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Strattons of Massachusetts Bay
Running Through the Sands of Time
The Long Line: A Stratton Chronicle — Chapter Nine
Monroe Township, Howard County, Indiana — 1863
Frank Nelson Stratton was not yet three years old when his father died.
He would not have known what death meant at two. He would not have understood why the house had gone quiet in a way that did not correct itself. He would have known his mother’s face. He would have known that the thing he was looking for was not there and did not come back.
Joel Stratton died in Washington, D.C., on April 22, 1863. He was forty-seven years old. The cause on the death record was what had been killing him since May of 1845 — the chronic upper respiratory disability from a lead ball that could not be removed, lodged near his left lung, working at him for eighteen years through medical school and an Ohio decade and three final years in Washington while Seward ran his intelligence networks and needed men he could trust. Joel had lasted long enough for Frank to be born in September of 1860, and for Susie to be born later that year in Washington — she came into the world the year her father left it, the census would record her birthplace as the District of Columbia, as though the city itself had made her. Whether Joel knew he had a daughter before he went is not in any record I have found.
Hester Donnellan Stratton was thirty-two years old. She had a son of two and a newborn daughter and a husband buried in the capital in wartime and a family in Indiana that needed her to come home. She came home.
By 1867 she had married again. The man’s name was Samuel Edgerton Stratton — no close relation despite the name, the Indiana branches had spread widely enough that the coincidence was possible. He was a self-taught millwright from Howard County who had spent twenty years building mills and water wheels across the state, a man of practical genius and unconventional belief. He had been raised Quaker and expelled from the meeting for marrying outside the faith, and he had replaced the faith with Spiritualism — the conviction that the dead could be reached by the living through the right kind of attention — and he would spend thirty consecutive years at it, serious and committed, while also serving as County Commissioner and superintending the construction of the Kokomo courthouse and building a reputation for machinery and ghosts that the county found entirely compatible. He was, in short, another extraordinary man in a family that seemed to attract them, though they kept dying on the wrong side of forty.
The 1870 census recorded the household: Samuel, forty; Hester, thirty-nine; Mattie, sixteen — Samuel’s daughter from his first marriage, brought into the new family; Frank, nine; Susie, seven, born in the District of Columbia, attending school.
Five people. Within a decade, three of them were gone.
An unnamed infant — Samuel and Hester’s child — was born and died in 1871, leaving nothing but a note in the family papers. Mattie, Samuel’s daughter, died before 1883. A county biography of Samuel that year referred to “two children, both deceased,” which tells you the arithmetic without naming either child. And Susie — Frank’s only full sibling, the only other person in the world who shared both his parents, the baby born in Washington the year Joel died — died sometime between 1870 and 1880, before she was grown, leaving no grave marker anyone has found and no cause of death in any record that has survived.
Frank was somewhere between nine and nineteen when he lost her.
He never wrote about Susie directly. He was not that kind of writer — the confessional mode was not available to men of his time and place in quite the way it is to us. But you read the stories and you notice that he comes back again and again to the figure of the person who cannot protect someone they love, the arrival that comes too late, the reunion that the story can only half-deliver. You understand something about where that tendency came from.
Marion, Grant County, Indiana — July 27, 1881
Frank married young. On July 27, 1881, at the age of twenty, he wed Sarah C. Dunn in Marion, Indiana. She was seventeen. She was from Knox County, Tennessee — the 1880 census places her there — and what brought her to Grant County and what drew her to Frank Stratton, the sawmill hand with his books and his dead father and his vanished sister and his stepfather who spoke to ghosts, none of that is anywhere I have been able to find.
The following March, in Marion, their son Harry Percy Stratton was born.
And then Sarah left.
There is no divorce filing in Indiana — no legal record of any kind marking the end of the marriage. She left sometime after Harry’s birth in March of 1882, and she took Harry with her. By 1890 the record picks her up again in Missouri, where she remarried a man named William Kuark. Sarah Kuark now, a new name in a new state, Harry raised through his boyhood on the Missouri side of whatever had broken apart in Marion. She came back to Indiana eventually — she died on June 25, 1913, in Indianapolis. The full story of why she left, and when, and what passed between her and Frank before she went, has not survived in any document I have found. The outline is clear enough — she built a new life and her son grew up in it, and she returned to the state she had left — but the explanation was never put on paper, or if it was, the paper is gone.
