The Four Divorces of Myron C. Barbour
Myron Cassius Barbour (1845-1914)
It’s kind of a family history mystery. On the last day of 1870, my great-great grandfather, Myron C. Barbour, applied for a marriage license in Valpairaso, Indiana. Valpairaso is across the state from his hometown, Fort Wayne. Why was he there? How did he meet Frankie A. Gifford, the girl he married in 1871? Who was she?
I can’t find anything about Frankie except that she was living in Dixon, Illinois at the time of their marriage, which leads me to believe that she was possibly a friend of one of his sisters, attending the same female seminary in Ohio. Her photo was in the album of his sister-in-law, Lizzie Loring, who attended the same boarding school. I also can't find a divorce record. But the marriage certainly didn't last long. Frankie was the first woman he married, and the first he divorced.
Divorce was nearly taboo and states governments regarded it as their role to ensure marital stability by making divorce difficult. But Frankie and Myron lived in a state known as a “divorce mill” for its liberal divorce laws and no residency requirement. In fact, Indiana lawmakers in the 1850s had been accused of having “practically legalized Free Love and its endless and nameless abominations.” They also lived in a time in which divorce rates leaped 80 percent in the United States.
Divorced people still faced strong disapproval, so Myron and Frankie may not have told future spouses about their brief union. In September 1873, in Kosciusko County, Indiana, Myron married my great-great grandmother, Agnes Banta. Agnes was a widow of 18 months and had a little four-year old daughter, Maud May Stoler. Agnes and Maud lived in Pierceton, a town about 40 miles away from Fort Wayne. Myron had cousins in Kosciusko County, where Pierceton is, and his brother lived in a town about eight miles away. Exactly a year later, Myron and Agnes’ son, Clyde Banta Barbour, was born.
Myron and Agnes made a life together for 26 years. They moved to a farm outside Coffeyville, Kansas in 1885, when Myron’s father bought the land for them.
Agnes came from an insular Dutch family that stayed in a Dutch-speaking colony for two hundred years in America, moving from New Amsterdam to New Jersey to Pennsylvania to Ohio and Kentucky to Indiana, trying to keep their children away from the influence of the “English.” This togetherness had finally broken up as Agnes’ parents’ generation pushed into Indiana. Lacking a Dutch Reformed church, they joined the Presbyterians.
Agnes was, by all that I can tell, a quiet woman who kept to herself, and for whom the church was important. When she moved to Parker Township in Kansas, she helped start a Sunday School and was elected leader. Yet in 1899, she took a controversial and probably desperate step and filed for divorce. Many other women opted to be “straw widows,” separating from their husbands without taking legal action. After all, as a Harvey County, Kansas newspaper editor opined in 1893, “it would seem most married people….are too proud to make their domestic infelicities public scandal by applying for divorce.” You risked being shamed and shunned. Presumably, she could have gone the “straw widow” route - the editor probably would’ve approved – so it’s interesting that she took such definitive action.
Women who hadn’t inherited wealth, like Agnes, had almost no good options for supporting themselves. Agnes went to live with her son Clyde in Indian Territory. Unable to get along with his father, he’d left home around age 14 and went to the “I.T.” where he found work on Arthur Dodge’s XU Ranch. Now Clyde had his own little place and his wife Melissa was due to give birth to their first child in two months.
The newspapers spared Agnes the humiliation divorcing parties were often put through, with embarrassing details laid out for all to see. A one-line notice simply noted that her divorce was granted. The cause was not included.
Kansas then had the highest divorce rate in the country, and as Indiana tightened its divorce laws, Kansas was the one criticized for being a divorce mill. Known for its liberal marriage laws, it allowed ten grounds for divorce. In contrast, New York allowed only one reason for divorce: adultery. In Kansas they included abandonment, extreme cruelty, gross neglect of duty, habitual drunkenness, adultery, impotence, incarceration, the woman being pregnant with another man’s baby at the time of marriage, and “fraudulent contract.” They were all alien from modern society’s view of “incompatibility” and the no-fault divorce; one of the parties had to be to blame. The dissolution of Myron and Agnes’ marriage in 1899 marked a point when one in eight marriages in the state ended in divorce.
About 70 percent of all divorces were instigated by women, and in about two-thirds of the cases, a judge granted their request. Nationally, abandonment was the cause given most frequently. In Kansas between 1867 and 1886, 4,074 women and 2,217 men filed for divorce on this ground. An absent husband or wife could obviously not fill the Victorian ideal of the marriage role. Abandonment on the part of the husband “forced,” “compelled” or “necessitated” the wife to seek employment, something that was considered to be outside a woman’s proper “sphere.” But so could “gross neglect of duty” – a husband who maybe hadn’t left, but simply refused to meet the Victorian masculine mandate of breadwinner. With either, a woman’s role as wife and mother was seen as jeopardized if she had to go out and work.
