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- Empire Courier, July 25, 1963
Graveside Services Held Sunday For Frank Willis
Graveside services were held at the Brown?s Park Cemetery Sunday at 2:00 p.m. for Francis (Frank) Willis, 79, with the Reverend Ella Beyer of the Maybell Congregational Church officiating.
Mr. Willis died Tuesday, July 16th, at the Moffat Rest home in Craig after failing health of several years.
Surviving Mr. Willis is one daughter Sister Mary Elene Willis of St. Euphrasia School of Batesburg, South Carolina.
Frank Willis was born at Reeceville, Tennessee in 1883. He came to Routt County in 1900, going to work for the Rocky Mountain Fuel Company. In 1904 he was employed by the Two Bar Ranch. Shortly thereafter he quit the Two Bar and went to Wyoming and then Nebraska.
By 1917 he had returned to Northwestern Colorado and was working in the Brown Park area. He was married to forty-two-year-old Ann Bassett in 1920. Both of them had been married previously, Frank having a daughter named Rose by his first wife.
Shortly after the couple was married they moved to California where for ten years Willis worked in the oil fields. The Willises moved to Arizona in 1931 and built up a herd of 1,200 head of cattle on a ranch they purchased near Hackberry. During their sojourn in the Southwest, Mrs. Willis enrolled as a forestry student at the University of Arizona and seemed vastly disappointed to learn that women were not acceptable as forest rangers.
After selling out their Arizona ranch and cattle holdings in 1937, the Willises returned to Colorado where Frank found employment with the Humphrey Gold Mining Company headquartered in Denver. At a later date he was sampler foreman for the U.S. Bureau of Mines. The uranium boom found him near Leeds, Colorado, and it was while the couple were making their home here that Ann Bassett Willis, the first white child born in Northwestern Colorado, and one of the most colorful persons of the early days in Brown?s Park, died in May 1956 at the age of seventy-eight.
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Bassett Family Association Database
1883 - 1963 (80 years)