Martha Ellen Mat Rossiter

Martha "Mat" Turner

The Isaac Turner Family moved to MacDonald County, Missouri about 1885 and after that Martha worked in a furniture store in Joplin, was a postmistress and someplace along the line she cooked in a Hotel. I don't know where that hotel was or when it was. I don't think Mat had more than an 8th grade education. In those days one could teach with no more than that. The only place that I know of where she taught was in a country school in what they call the Buffalo Hump country in Idaho and I'm sure that would have been 1902 or after. As I remember the story, she rode a horse into the mountain country east or Riggins, Idaho.

Martha Turner never had children. She had been a school teacher, cook in a hotel, postmistress and clerk in a furniture store. She was a character. She had arthritis to the extent that her body was twisted almost 90 degrees. As she got to her final years of living alone she even brought her chickens in the house. Marjorie Hamilton and I (Henry Franklyn Turner) visited her in those years and as I recall there was a rooster roosting on the foot of her bed. We didn't stay for lunch!!

Additional information about this story

Description Story submitted by Henry Franklyn Turner.

Date 2007