Frank was left alone, in a county where this sort of thing was noted. He read. The labor years continued — the sawmill, the clearing, the farm — and he read when he could, after the work was done, by lamplight. History, law, literature. He was, by the account of the newspapers that would eventually notice him, a man of extraordinary private reading. It was not a plan yet. It was habit, and the only quiet he could find.
In March of 1888, Frank married again.
Kokomo, Indiana — 1888–1898
Otilie Schellschmidt was a schoolteacher in the Indianapolis public schools, the daughter of Ferdinand and Kate Shellsmith — the family name had softened in the American crossing — a family of musicians, her father a professional, the whole household attuned to things Frank had not had much occasion to notice in the clearing and the sawmill. He married her on March 8, 1888, in Marion, and she moved into a life that contained a gap in the record where a first wife had been, a son somewhere in Missouri, and the accumulated reading habits of a man who had not yet decided what to make of himself.
Three more sons followed: Frank Arthur in 1890, Frederick in 1896, Ferdinand in 1898. The house on Fort Wayne Avenue filled up with children and music and books, which was the household Otilie built, and it was the one Frank needed, because in 1892 he made his decision.
He was going to study law.
He had no degree, no patron, no money. What he had was the discipline built from years of reading after the work was done, and a stubbornness that the sawmill had not been able to grind down. He read law the way he had read everything else — by lamplight, after the household went quiet, through the winter and the spring and the next winter. In August of 1894 he was admitted to the Indiana bar.
His mother was already gone.
Hester Donnellan Stratton had died on September 18, 1893 — the year before, almost to the day, eleven months before he was admitted to the bar. It was Frank’s thirty-third birthday.
She had lived long enough to see him survive everything the first three decades had thrown at him — the deaths, the disappearance, the midnight hours of self-education — and then she died before he passed the bar, before she could see what he made of any of it. The timing has a cruelty to it that Frank never wrote about directly but that surfaces in the work, again and again, in the form of mothers who die before the story has finished needing them. He formed a partnership with Joseph C. Herron in the Ruddell building in Kokomo — Herron & Stratton, civil and criminal. By 1898, four years in, he was the Republican candidate for prosecuting attorney, and the newspapers were saying that he had “fought his way from the sawmill, the clearing, and the farm to the front rank at our bar,” and that there was “perhaps no one in the county better versed in the wide field of literature.” He had done it. He just could not tell his mother.
That same spring, Harry Percy Stratton enlisted for the Spanish-American War.
He was sixteen years old. The minimum age for enlistment was eighteen, so he told the recruiters he was eighteen, and they took him. By 1900 the census enumerated him at Villasis, Pangasinan Province, Philippine Islands, living among the military forces occupying a country that had expected liberation and received something else. He was blue-shirted. He was a long way from Fort Wayne Avenue.
Frank never wrote about the enlistment. What he felt about his firstborn son shipping to the other side of the world at sixteen — the boy who had grown up in Missouri, whom Frank may not have seen more than a handful of times since he was a year old, the only piece of Sarah Dunn that the record had given back — is not preserved in any letter or diary or court record that has survived. The only evidence of it is oblique and several years later and published in The Nickell Magazine.
Kokomo, Indiana — 1898–1901
The political line ran straight.
Joel Stratton had been a Whig — not a casual Whig but a committed one, a man in the tradition of Henry Clay and Salmon Chase and William Henry Seward, the anti-slavery wing of the party that believed the republic could not survive half slave and half free. When the Whig party broke apart in the 1850s over exactly that question, the men of Joel’s persuasion did not hesitate. They went into the new Republican Party, the one that ran Lincoln, the one that meant to hold the line. The 1898 Biographical and Genealogical History of Howard County would note, almost in passing, that “the Strattons were intimate with the Seward and Lincoln families” — a sentence that tells you everything about where Joel Stratton had stood and who had valued standing there with him.
Frank Nelson Stratton was thirty-eight years old in 1898, four years at the bar, a partner in Herron & Stratton, and a candidate for the Republican nomination for State’s Attorney — the prosecuting attorney for the judicial circuit, a state-level office that covered multiple counties, Howard and Grant among them. The party his father had helped make was the party he ran in. He did not have to explain the connection to anyone in Kokomo who knew the family.
The nomination was not handed to him. At the judicial convention in Kokomo that year, three men wanted it: Frank, Charles Willitts, and S. F. Harness. They went to ballot after ballot without a majority — sixty-seven ballots before it was settled, the kind of grinding convention fight that leaves everyone in the room with something to remember about your name. Frank came out of it with the nomination. He won the general election and took the office.
