Beth Fortner Moseley

Story by Cindy Higgins Photography by Cindy Higgins and courtesy Venecia Eubanks Sutton Price

The Fortners lived in this home on Oak Street.

In 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.”

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

A Fortner family photo shows Nettie and her two oldest daughters.

putting it in the box to cool. They were nice friendly people who besides having cows, had an apple orchard. So besides getting milk, they would give us a bag of apples when they were ripe. (p. 16)

East of the house, the Fortners had three fenced acres with a chicken pen and vegetable garden. Under the elm trees in their yard, grandmother Mary made soap and laundered clothing for income. She first boiled the clothing, and then rubbed each item on a washboard before rinsing.

The Fortner girls walked to school at 626 Church, often joined by the Irish-Catholic Erwin daughters, who would stop at Pilla’s grocery to buy baloney and crackers for their lunch. The Fortners came home each day for lunch except Wednesdays when they ate the hearty potato soup and sandwiches at school made by two German cooks.

A little more than a block from the Fortner house, the train came from Kansas City at 6 p.m. every day, often bringing visiting relatives. The Fortners took the train to Topeka for shopping and employed a dressmaker to make their clothing except for the underwear—that was made by grandmother Mary.

Each Sunday the Fortners attended the First Baptist Church on the 600 block of Locust. Built in 1892, the church replaced the Black Methodist church at 610 Church Street and the interdenominational Black church next door to the south.

According to Moseley’s memoir, five Black families lived in Eudora during that time, including the families of two of Mary’s siblings, and Maria Crump, who moved to the Fortners’ block in 1922.

Beth’s father, George, who “truly believed in being the best and surrounding yourself with the best”

Beth Fortner Moseley: Her Story is available to purchase online. The book is also available for check-out at the Eudora Community Library. A copy of the book can be read at the Eudora Community Museum at 720 Main Street. stayed with his family in the summers while he picked potatoes for extra money. In 1924, he moved his family to Kansas City, Kansas, after he accepted a teaching position at Northeast Junior High School. The family later returned to Tulsa, and Beth went on to earn a college degree and become a multilingual educator and international traveler.

Price says she intentionally wrote her aunt’s story with younger generations in mind.

“When I first read through my Aunt Beth’s pages after finding them in a box I stored away in 2003, I immediately recalled many of the newspaper clippings I had collected over the years while doing genealogy research. I also saw in my ‘mind’s eye’ how I wanted to put it all together by using keepsakes such as photos and menus that I also collected while cleaning out her Chicago apartment,” Price recalls. “I know younger and future generations are likely to be even more visual learners, so it was my hope that the visuals would catch and keep their attention.”

What she has captured in this book is an authentic glimpse of Eudora in the late 1910s and early 1920s.

“Based on the stories my mother and aunts told about Eudora, they really loved living there as children, saying it was almost idyllic,” Price says. “They always looked forward to returning in the summers as children [after their move to Tulsa].”

Price plans to research and publish more stories of her family’s history. She views them as lessons of strong faith, resiliency, fairness, and the dignity “extremely important to my grandfather’s generation as they were the first ones who were born free.”

Discover Eudora | Spring/Summer ’22