Mollie Frances Holbrook

A flat red granite marker: “FRANCIS H. PFEIFFER / 1870 DAUGHTER 1952.” She died in 1954. Lot 59, space A, beside Emil.

The page with the report of Alinda Cranney’s wedding to Frank E. Emple. Among the gifts, “Mollie Holbrook and Hattie Swift, knife”; among the guests, “Miss Mollie Holbrook.” Her earliest mention found in a newspaper.

The freshman class list, with “Holbrook, Frances … Whidley Island, Wash.”

Her short story, on two pages: a lighthouse keeper’s wife who cannot sleep on stormy nights since her only son, fifteen, took the lighthouse boat out on the straits and was drowned.

Her essay on the abolitionist orator, signed “M. Frances Holbrook, ’98.”

“We go from our alma mater / Out into the world to-day.” Words by M. Frances Holbrook, music by Ruth Jean Vose, for the class of ’98.

The page with the Coupeville column: “Mrs. Mollie Holbrook Pfeiffer, late of Emerson college, Boston, together with her husband, Prof. Pfeiffer, will give an entertainment this week at W. C. T. U. hall.”

The alumni note: she read a paper at a meeting of the Washington State Equal Suffrage Association and was elected its first vice-president for the coming year.

The page with his sworn statement, as circulation manager of the Buffalo Express, that his wife had been “almost completely prostrated” from about 1898 to 1900 and had recovered under Mrs. Wilmans Post’s Mental Science.

Her essay on the New Thought in the monthly Mind, on four pages. It ends on her college days: “When I was in college I selected my room with great care, as if it were to be my abiding place forever.”

The front page with the item on the high-school girls’ gift of a sterling-silver desk set to Mrs. F. H. Pfeiffer, for her work on the graduation speaking and the play.

The table of special certificates, with “Pfeiffer, Mrs. Frances H.” for English, history and oratory, dated May 6, 1909.

The page with “Holbrook, … Frances (Mrs. Charles E. Pfeiffer),” enrolled 1893-95. A possible match only: the husband’s name is given as Charles E.

The page with her four-page pamphlet, “Cinema lyceum,” copyrighted at Los Angeles on 22 Apr 1916.

Her letter on the letterhead of The Cinema Lyceum, 714-715 Story Building, Los Angeles, proposing an educational film with Booker T. Washington’s life as its basis, and recalling that her husband had been with Du Bois at Harvard.

Her memoir of “Old Mary,” consort of Tom Squiqui, nominal chief of the Skagits, who nursed the Holbrook children, and of the day her mother said goodbye to her on the shore.

The page with the wheat-harvest photograph taken by Adele Kaehler of Whidby Island and supplied by Mrs. Pfeiffer, who added that Whidby wheat took prizes at the Chicago contest of 1919.

Two pages. Page 1, the State Board of Health form, filled in sixty years after her birth and filed at Island County on 17 May 1930 as certificate no. 1: Mollie Frances Holbrook, born 4 Dec 1870 at “Penn’s Cove, or Coveland, (San de Fuca),” to Richard Blackmer Holbrook of Plymouth, Massachusetts, farmer, and Harriet Phillips Low of Deer Isle, Maine. Page 2, the affidavit of Horace Holbrook of Coupeville, born 3 Jan 1863, who swears that he is her brother and that the facts are within his own knowledge; sworn before a notary at Coupeville the same day.

Page 5 of Eli Hathaway’s enumeration: R. B. Holbrook, 49, of Massachusetts; Horace G., 8; Harriett, 36, of Maine; and “Mollie H.”, three months old, born within the year in January.

Page 6 of Thomas Cranney’s enumeration, dwelling 73: R. B. Holebrook, 58, farmer; Harriet, 44; Horace, 17; Molly F., 9, at school; and Rich’d B., 7. The Swift family, with Hattie, is two dwellings on.

Page 15 of Jos. C. Power’s enumeration, lines 17 to 21: the Holbrooks, with no ages given, followed by the Swifts.

Page 136, no. 2446, of the Boston register, where the marriage took place: the same couple, parents and minister as the Cambridge entry, recorded 18 June 1898.

Page 112, entry 383, of the marriages registered at Cambridge, the groom’s city: married 15 June at Boston by Charles R. Tenney, minister, of 28 Glenarm [Street]. He was 33, a publisher, of 57 Wendell Street; she was 27, a teacher, of Coupeville, Washington.

Enumeration district 92: E. C. Pfeiffer, born May 1865 in New Hampshire, newspaper man; M. F., his wife, born Dec 1870, teacher, mother of one child; A. P., daughter, born Aug 1899; and H. P. Holbrook, mother-in-law. The house was rented.

Sheet 25B of enumeration district 246, the lodging house of Millard V. Curtis: Frances H. Pfeiffer, 39, married eleven years, a correspondent in a printing house, and Alice P., 10. Emil is not in the household.

Frances H. Pfeiffer, 49, married, lodger, in advertising for a newspaper, and her daughter Alice P., 20, a bookkeeper. Emil is indexed separately in the same census as a boarder.

Enumeration district 19-144: Emil, 65, head, renting at $24 a month, no occupation, married at 33; Frances, 59, his wife, married at 27.

Sheet 4A of enumeration district 15-5, line 31: Francis Pfeiffer, 69, widowed, owner of her house (worth $400), three years of college, living in the same house in 1935.

State file no. 5201. She died at Resthaven Nursing Home, Mount Vernon, after two years there; her home was Coupeville. Born, by this certificate, 4 Dec 1861 [sic], on Whidbey Island; father Richard Holbrook; mother “Harriet ??”. The informant was Mrs. Harold Forrester of Hollywood, her daughter. Cremated at Washelli Crematory, Seattle.

The cover of the college’s catalogue for 1895-96, the year Mollie (Frances) Holbrook entered as a freshman from Whidbey Island: the entrance at the corner of Tremont and Berkeley Streets, Boston, with students on the steps, under gilt lettering. Its class list is the page beside it.

“Born, to Mr. and Mrs. E. C. Pfeiffer, née Frances Holbrook, a twelve-pound daughter,” quoted from “a far western paper dated Aug. 25, 1899.” Signed “L. P.”

The class’s notice of his death, his career from Boston schoolteacher to the University of Nevada and Los Angeles, his last years as an invalid, and his wife Frances Holbrook, daughter Alice and grandson.

The city’s register across two pages. The entry for 25 Aug 1899 names the parents, Emil C. and Frances H. Pfeiffer (their birthplaces swapped), and on the right-hand page, a line higher, gives the place, 104 Tacoma Avenue, a girl, and the physician J. R. Yocum [?].

Alice Phillips Pfeiffer, 21, bookkeeper, of Los Angeles, daughter of Emil Chas. Pfeiffer and Frances Holbrook, married Robert H. Carter, 21, contractor, of Sierra Madre. Her father, E. C. Pfeiffer, signed as witness.

Died at home, 3715 Keystone Avenue, Palms, aged 69. Advertising manager in a newspaper office until 1918 [?]. The informant signed “Frances H. Pfeiffer.” Cause, after a coroner’s autopsy: hemorrhage from a chronic duodenal ulcer. Cremated at the Los Angeles Crematory.

Alice Phillips Carter, 46, of North Hollywood, in her second marriage, to Harold Franklin Forrester, 41, of Van Nuys. Her mother is named “Molly Frances Holbrook.”