The State’s Attorney’s office was not a sinecure. Kokomo was a city of twelve thousand in an era of unreformed vice — pool rooms operating openly, slot machines in the saloons, gambling establishments running on the understanding that everyone had one and the law preferred not to notice. Frank preferred to notice. The newspapers recorded him going after the pool rooms and slot machines with what the reporters recognized as personal conviction, not merely official duty. He was a man who had worked the sawmill and the clearing and the farm, who had read Blackstone by lamplight while other men slept, who had a particular regard for the proposition that the law was supposed to mean something for the people who lived under it, not just the people who could afford to hire someone to interpret it for them.
He also tried the hard cases. Early in his term he prosecuted a murder that the Kokomo papers covered as a set piece — witnesses, evidence, summation, the courtroom packed with people who had an opinion about what the verdict ought to be — and he handled it well enough that his reputation at the bar grew a size. The same newspapers that would later note his fiction in the Eastern magazines had already established that Frank Stratton in front of a jury was worth covering. He had the lawyer’s gift of the sustained argument and the storyteller’s instinct for what a room needed to hear, and at the county courthouse those two things turned out to be the same thing.
The Kokomo Morning News, assessing him in those years, wrote that he was “one of those careful, sympathetic observers who sees the best and the truest side, as well as the more humorous. He gets all that there is in a situation, and he knows how to write about it in a way that attracts the people.” They were talking about his fiction when they wrote that. But they had watched him work a courtroom for three years before his name appeared in any magazine, and what they were really describing was the same quality operating in two different rooms.
He served out his term. By 1901 or 1902 — the record does not give an exact date — he returned to private practice and to the desk on Fort Wayne Avenue, and the stories began.
Fort Wayne Avenue, Kokomo — 1901–1903
The house at No. 2 Fort Wayne Avenue was quiet. Frank Arthur was eleven. Frederick was five. Ferdinand was three. Otilie had gone to bed. The law practice was done for the day.
Frank pulled a fresh sheet of paper toward him, dipped his pen, and wrote.
We do not know exactly when the fiction started or why. Sometime around 1901 or 1902 is the best the archive can tell us. Maybe it was the long habit of reading finally demanding an outlet. Maybe it was a lawyer’s understanding that every case is a story and he had grown tired of only telling other people’s. Maybe he read something and thought: I can do this. What we know is that by 1902 the stories were coming, and they were good. Not tentatively good, not almost-good. Genuinely, professionally good — good enough for the best mass-market magazines in America.
He published under two names. As Frank N. Stratton in the county papers and the legal notices. As Frank Neilson in the stories, a pen name that collapsed quickly; by 1903 he was publishing under his real name in Everybody’s Magazine and Collier’s Weekly, which required no disguise at all.
The company he was keeping was not nothing. In August of 1902, when Frank’s story “The Man and the Horse” appeared in The Argosy, it appeared in the same periodical that had published Jack London the year before. London was thirty-four that year — the same age as Frank — and The Call of the Wild made him famous that summer, ten thousand copies sold on the first day, the most famous writer in America burning at a desk in California. He was self-taught, as Frank was. He had worked a physical life before he wrote — oyster pirate, gold rush prospector — as Frank had worked the sawmill and the clearing before he found the law. They were reading the same magazines and writing for the same editors and neither of them knew the other existed.
The early stories are a man showing off. Rider’s Revenge (1902) is pure social comedy — a banking president, a fraudulent dog, a practical joke that bounces back on the prankster with satisfying precision. The Pottering Pete series — six linked stories about a cheerful Western drifter — is picaresque and gentle, Pete wandering from one comic predicament to the next through a frontier that was already becoming mythology. These are the stories of a man who is pleased with himself for being able to write them, and reasonably. They are not yet the stories he is capable of.
By 1903, the stories he was capable of were starting to arrive.
Kokomo / Pangasinan Province, Philippine Islands — November 1903
In November of 1903, The Nickell Magazine published a story called “The Little Brown Man.” The byline was Frank Stratton — no middle initial, no pen name, his name plain on the page.
The story is set in the Philippines during the American occupation. A band of blue-shirted American troopers has a native boy living at the garrison — a small Igorot child named Juan, brought back from the mountains, a curiosity or a kindness depending on your perspective. His father has been looking for him for a year.
The story follows the father.
