Butler County KS Archives Biographies.....Brown, Emmet August 13, 1878 - October 28, 1963
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Author: Times Editor - The El Dorado Times, November 6, 1963

The El Dorado Times 
November 6, 1963 

EMMET BROWN 

(Emmet Brown died on October 28 following a surgical operation. The following 
account represents an endeavor to accord a fitting estimate of the life of this 
valuable Butler county citizens. – EDITOR).

How can the stature of a man be measured? By a yard stick? By a foot rule? By 
the vigor of his youth and manhood? As the years come, his vigor fails, his 
stride shortens, his shadow falters.

But how can a man be measured? By his status? His lands, his cattle, his bank 
accounts? By the pressure he can bring to bear to carry out his purposes? 
Status, possessions, position are fleeting. They wither as the green herb and 
are gone.

Yet the stature of a man endures, measured always by the purposes to which he 
has given his life by the essence of his spirit. Measured, too, by his 
industry, integrity, honor and his allegiances. And by his capacity to endure, 
his good humor when the going is rough, and the deep, lasting love he gives to 
his dear ones.

In all of these Emmet Brown was a man. 

He knew joy and heartbreak and et them as a good man must. Even in his final 
days, his pleasure in good humor did not desert him. “Tell Jesse,” he told his 
wife, “that I’m still here by being careful.”

After surgery, when the jaundice that plagued him began to grow paler, a member 
of his family said, “Emmet, you’re going to be a white man again,” and his old 
smile flashed and his eyes lit up – there ever so briefly.

Emmet came to Butler county with his parents by covered wagon the summer he was 
eleven years old. His father, a Missouri teacher and county surveyor, was never 
strong. One day he was found in the field unconscious, felled by a heart attack 
from which he never fully recovered. And so it was that the 11-year-old boy 
began following a plow and assuming a man’s responsibility – a position he 
never relinquished.

He was always responsible. If a family or a community needed something done, he 
could be counted on to do it. He might be out most of the night at a “social,” 
but he laid the fire for breakfast next morning and afterward took the team to 
the field.

He could be depended on. His judgments were right. The girl he married as a 
young man of 25, Effie Torrey, people called “just about the nicest girl 
anywhere around.”

In 1907, he bought the place where he lived until his death. In the years that 
followed he became increasingly involved in the community activities. For more 
than a quarter-century, he served on the Rosalia township board. These were the 
years when power tools for road building and maintenance were only beginning to 
be used.

Rosalia township roads were among the first in the county to be graded, 
graveled and improved. A good road, well kept, led to every farm. From the time 
the Long School, district 171, was established until it was absorbed by Rosalia 
district, he was the school board treasurer, insisting always that the best 
teachers for the money available be engaged.

When the Blue Cross-Blue Shield plan for hospital and medical care was being 
organized in the county, he was a prime mover in its formation in his township. 
For years, he was a member of the board of trustees of the Methodist church in 
the little town of Pontiac, now all but faded from the map.

Ten years after he suffered a major heart attack in 1935, from which he was not 
expected to recover, he began raising calves and actively farming, though never 
on the extensive scale of other years.  When the government wheat allotment 
program went into effect, he measured wheat over all of Butler county, often 
walking ten to twenty miles a day to compile accurate figures.

This fall, at age 85, he plowed, disced and fertilized 41 terraced acres and 
planted them to wheat. He sowed a new field of alfalfa and when he died, a 
drill stood in the yard of his home ready to sow still another field to sweet 
clover – a field which he had prepared.

He was a farmer. All his life, he was a farmer – and he loved it. He and his 
wife, the former Myra Lockwood, have been active members of the First Methodist 
church, El Dorado. For years, Emmet believed that life goes on after death 
without interruption, that men retain their loves, their abilities.

Who is to say that the work to which the God of all good workmen has set him 
now is not a long, straight furrow to plow?



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