Lee Neer

Lee Neer, undated

Lee with his wife Charlotte and daughter Leona Jane

Lee's passport photo

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Lee's diary

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Lee's funeral

Lee Neer, son of Oliver Lee Neer and Ida Jane Johnson, was born on 21 Jul 1885 in Garrison, Montana and died on 24 Jul 1951 in Fresno at age 66.

General Notes

Lee Neer: So attested in all primary source documents but the following.

O.L. Neer, Jr.: So attested in the birth certificate of his daughter Leona Jane.

Oliver Lee Neer, Jr.: So attested on his marriage license in 1906.

His birth: Evidence on his birth year and place is somewhat confused. His daughter Peggy’s notes give the year as 1886, the place as Garrison, Montana. (In 2004 she tells me she guessed at this.) My original notes had indicated Ohio. The information as it currently stands comes from his fraternity initiation card. The birth certificates of both of his daughters give only "Montana" as his birth place. His daughter Leona Jane’s 1920 census record indicates that her father was born in Iowa, but this is likely nothing more than confusion for Floyd Manning, listed in that entry as her father, and born in Iowa.

His Parents' Families

His father’s family: His daughter Peggy remembers him talking about "Uncle Nah", whom I take to be his father’s half-brother Uriah. Lee would have been ten when Uriah died. I asked Peggy if Lee knew his grandfather Eden, who died when Lee was roughly five years old, and she said, "He never mentioned him."

His mother’s family: He seems to have retained some contact with his mother’s family. Peggy recalls that Lee did not like his aunt Amelia Niehardt (b. Johnson) and thought she was a mean old lady. Amelia was his mother Ida Jane Johnson’s half-sister. His diary records (see right) on September 24, 1925 a visit from Kimmins Johnson and his wife, who he has not since since he was in Angola. Peggy’s marginal note on our copy of this entry records memories of him talking about Angola, and her suspicion that he went to school there.

I take Kim Johnson to be Delbert Kimmins Johnson, Lee Neer’s cousin, both of them grandsons of Luther Hunt Johnson. (Delbert Kimmins Johnson was the son of Delbert Johnson, Amelia's brother.) By Angola, presumably Angola, Ohio, is meant. Yet, if his birthplace is correct, this means the family returned to Ohio from Montana before heading onwards. I assume that Angola, Ohio, is meant, because it is perhaps thirty miles from Lima, Ohio, where his grand-father Eden owned land.

His Education

In 2004 Peggy says he attended Angola Normal School, and that she wrote and found out it was a mining school.

1890s/1900s: He attended Denver Normal High School.

1900s: Lee was a member of the Sigma Nu fraternity at the Colorado School of Mines, where he was enrolled in the 1910 class of Mining Engineering. Charlotte remembers a family story that he had the fraternity’s letters branded on his stomach. Peggy confirms seeing this, and says that they were blindfolded during this process.

Sigma Nu national confirms that he was a member of the School of Mines Gamma Eta chapter, badge number 50, initiated on September 14, 1906. On his initiation card, it indicates that badge number 49 went to his brother Paul. This sequence might support Peggy’s assertion that Lee knew that the branding was coming, because his brother had gone first.

The 1906 Denver Colorado city directory records Claude and Lee as miners living with Ida Jane at 3037 California Street.

Life in Arizona

1906: Lee Neer marries Charlotte George. They met in Colorado. They were married in San Francisco on 21 July 1906, the license recorded as Number H, 979, on 24 July, 1906. We have a copy of this license. It is likely that they were in San Francisco because Charlotte's mother Izetta was there at the time, in the period after the 1906 earthquake.

Lee worked at the Old Dominion Mine in Globe, Arizona. This was a copper shaft located about 8 miles from Globe, in Gila County. (Globe itself was founded as a mining community in 1876, and copper and turquoise are still mined there.)

1909: Leona Jane Neer born to Charlotte and Lee Neer.

1914: Lee and Charlotte Neer divorce. (Peggy threw the original records away, but we obtained copies of documents from case 1120 in the Superior Court of Cochise County, Arizona, 21 August 1915.) Charlotte made the petition for divorce on the grounds that Lee "for more than one year last past failed and neglected to provide the plaintiff with the common necessaries of life." The settlement was initially described to me to be that Lee and Charlotte would have joint custody of Leona Jane with Leona Jane spending six months of the year with one parent and six months of the year with the other until she reaches high school. In fact, the divorce records say that Leona is to spend three months in the summer with her father, and the rest with her mother. This settlement seems to have resulted in legal disputes in 1916 and 1918. Considerable records of these disputes are included with the divorce documents: these records include summons to Lee Neer; a letter from Leona Jane Neer to her mother Charlotte; and a description of Lee's failure to bring Leona to Izetta George for transfer to Charlotte.

1916: The city directory of Globe Arizona records Lee Neer as a miner living at the Webster House.

1917/1918: Lee's draft registration card records him in Globe as a miner working for the Iron Cap Copper Company and living at 328 South House (?) Street. He lists his mother in Chicago as his nearest living relative.

1919: Lee and Margaret Buchanan Reid were married on 11 October 1919 in Globe, Arizona. They appear in the Globe city directory of that year as an engineer and clerk living at 432 South High Street. Peggy was born in 1925. She thinks her mother may have had a prior miscarriage, but is not sure. When she was born, the Neers were still going to Mexico, as Peggy says that her mother had been to camp there. Her birth certificate gives his occupation as "Mining Engineer."