He is an Igorot warrior, a man of the mountain people of Luzon who resisted first the Spanish and then the Americans. Frank Stratton makes him the hero. He tracks his son across the length of Luzon to Manila — hundreds of miles on foot, surviving on the jungle and on hatred and paternal love, which in this story turn out to be the same thing. He finds the garrison. He watches. He waits.
And then the story turns. An ambush is coming — not from the father, but from other men with their own reasons for wanting the captain dead. The father sees it. He has spent a year wanting this man dead, and now, at the moment of the ambush, he does the only thing he can: he warns the captain. He dies in the warning. His last act is to place his son’s small hand in the captain’s.
It is the most morally serious thing Frank Stratton ever wrote. It refuses to make the soldiers evil — they are not evil, they are just there, as occupying soldiers are just there — but it places the full weight of the reader’s sympathy with the man they have dispossessed. It is a story about a father who cannot reach his child. Who dies trying.
Harry Percy Stratton had been gone since 1898.
In 1903 he was somewhere in the Philippine Islands — Pangasinan Province, the last census had him, though the deployment was shifting. He was twenty-one or twenty-two. He was blue-shirted. Whether he and Frank wrote letters in those years — whether anything passed between Kokomo and the far side of the Pacific — is not known. Harry never spoke of the Philippines. Not to anyone, as far as any record shows. He settled eventually in Seattle, lived quietly, died there in September 1957, and left no account of what he had seen or done when he was young and a long way from home.
Frank wrote him a reunion instead. He gave it to a fictional Igorot father who would walk across an island to put his hand on his son. He made it as real as he knew how to make it. He put the boy’s hand in the captain’s keeping and called it the only reunion the story allowed.
It was the only reunion he had.
Kokomo, Indiana — 1903–1904
A lawyer reads cases for a living — reads them, if he is any good, for the human structure underneath the legal question. Who had power. Who didn’t. What they did about it. What it cost.
Frank Stratton brought this reading habit to his fiction, and once you see it you cannot unsee it. He came back again and again to the same situation: a person with no standing before a person or institution with all the standing, and the question of whether plain human force — love, honesty, sheer persistence — can move something that has no legal obligation to move.
“The Governor’s Visitor,” 1903: A woman comes to the governor’s office to plead for her son’s life. She has no lawyer, no political connection, no standing whatsoever. She has only her case and her grief. The governor, a man who has made a career of not being moved, is moved. That is the whole story. It earned fourth prize in a national short-story contest, the judges three well-known authors, several hundred manuscripts submitted. It was no small thing for a self-taught lawyer from Kokomo to be competing at that level. The local papers made sure everyone knew it.
“Jimmy’s Mother,” 1904 — published in Everybody’s Magazine, one of the most widely read publications in the country: A man is on trial. The evidence is thin but the verdict looks certain. A juror sits in the box watching the defendant’s mother — an old woman from the Appalachian backcountry who cannot write her name, who has come not because she understands courts but because her son is there — and the juror sees in her face his own mother, dead these many years, and quietly changes his vote. The lawyer who notices what happened asks him afterward. The juror says: It wasn’t me. It was his mother.
It is the best sentence Frank Stratton ever wrote. It is also a sentence that a man writes who grew up in a house where the mother was the fixed point — the thing that did not leave when the fathers died and the children died and the first wife vanished. The thing that stayed. Hester died on his birthday at thirty-three, eleven months before he passed the bar, before she could see what all those midnight hours had been building toward. She is in every story he wrote about a woman of no standing who turns out to be the most powerful person in the room.
Kokomo, Indiana — 1904–1905
In the last months Frank wrote fast, as if he knew something.
“Yukon Dan” went to The Popular Magazine — the most London-esque thing he had written, a con man from Nebraska and a dog that could apparently count cards loose in a Dawson City gambling house, the story moving like a card trick, the dog walking out alive. And he submitted something to All-Story Magazine — the proto-pulp house that would later publish Edgar Rice Burroughs — called “Where the Grey Wolf Fell.” We do not have the text of that story. We have only the title, and the knowledge that he was still reaching toward the wilderness, toward the grey wolf country, toward the far edge of what a story can do.
And he wrote “The Atavism of Abimelech.”
It would appear in Collier’s Weekly that July — after the funeral, the posthumous work still coming out. It is set in a small Indiana town, and it turns on this situation: a Quaker patriarch named Abimelech stands between a lynch mob and a man in a jail cell, and the story asks whether a man of absolute principle can bring himself to use force in defense of a principle. What happens involves the nature of inheritance — what we carry forward from our fathers even when we have rejected everything they stood for.