For men, a charge of adultery was a husband’s surest way out of a marriage in Kansas, but there had to be an abundance of proof. It was considered one of the cruelest things a man could do to falsely accuse his wife of infidelity.
The second most common cause for divorce in women’s petitions was “extreme cruelty,” a broad catch-all term. Victorians believed, in the cult of true womanhood, that a woman should not be subject to brutish behavior, vile language, ridicule before strangers or aberrant sexual behavior. She should not be subject to mental cruelty - this caused nervous prostration, neurasthenia, and nervous exhaustion. Both men and women charged each other with using vile and profane language, which was a sure sign the marriage was irretrievable.
Agnes’ divorce was granted 31 March 1899. Because of a lingering stigma, most women, once divorced, listed themselves as ‘widowed’ on the census, which is what Agnes did in 1900.
Myron Marries Again
Single for just shy of a year, Myron remarried to third wife Ida Mae Miller Andrus on 12 March 1900. She was twenty years younger than Myron and had two daughters, seven and 15. They were married in the Presbyterian parsonage, presumably with high hopes, and went to a hotel for a wedding lunch. But the marriage didn’t even last two years. Ida filed for divorce on 30 Jan 1902, alleging he "accused her wrongfully," and of extreme cruelty. She asked for court costs.
And Again
Kansas may have had the country’s highest divorce rate and what was considered the most liberal divorce laws, but divorce still wasn’t common or without stigma. To have three failed marriages was really unusual, but it didn’t deter Myron from trying again. On 6 Feb 1904 he married for a fourth time to Alice Buck Landon. Alice was 15 years younger than Myron and twice widowed. She had a 13-year old son and a young adult son who was on his own. Once again, they were married at the Presbyterian minister’s parsonage, though they went to a minister in a different town.
According to Alice, one day in April 1909, Myron simply walked out of their home and she did not hear from him after that. She filed for divorce on Christmas Eve 1909.
The Independence, Kansas paper, the Evening Star, had a humiliating headline: “He Skidooed - This Husband Found Matrimony Uncongenial To His Tastes.” Alice said if she hadn’t taken in laundry, rented rooms, and had the assistance of her adult son, she wouldn’t have survived.
The article had a few other details:
“The defendant was a good worker when so disposed, but he has not given to steady and continuous labor and sometimes he would work and at other times refuse to do so. At one time while employed as a box maker in the glass factory in Coffeyville he was induced by the plaintiff to buy a small tract of land which he mortgaged to build a house. At the time he left six months interest due on the loan and the plaintiff borrowed money to pay it. She now wants the court to vest in her the equity to the property that she may renew the mortgage, and to restore her to her former name, Alice Langdon.
Like Myron’s other wives, Alice was also granted a divorce. Oddly, she did not take back the name Langdon, and when she died, “Alice Barbour” was carved on her gravestone.
Myron was finally done with marriage. I believe he felt like he’d run out of options and had no reason to stay around Coffeyville, Kansas anymore. The brother he’d come to Kansas with and was so close to died in 1903. He was estranged from his only child, and therefore his six grandchildren. He had four failed marriages behind him and he lost a court case involving his father’s will, leaving him with nothing of his father’s estate.
Myron moved to Schodack, New York, where he lived with his sister Sylvia and her husband, retired Presbyterian minister Henry Lipes. On the 1910 census he was listed as a house carpenter. He died in 1914 and was buried with Sylvia and Henry. The family saved money, and tacked his name under Sylvia's and Henry’s on their tombstone.
Sources:
Bennett, Lynn Ellen. “Child Custody, Custodial Arrangements, and Financial Support in Late Nineteenth-Century Kansas,” Kansas History, Spring 2021, https://www.kshs.org/publicat/history/2014spring_bennett.pdf
Cahn, Naomi. “Faithless Wives and Lazy Husbands: Gender Norms in Nineteenth-Century Divorce Law,” 2002 U. Ill. L. Rev. 651 (2002).
Haywood, Robert C. “Unplighted Troths: Causes For Divorce in a Frontier Town Toward the End of the Nineteenth Century,” Great Plains Quarterly, Vol. 13, No. 4 (Fall 1993), pp. 211-221.
Olito, Frank. “How the Divorce Rate Has Changed Over the Last 150 Years,” Insider, https://www.insider.com/divorce-rate-changes-over-time-2019-1
Schmidt, Janeal. “Selfish Intentions: Kansas Women and Divorce in Nineteenth-Century Kansas,” Thesis at Kansas State University, 2009, https://krex.k-state.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/2097/2327/JanealSchmidt2009.pdf?sequence=3&isAllowed=y
“The Divorce Mill of the Midwest,” Indiana Magazine of History, Indianapublicmedia.org/momentofindianahistory/divorce-mill-midwest/
“The Divorce Mill - Unhappy Couples That Are Cut in Twain,” Newton Daily Republican, (Newton, Kansas), 22 June 1893, p. 4.
Copyright Andrea Auclair © 2023
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