Moore, Katie Ann Bender (1865-1938)

Mennonite Weekly Review obituary: 1938 Apr 13 p. 2

Birth date: 1865 Jun 13

text of obituary:

Pioneer Kansas Woman Bequeathes $5,000 to Local Institution

Mrs. Katie Bender Moore of Mount Hope, Kansas, who left $5,000 in her will to Bethel college, is shown above with her husband Mr. John F. Moore. Mrs. Moore came with her parents to Kansas in 1882 and five years later married Mr. Moore, the son of a family who had also settled at Mount Hope, Kansas. A bronze plate in memory of these two pioneers will be placed in the entrance hall of the $100,000 Memorial building now under construction at Bethel college. A memorial biography of Mrs. Moore is printed in this issue of the Review. It is the third of a series of such life stories prepared by the college.

Mennonite Weekly Review obituary: 1938 Apr 13 p. 5

text of obituary:

KATIE BENDER MOORE A Memorial Biography

A gift of $5,000 was willed to Bethel college by Katie Moore of Mount Hope, Kansas, according to an item in newspapers that reached the college campus on Friday morning, March 25. There was something dramatic about the gift. No one knew the benefactress except for the few printed facts.

The first floor of the Memorial hall, being erected in memory of Kansas pioneers, had been begun. The board of directors of the college had voted to build only the ground floor as that was all the money available at the time. But a recent development among Kansas Brick manufacturers enabled the college to buy bricks far below the customary price. Could the bricks not be purchased at this saving and held until the school felt it could go ahead with the rest of the hall?

A way must be found! But where was the money to come from? Then one morning the $5,000 bequest to the school was seen in the papers. It was an answer to prayer. The building bricks wee purchased.

Mother of Benefactress a Mennonite

The next day the story of the beneficient [sic] lady's life was unfolded. On June 13, 1865, a little girl, Katie Ann, was born to Martin and Katherine Hilty Bender of Bluffton, Ohio. Her mother, who was a Mennonite, had come as a child of three years from Switzerland to America. Katie Ann's pioneer father had been one of six brothers who had left Beuthen in eastern Germany to make a home in the western nation.

Land in Ohio was high in price and so in 1882 Martin Bender with his wife, seventeen-year-old daughter Katie, and sons, Amos, Adam, and John came to Kansas. Three miles west of Mount Hope, Kansas, the father bought 160 acres of land at $5.80 an acre. The farmland purchased was from a grant of land the government had given the Santa Fe Railroad company when it had completed a track across the state within a ten-year period.

Came to Mount Hope, Kansas in 1882

Chartering a freight car the Benders shipped one team of horses and farm implements to Kansas, a son, Mr. Amos Bender of Have, Kansas, today recalls. With soft pine wood the family of six built its first house measuring only sixteen feet square. In 1882 Mount Hope, according to Mr. Bender, consisted of a blacksmith shop, a post office, grocery store, and less than fifteen residents. Today the little town has 450 inhabitants.

"Our first house was very crowded," the brother of Mrs. Katie Bender Moore said, "and so after a year father built a new and larger home about thirty feet long in which we lived for sixteen years.

The Bender family's first harvest consisted of fifteen acres of wheat and a little corn. The grain was threshed with an early rig operated by horse power. Since there were not fences in the 'eighties in this region, Katie Ann, the oldest of ten, herded cows with one of her brothers.

After having been in Kansas five years Miss Katie Ann Bender married Mr. John F. Moore, the son of another pioneer family who had also settled near Mount Hope, Kansas. Mrs. Moore's husband had been born on April 11, 1863, in Fairbury, Illinois, from where his father, Robert Moore, had taken his family to Missouri and from here had come to Kansas on October 14, 1877, settling near Mount Hope.

Gave Lodging to Ministers in Pioneer Days

For many years Mr. and Mrs. Moore welcomed to their home for food and lodging ministers who in pioneer days came to hold church services in the community. Both were members of the Methodist Episcopal church at Mount Hope. After a prosperous career as a farmer, Mr. Moore died on February 18, 1935.

A quiet, reserved woman, always considerate of all the persons with whom she came into contact, Mrs. Moore for several years prior to her passing on March 14, 1938, had been in frail health.

The funeral services for this pioneer woman were held on March 17, 1938. The generous gift of $5,000 left in her will to youth and Christian education at Bethel college came in a year when Bethel will observe a Golden anniversary — the Golden anniversary of its struggles and progress since the college's corner stone laying in 1888.