Frank BLAIR

BLAIR, NOTESTINE, AVERILL, ARCHER

Posted By: Sarah Thorson Little (email)
Date: 2/17/2013 at 12:50:04

December 31, 1881 --- April 19, 1981

Frank Blair, one of the area's original homesteaders who settled in the Richey area in 1910, died April 19 at the St. John's Retirement Home in Billings, Montana. He was 99. Mr. Blair was born in 1881 at Meriden, Iowa. His boyhood was spent in Iowa with the exception of a year in Tennessee at the age of ten. He attended Humboldt College in Humboldt, Iowa in 1903-04 where he studied business and played baseball and football. It was during a baseball game that he first met his future wife, Mabel. At the end of the game, as Mr. Blair was leaving the field, he looked around for his warm-up jacket and finally found this unknown girl sitting on it. A romance blossomed that had to wait while he served a hitch in the U.S. Navy from 1904-1908, attaining the rank of Chief Yeoman.

On June 30, 1909 Mabel A. Notestine and Frank Blair were married at Hardy, Iowa. In June of 1910 he filed on a homestead in Richland County nine miles northeast of the present town of Richey. He returned to Iowa and came out the next Spring in an "Immigrant" car to the railhead of Mondak with a bare compliment of horses, cows, machinery and furniture to start farming. In 1912, Mrs. Blair and their oldest son Donald, came by train from Iowa to Poplar where Mr. Blair met them with a team and wagon. His sons often remember their father telling about the trips to Poplar and Sidney hauling grain with four-horse teams. On the trips to Sidney he took two days going down; spending the first night at the Crippen Ranch east of Lambert and then returned empty on the third day. Mr. Blair was one of the last surviving homesteaders of that area in Eastern Montana. In 1924 the family moved to a farm two miles northeast of Richey where they resided until 1963 and then moved to Sidney. Mrs. Blair preceded her husband in death in 1964. In 1967, Mr. Blair moved to St. John's Retirement Home in Billings where he resided until his death. Mr. Blair was postmaster at Richey from 1929 to 1933. He was a charter member of Tyre Lodge No. 136 A.F. and A.M. and Maud Marshall Chapter of the Order of Eastern Star. He served on the Richey School Board and Farmers Union Oil Company and Farmers Elevator board for many years. He was a member of the First Christian Church of Billings.

Surviving him are four sons, Donald of Billings, Duane of Eugene, Oregon, John of Seattle, Washington, and Arden of Billings; two sisters, Gladys Averill of Jefferson, Iowa, Myrtle Archer of St. Paul, Minnesota and nine grandchildren and nine great grandchildren.

Funeral services were held on Wednesday, April 22 at Fulkerson Memorial Chapel in Sidney [Montana] with Pastor Robert Firebaugh officiating. Pallbearers were: Ed Beery, Mark Blair, John Blair, Jim Cummings, Saxton Cummings, and Melvin Hagen. Burial was in Sidney Cemetery under the direction of Fulkerson Funeral Home.