Posted on: USGenWeb Delta County Biographies Reply Here: http://genconnect.rootsweb.com/gc/USA/Co/DeltaBios/10011 Surname: STELL, BURRITT, SMITH, BOYLE, FROTHINGHAM, HUNSICKER, REED, MCCORMICK ------------------------- SMITH FAMILY Echo Margaret Smith was born in 1888 in Iowa as daughter of Lewis Edwin and Margaret Jane Boyle Smith. Her father had severe asthma and was advised to seek a more temperate climate. He was intending to move his family to California, but several of his friends and members of the same Presbyterian church had moved to the Surface Creek Valley at the encouragement of their former minister Rev. Frothingham who had come to the Surface Creek Valley to start a new church. Lewis decided to visit Colorado and then go on to California but the Colorado air and Surface Creek Valley suited him well and he decided to stay. Reverend Frothingham however failed to establish a successful church, and left Eckert; it was some few years before a flourishing Presbyterian Church was finally established under Reverend Hunsicker. Prominent among its early members were Lewis Edwin Smith and John Allen Brower. Lewis became a popular member of the Surface Creek Valley society, serving as deputy water commissioner for several years and being active in the Presbyterian church and lodges which the Browers and Burritts also attended. Lewis and Margaret had three daughters; Echo Margaret b. 1888 m. Frank Reed Burritt 1923 d. 1969 in Cortez; Edna b. 1889 m. Dewitt McCormick 1913 d. 1950? in Seattle; and Ethel b. 1891 m. George? Mathis d. 1940 ? in Seattle Echo Margaret Smith was about 18 when her family moved to Surface Creek Valley. She took employment in Delta as a switchboard operator. In time she became acquainted with Frank Reed Burritt while he was still in high school. Echo, however, wanted a career, and worked hard to become head operator, then started her own switchboard office in Cederedge with sister Edna, and finally took over the switchboard in Eckert which was housed in the same building as the post office. Echo began filling in on postal duties and eventually was appointed post mistress. For several years she worked from 7 A.M. to 7 P.M. or later, delivering mail by horseback throughout the Surface Creek region, supervising the switchboard operators, and often filling in a shift or two, and running the post office. She was also an active member of the Eckert Presbyterian Church and Odd Fellows and Rebeccas Lodge. Her frequent companion was Frank Reed Burritt, fellow church and Lodge member, veteran of W.W.I during which he served as an army nurse in France under General Pershing. In 1923 both he and Echo became delegates to the Grand Lodge Convention in Gunnison. Much was made of their sneaking around together, during the trip to, and stay in, Gunnison, and so on a whim, Echo and Frank got married, on the way home in Montrose. She then had to retire from the post office, as married women could not hold such a post, and she became a ranch wife. At first she and Frank had a spread up on Redlands Mesa near his brother John, but that failed in the early years of the Depression and he and Echo moved onto Keystone farm on Tongue Creek in the Surface Creek Valley. They were soon joined by Hiram Burritt and family, he having lost his job at a Creamery in Montrose. Frank, Hiram, their father Fred Ray, and aided by cousins George, Walter, and Jim Stell ran Keystone Farm successfully throughout the remainder of the Depression. After Fred Ray died in 1940 and Hiram left after the tragic death of his beloved Edith from a tick bite in 1941, and the Stells all eventually moved away, Frank was left alone to run Keystone Farm. This proved too overwhelming a task, and by 1948 it was abandoned, its fields leased out, and its 160 acres sold in 1951 as pastureland. The original Burritt homestead and its many out buildings have all fallen into ruin and little evidence of Keystone Farm exists today. It was just behind the old Tongue Creek School, now a private dwelling. Frank and Echo moved in with her mother in Eckert, and lived there for many years after her death in 1955. Failing health led to their selling the Eckert home in 1968, and moving to Cortez in Montezuma County, where their daughter, my mother, cared for them until their deaths in 1969 (Echo) and 1982 (Frank)