Week 21: In The Cemetery - Starr Family

 

Week 21: In The Cemetery – Starr Family

In 2018 my wife and I bought a 120 year old farm house in Prairie Village, Johnson County, Kansas.  Not only do we love the house, but we wanted to find out what we could about the family who first owned the farm 160 years ago, and 39 years later, in 1900, built the house we now call home. After visiting Johnson County Courthouse to view titles and deeds and examining two old maps (1878 and 1922) with landowners names on them we found that the original farm owner was a widow by the name of Nancy Hunt Starr.

We found the Federal Census of 1860 showed the family of Jacob and Nancy Starr living in Jackson County, Missouri, about 15 miles from where our house is today. Since finding no record of Jacob after 1860 our assumption is he must have died between the Jun 4, 1860 Federal Census and Nancy buying 80 acres for the new family farm on Oct 9, 1861. Nancy died in 1890 and left the family farm to her son, Walter O. Starr. Walter owned the farm during the time our house was built. What we have been unable to discover is exactly for whom the house was built. Examining the ages of the four Starr children, they were too young to need a home of their own in 1900. Since Walter and his family lived on the north end of the farm, a good guess is he built our house for a hired man and his family at the south end. Walter had only one arm and literally needed another hand. Walter died in 1913, at the age of 62, and left the farm to his wife Lilly Farmer Starr and his four children. He did this by willing the northern 40 acres and the main farm house to Lilly and dividing the southern 40 acres into four ten acre lots for daughters Edna Pearl Starr Cross, Nellie L. Starr Fischer, Nancy J. Starr Heslip, and son, William H. Starr. The entire farm stayed in the family’s possession into the 1920s.

Now it was time to discover where the Starr family was buried. Using Findagrave, I found that both Nancy Hunt Starr and her son, Walter O. Starr are buried in Corinth Cemetery about one mile east of where their original farmhouse stood on the north end of the farm. Today this is West 83^rd Street in Prairie Village, Kansas. Our house stands ½ mile south on West 87^th Street. Today, farms have been replaced by hundreds of single family dwellings. However, it is fun to look around and imagine what things must have looked like when this area was wide open tall grass prairie up until the mid 1850s, and then farm after farm after farm ten years later by the mid 1860s.

The Starr family plot was easy to locate thanks to Walter’s tombstone featuring the five pointed star above right. One of his daughters, Nancy J. Starr Heslip, has a headstone immediately to the left of the left-hand evergreen tree above. That is all I could find until I literally began to dig around. I found the headstone for Walter’s mother, Nancy Hunt Starr, centered between the two trees just under the bush where the two pink flowers are. I knew at least one more headstone should be there. I probed around using a long screw driver and found two more stones under about four or five inches of dirt. These stones turned out to be for Nancy Hunt Starr’s mother-in-law, Ruth E. Starr and Nancy’s son, William H. Starr. Although the Starr family has been gone since Nancy Starr Heslip died in 1957, we feel like we’ve come to know them. There is a strange comfort for us to know who first owned this land and our house.

 

Here are the headstones I had to probe for and use my trowel to uncover: 

Nancy Hunt Starr (1815-1890)

Ruth E. Starr (1787-1875)

William H. Starr (1885-1941)

P.S. Lilly Farmer Starr, Walter's wife, lived until 1946 and was buried here in the Starr family plot but for some reason without a headstone.