1920s-1940s: He kept diaries. I have seen five year volumes, from 1925, 1926, 1935, the late 1930s, and the early 1940s.

1925: The December 20, 1925 issue of the Douglas Daily Dispatch gives his address on page four as 1119 Eleventh Street, the same address as his brother Claude. This is the same address given in Peggy’s birth certificate for Lee Neer and his wife four days prior. Note however that we have records indicating that Claude himself was already dead by this date.

Life in California as a Miner

c. 1927: In about 1927, Oliver, Ida, Lee, Margaret, and Peggy moved to Awahnee to work the Enterprise Mine. As Peggy put it, "they went broke with that mine and were always broke after that." (Peggy later attributed that quote to Lee himself, in the first-person plural.) Peggy also says that Lee used to work the Josephine Mine, which is in Mariposa County, and that the Mariposa mining museum still buys specimens from them. Lee stayed in Ahwahnee, near Yosemite, where Charlotte says he worked. Peggy remembers him saying that he could not get a job in this period because he was a registered Republican. Peggy’s uncle Dave had land, Lee and Margaret getting part of it, a 20-acre plot where the house was.

1930: Listed in the federal census as a gold miner in Madera, Township 4, District 11, with wife Margaret and daughter Margaret.

1932: Lee Neer and family went to Long Beach shortly after the Long Beach earthquake. They lived with the Reid family. They had heard that there were jobs available there. Peggy doesn’t know what Lee Neer did for work while in Long Beach.

1934: Peggy wrote a letter to Leona Jane from Bear Valley on April 18, saying that "We went to the wild flower show at Ahwahnee Sunday and I got prize for my wild flowers. They had a dance at the school house here and had a lot of drunks."

1934: Peggy wrote a letter to Leona Jane from Long Beach on June 14. Was Lee with her? Maybe he was visiting his father Oliver. Peggy wrote that "Daddy went to Bansburg to look for a job. The other mine closed down."

Life in California After Mining

1935 (?): Lee, Margaret, and Peggy Neer move back up to Awahnee at approximately this time. Lee Neer had difficulty finding work and said it was because he was the only Republican in the area. Lee starts working at the Yosemite Mountain Lodge. Margaret became a cook at the lodge.

He became a caretaker of a vacation lodge, the Yosemite Mountain Ranch, with his second wife as cook. Charlotte remembers him building a boat at his house and putting it on nearby Bass Lake. He and Margaret would ran the Ranch during the summer, and live up there while keeping the place in Ahwahnee. They would open it up in late May depending on the snow. She did the cooking on an old wood stove. Peggy remembers that Lee learned to ski, figuring he’d have no problem as he had skated as a kid, and used to ski down from the Ranch. Once, in a rush when a cow was calving, he took a turn too fast and had a long fall.

When asked if Lee drank, Peggy said that he did not often, but sometimes had a "coffee royale" in the morning. A friend of his once introduced him to cognac, which he enjoyed, and when someone finally delivered him a bottle and called it COG-nack, he pronounced it that way in amusement from that point on. Peggy: "He used to say he would hold it until his plates start to smoke," by which he meant his false teeth, which she says he’d had since the age of 21. He rolled his own cigarettes, but never licked them when he was done rolling them. He smoked a pipe as well, which Peggy eventually threw out, a Mearsham.

When discussing the issue of Catholicism with Peggy and Charlotte Quinlan, Peggy relates that Lee Neer used to say that he had a Methodist minister as an ancestor or other male relative. Charlotte added that she thought Lee may have had some anti-Catholic feeling. When I asked if he was a Methodist himself, Peggy nodded after Charlotte’s assertion that he may have been more of an atheist.

His house in Ahwahnee burned when the Harlow Fire came through in the early 1960s.

Peggy has in her possession State of California Department of Agriculture branding records from the late 1930s and early 1940s, one of which is addressed to Lee Neer. Peggy says he kept 2 or 3 cattle. His brand was ’49’ which she says was "his lucky number." I suggested that this was his fraternity initiation number, and that Paul and Lee got swapped in the fraternity records. Peggy said that he won his first cow with the number 49 from a rancher who had a lot and was giving one away in a contest. His five-year diary with entries dating from 1941 to 1944 includes in the back his own cattle breeding notes from 1940 to 1947.

1951: A funeral notice in our possession dates to July 27, 1951, Lisle Chapel, Fresno, California. Peggy has the death certificate dated to July 24: she was the informant, as her mother had died in 1944, after an operation for a varicose vein. (Peggy has the legal bills incurred in the process.) His occupation was listed as a laborer. He died in the Fresno Community Hospital of a ruptured aneurysm, for which he had had an operation on July 23.

In 2006, Peggy described the event as she understood it. Lee was walking, perhaps from Ahwahnee to Yosemite Mountain Ranch, when his aorta ruptured. He tried to walk to Fish Camp. Cars drove past him. One couple picked him up and took him to Fish Camp. He wanted to stay there, but the doctors insisted that he go to the hospital. Leona Jane came. They operated on Lee in Fresno. He asked her (Leona?) to cover his feet because they were cold, but his feet were already covered, and he could not feel them. He did not live long.

Family

Lee married Charlotte George. The marriage ended in divorce.

The child from this marriage was:

Leona Jane Neer.

Lee next married Mary Buchanan Reid on 11 Oct 1919 in Globe, AZ.

The child from this marriage was:

Mary Margaret (Peggy) Neer was born on 16 Dec 1925 in Douglas, AZ.