Land (#52Ancestors, Week 17)

I haven’t found anyone in my family who was a homesteader on federal land, or who was a land baron. But I want you to meet Charles Bruce Foley, mining engineer, who lived in more places in this country than just about anyone else on our family tree.

Charles Bruce and Esther Foley
with baby Esther, ca. 1915

Charles Bruce (also just called Bruce) was born in 1876 in Indiana. He married my great-grandmother's sister, so you can see that he is sort of a shirt-tail relative. But he intrigues me, mostly because he did move around so much. Here is an outline of the places I know he lived in:

1876 Indiana
1901 Colorado
1906 Mexico
1909 Arizona territory
1911 Milwaukee
1918 Dayton
1915 Michigan
1918 Brooklyn
1920 Bristol, CT
1923 Albany NY
1930 Ft. Wayne, Indiana
1936 Kansas City MO
1940 Reno NV until his death in 1965

That's a lot of ground to cover. Bruce attended Colorado College in 1901 in the class of "special student," which I think meant he wasn't there as a freshman, sophomore, junior or senior, but just to take classes. He later worked as a mining engineer.

Charles Bruce Foley,
student, circa 1901

I don't know what brought him to Aurora, Illinois, but that is where he met and fell in love with Esther Hedin. According to my mom's Aunt Adrienne, Bruce declared that he would not leave Illinois until Esther married him. I haven't found any documentary proof of this marriage (or even that he ever lived in Illinois) but I have the birth certificate of their first child, Ruth, who was born (in Mexico) in 1906, and it includes Bruce and Esther, father and mother.

Another interesting fact about Bruce Foley is that he owns a U.S. patent. According to his obituary, he was the inventor of the electric furnace for U.S. Steel Corp. According to his patent, Number 1,350,714, he invented the Process of Treating Metals and Alloys. (They could be the same thing, what do I know about electric furnaces or treating metals and alloys?)

Patent 1,250,714
Process of Treating Metals and Alloys

I don't consider my research on the Foleys complete in any way. I'd love to find out more about what Bruce did in all those places he lived, and if he lived places I haven't discovered yet. Bruce and Esther made their last move to Reno, Nevada in 1936; I'm not sure why. No doubt there were many mining related opportunities there for a mining engineer, perhaps he went for a job. Or maybe they moved there with retirement in mind. In any case Charles Bruce Foley, you picked a beautiful place to land.