Charles Barr became a naturalized citizen in 1888. He is working for the Sioux Falls Granite Co. as a paving cutter and wife, Mary, is doing her best. They are living in a rented home. Just before the turn of the century, sons Walter and James are out into the world. They are running a livery barn in Dell Rapids Township, S.D., and by 1898, Margaret, May Ethel and Leo are born to the family in East Sioux Falls. Their son, Charlie, is also out on his own working as a saloon keeper. While Charles is working in the quarry, Mary is taking in laundry for extra income, in addition to her daily chores of being a mother, a cook, a baker and maintaining their home. Married women rarely strayed outside the home in the late 1800s where the work was laborious and filled with drudgery. This was the life of Mary Barr that had tested her metal since a young age. Sometimes life only gets tougher.

East Sioux Falls was a city (now gone) located in southeastern Minnehaha County, S.D., located about six miles east of Sioux Falls on the Big Sioux River. During the 1880s, the quarrying of a distinctive pink stone known as jasper or quartzite had developed into a successful business in Sioux Falls. In 1887, the Sioux Falls Granite Co. opened four quarries six miles due east of downtown Sioux Falls in Split Rock Township. The area had an abundance of quartzite along the bluffs overlooking the Big Sioux River. It was exposed to the Earth’s surface and easily mined. Hundreds of miners and their family settled in the area that was first known as Ives, but when the Illinois Central Railroad extended the tracks west from Iowa and through the city, it put in a depot and had the name changed to East Sioux Falls. The population was more than 600 by 1890, and it was incorporated into a municipality.

The town had workers’ cottages, a post office, town hall, depot, school house, general store, hotel, grain elevator, stable, saloons and a jail. The quarried stone was cut into building stones and paving blocks and shipped to construction projects throughout the country. Pink quartzite was superior in quality to other stones with a delicate coloring that looked good in any light. Like in any quarry, all of the tapping, drilling and blasting filled the air with the dust and grit from the mined stone. If you worked in a quarry this is what you breathed. Hundreds of cities of the west were paved with quartzite blocks cut at the East Sioux Falls quarries. That was a lot of stone and even more dust and grit. The city felt the depression of 1893, and the Sioux Falls Granite Co. was pushed into bankruptcy. By 1900 concrete had taken the place of stone as a building material. Charles Barr’s life as a paver cutter was at an end in East Sioux Falls with the closing of the quarries.

The explosives and cutting of stone in the quarries that released particulate matter into the air, could cause human illness such as silicosis and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Charles Barr had breathed this air in Scotland and now in Sioux Falls for 30 years. He had quarry lung. An immigrant was given work based on what he learned from his father, and many jobs found the immigrant as dispensable. Jobs that involved the dangers of death kept a supply of immigrants at hand. Charles Barr died at age 48 on March 17, 1904, in Sioux Falls, S.D. He died of hemorrhage of the lung and was buried in St. Michael’s Cemetery. The city of East Sioux Falls gave up its charter in 1913 with the out migration of its residents. Mary Barr and her three children had already moved on after the death of her husband.

It is 1910, six years after the death of her husband, Charles, and Mary Barr is now living in Split Rock, Minnehaha County, S.D. She is a laundress in her home with two of her children, May Ethel (Richard Widmark’s mother) age 13, Leo age 11, and a boarder James Loury from Ireland. Her daughter, Margaret has left the nest and married David W. Miller in 1907, a man eight years her senior. They have a daughter, Rene, age 2, and live in Sioux Falls. May Ethel leaves home later that year and is living with her sister, Margaret, and David Miller. She meets Carl Henry Widmark at some time in 1912, and they are married on Jan. 16, 1914, in Canton, Lincoln County, S.D. They move to Braham, Minn., for work, and then Carl takes a clerking job, with living quarters in Sunrise Township, Minn., in early 1914. May Ethel is with child, and on Dec. 26, 1914, at 12:45 p.m., Richard Weedt Widmark is born.

Mary Barr has relocated to Sioux Falls in about 1915. She and her son. Leo. are living at 517 N. Waltz. Leo is working for the Sioux Falls Candy Co. They move to  821 W. Sixth St., and they have three Greek roomers who also work in the candy factory. Mary’s daughter, Ethel Mae (she reversed it from Mae Ethel), her husband, Carl Henry Widmark, and son Richard, have moved back to Sioux Falls in 1916. Mary is elated to have her family near and is very fond of her little grandson, Richard.

The city of Sioux Falls, S.D., sprang to life from the settling, by an agricultural society, of the area around the cascading falls of the Big Sioux River, created about 14,000 years ago during the last ice age. The lure of the falls brought first the native tribes (HoChunk, Ioway, Missouri, Omaha, Osage, Dakota and Cheyenne) followed by the Europeans. Fort Dakota was established in 1865, and by 1873, the population was 593 in the midst of a building boom. The village of Sioux Falls, 1,200 acres, was incorporated in 1876 and chartered as a city in 1883. The arrival of the railroads ushered in the great Dakota Boom of the 1880s. The population had mushroomed to 10,167 by the turn of the century. A severe plague of grasshoppers and a national depression halted the boom by the early 1890s, but prosperity eventually returned with the opening of the John Morrell meat packing plant in 1909. The city had industry, shops, services, schools, churches and entertainment, including movie theatres. The Olympia Theatre opened in 1909, The Egyptian Theatre in 1915, and The Strand Theatre in 1916.

The first minute-length movies, were shown in Mutoscope parlors, where only one person could view them, by cranking a handle as they looked into the peepshow machine. The big turning point came in 1903 with the Edison Company's "The Great Train Robbery," projected on a screen with musical accompaniment, usually with piano. The Olympia Theatre opened with the showing of "Her First Biscuits" and "The Faded Lilies," both by Director D.W. Griffith. Mary Barr discovers the movies and for just a few pennies, she finds an escape from the toils of her life, even if for less than an hour. She sees her first Tom Mix Western shorts in 1915. She takes Richard, age 3, to his first movie in 1917. She has endured as a young mother since age 16, lost four children, raised another six in the toughest of circumstances, buried her husband at 44, and found a way to survive by the most menial type of labor.

I’ll be back with the third reel on Mary Barr and grandson, Richard Widmark.