Maud Belle Stevens

The Lusk Herald - August 29, 1968

Maude Stevens Buried At Van Tassell

Mrs. Maude Stevens of Torrington was buried in the Van Tassell Cemetery, Thursday. Mrs. Stevens and her husband, the late Ernest Stevens who was an artist, lived about five miles south of Van Tassell some years ago. John Hammond, Lester Lewis and Jerry Lewis were among the pallbearers. Mrs. Stevens was one of Lester Lewis's teachers.

After the funeral, Lester Lewis entertained the pallbearers, relatives and friends of the deceased with dessert and coffee. Sam Rice of Henry, Nebr., is a brother of the deceased.

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In Washington Stevens became well acquainted with Maud Belle Rice, a Census Bureau clerk originally from Neligh, Nebraska. Stevens and Miss Rice continued their friendship after both left Washington in 1909, Maud to teach in North Dakota and Stevens to recuperate with his family in Iowa from typhoid fever. After regaining some of his strength, he worked in Minneapolis for a year but found the climate, like that of Washington, too cold and damp for his health. In the fall of 1910 he and a friend traveled to the high, dry plains of Montana to look for homestead sites. Stevens staked out a claim four miles southeast of Sumatra in Rosebud Coun­ty.

Later his mother and sister moved from Cedar Falls, Iowa, to an adjoining homestead. Maud Rice, who corresponded regularly with Stevens, decided in 1911 to give up her North Dakota teaching job and try homesteading near Van Tassell, Wyoming. For the next few years she struggled along on the prairie, with occasional assistance from her father, whose homestead was about 24 miles southeast in Sioux County, Nebraska. On May 20, 1914, she married Stevens and lived with him on the Montana homestead until the land was legally his. The couple then rented it to others and moved to Maud's homestead near Van Tassell. During the Montana and Wyoming homesteading years, Stevens could not devote as much time as he wished to his art work. He sometimes sketched or painted in the evenings and drew cartoons or caricatures of himself as hayseed farmer "Tom Thistle," which reflected his frustration in farming. He also did sketches of horses and a few portraits of his neighbors. Finally in 1925 Stevens left farming and moved to Denver where he again worked as a draftsman and between 1927 and 1929 did free-lance drawing for the Denver Post. In 1929 he moved to the Neligh, Nebraska, farm of Maud's parents so that Maud could care for her aged mother, who died in 1933.

Sources

1. Maud Stevens U.S. Social Security Death Index (SSDI) Birth: Mar 6 1881 Death: Aug 1968 Last residence: Torrington, Wyoming 82240, USA

https://www.familysearch.org/tree/person/details/9VP7-6QD https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/29305897/maud-r-stevens