Joel Stratton had spent his life using force in the service of law: constable, deputy marshal, operative, captor of counterfeiters, instrument of Seward’s intelligence network. Frank became a lawyer. Whether he saw himself as his father’s successor or his father’s correction, the story suggests he had been working through the question for years without quite naming it. The stepfather who raised him — Samuel Edgerton Stratton, the millwright who talked to spirits — had been raised Quaker and expelled from the meeting. Abimelech’s predicament is not drawn from life in any direct way. But the Quaker inheritance, the expelled believer, the question of what remains when the formal faith is gone — these are the shapes of Frank’s own household, translated into fiction.
He was doing what writers do. Using the stories to think through the things that could not be thought through any other way. He had been doing it since at least 1903, when he wrote an Igorot father walking across an island. He was still doing it in the last months, pushing toward the grey wolf country, and the clock running down, and the paper on the desk.
Kokomo, Indiana
The cause was pneumonia. Four days of it, complicated by heart failure. It was winter. He was forty-four years old.
The fraternal lodges turned out for the procession: the Improved Order of Red Men, the Odd Fellows, the Woodmen of the World, the Pathfinders, the Ben Hur lodge — he had been a joiner, which was what men of his era did instead of other things. More than eight hundred men walked. This in a city of twelve thousand. The newspapers noted the number. Here was a man who had risen from the sawmill to the front rank of the bar, who had published fiction in the best magazines in the country, and who had never lost his connection to the people around him. Eight hundred men. The measure of what a life had been.
The stories kept coming out after he was gone. Munsey’s in May: “The Courting of Molly McCrea.” Collier’s in July: “The Atavism of Abimelech.” All-Story in October: “Where the Grey Wolf Fell.” He had a year’s worth of stories in the pipeline and they emerged into a world he could no longer read them in — not famous enough to be collected in a book, but prolific enough that the magazines were still running him eight months after the ground closed over him. A peculiar kind of posthumous career.
In the house on Fort Wayne Avenue, Frederick Nelson Stratton was eight years old.
Joel Stratton died in Washington in 1863. Frank was not yet three years old.
Frank Stratton died in Kokomo in 1905. Frederick was eight years old.
Frederick Stratton died in Ligonier in 1940. I was three years old.
I have thought about this for a long time and I still have no word for what it is. It is not tragedy — tragedy implies an arc, a fall from something, a cause. This is quieter and stranger than that. It is a shape that keeps recurring in the line: a father leaving early and a son being left to make himself without quite knowing what he was supposed to be making himself into, or what the man who left might have told him if he had stayed.
Joel made himself into a physician and a spy and died at his desk in Washington with the war not yet over.
Frank made himself into a lawyer and a writer and died in Kokomo with the stories still coming out of him.
My father Frederick made himself into a radio operator, a sailor on oil tankers and mailboats, a dentist, and a father, and died when I was too young to ask him anything at all.
Ninety-one years after Frank died, a scholar named Robert Ohmann pulled two of his stories out of the bound volumes of old magazines and found in them something worth saying in a book about what those magazines sold and who read them and what they believed. The citation is real. The stories are in the anthology on this site — all fifty of them, pieced back together from original magazine pages and photocopies and digital scans. Frank worked hard enough to write them. The least we can do is keep them.
I found him in the archives. I cannot ask him what he meant by them. So I have read them until I think I know. The Little Brown Man. Jimmy’s Mother. The Governor’s Visitor. Yukon Dan. The Atavism of Abimelech.
He was using the stories to think through the things that could not be thought through any other way.
So was I.
Frank Nelson Stratton (1860–1905) was William F. Stratton’s grandfather. Son of Francis Joel Stratton and Hester A. Donnellan. Attorney, prosecutor, and fiction writer. Married first Sarah C. Dunn (1881), with whom he had a son, Harry Percy. Married second Otilie Schellschmidt (1888), with whom he had three sons: Frank Arthur, Frederick, and Ferdinand. Admitted to the Indiana bar, August 1894. Died February 15, 1905, Kokomo, Indiana. His stories are available in full in the Frank Nelson Stratton Anthology on this site.
—Wm. F. Stratton, May 2026
Over 50 years of research into the Stratton, Schneider, King, and allied families—from colonial Massachusetts to Indiana and beyond. Built by Bill & Karen Stratton.
If you are tracing a Stratton line, start here. Harriet Russell Stratton's two-volume Book of Strattons is the most comprehensive Stratton genealogy ever compiled—both volumes are free and fully searchable online.