrooms—one for grandmother Mary; one for Beth’s mother, Nettie, and her four children; and one downstairs used sporadically by a relative who worked at the mines in Lexington, Missouri. Family members used an outdoor toilet. To fuel the two kitchen stoves, the Fortners used coal, oil, and wood stored in the cellar. Ice delivered every other day cooled the family icebox that stored milk and other perishables. Price quotes her aunt’s memoirs to provide a vivid description of the family’s daily life. Several blocks from us lived a middle-aged couple call Mr. and Mrs. Nice [Neis]. By the time we were old enough to go to school, my mother gave [my sister] Mary and me a couple of pails to go get our milk. For some reason Mom and grandmother preferred [to] buy milk from them instead of at the store. Mary and I would take our milk pails, walk over to their place, and get the milk every evening. Mother would heat it to the boiling point [to kill harmful bacteria] before
Discover Eudora | Spring/Summer ’22
