Fountain Stewart

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Biography

Fountain grew up in St. Clair County, MO and attended the collegiate division of Southwest Baptist College at Bolivar, MO in 1897-98 and 1898-99. It must have been there he met Eunice Vinetta Heydon who was in the preparatory department of SWBC. Each had taught school in the intervening time. Fountain had gone to Montana and also worked at surveying and was ranch foreman on the S. H. Glidden Ranch near Bridger, Montana. He continued with that job the first year of their marriage. They moved to Coeur d'Alene, ID and lived there for five or six years. Fountain worked at a sawmill and then was a salesman in a furniture store. Two red-headed daughters were born in Coeur d'Alene. When Carey Act land was opened for homesteading, they located a farm west of Richfield, ID near Shoshone. Eunice took the two little girls and went home to Missouri while Fountain started work on the sagebrush-Govered land and put up a temporary house in 1911. They received title to the land in 1915. Besides the regular farming, other money-earning projects were carried on as driving a team-drawn Govered wagon school bus that was converted to a sled in the winter. Eunice baked and sold bread, sold home-churned butter. The little girls even grew sweet peas and sold bunches of flowers. Two more children were born, a brown-haired son, and another red-headed daughter. The place was sold in 1919, and the family moved to the Boise Valley. Farming on rented farms didn't prove profitable enough, so Fountain went to work for the Nampa-Meridian Irrigation company as "ditchrider." Daily he rode along a section of canal and its main laterals, making sure the proper amount of water for irriga¬tion was turned into the ditches for the farms and homes in that area. Eunice, Fountain, and the children were active in the First Baptist Church of Boise, the primary activity besides work and school. Fountain had a stroke the winter of 1943. Eunice cared for him at home. Following a weeks illness, Fountain died on 21 Jan 1945, from the effects of a heart-attack. Both Fountain and Eunice are buried in the Morris Hill Cemetery, Boise, ID. They share a headstone

Sources

• This person is also found in a book titled DESCENDANTS OF HEZEKIAH V. PARKER AND MARY ANN SMITH PARKER compiled and edited July 1988 by Mildred Beth Wise Stewart.