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Libbie Pierson — A Life in Full

As a child, Libbie Mercer had to stand on a box to be seen when she gave her elocution recitals. She learned at the Friends Academy in LeGrand, Iowa, and the gift came from both parents, her mother a schoolteacher, and her father “an excellent public speaker.”

Libbie married Barak Pierson in Barclay, a Quaker town on the Kansas prairie, in 1883. The couple moved to Pasadena in 1887, then to an 80-acre orange ranch in Orosi in 1910. Her granddaughter Beth remembered the house there as a small cottage, its porch roof covered in yellow roses, and inside, a round oak table and Grandpa’s rocking chair.

By 1912, newspapers show Libbie in constant demand: “Get Mrs. Pierson to entertain!” She read at church socials, county fairs, and meetings of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. Beth remembered what she was like in a room. “Grandma Pierson was never quiet. She was just really chattering away all the time and doing something crazy.” She crocheted constantly, and loved dressing up in costume for a good cause.

Around 1925, Barak and Libbie left Orosi for Tulare, where they spent the rest of their lives, with frequent visits from family and friends. Their church changed with each move too. Quaker in Pasadena, Presbyterian in Orosi, and Methodist in Tulare, where Libbie remained active for her last fifteen years.

Libbie did not just perform other people’s words. She wrote her own, and some poems survive today. One, for a family Thanksgiving gathering, dates to 1911. Another, written in 1928 for her granddaughters Beth and Edith, remembers the one-room Iowa schoolhouse of her girlhood, its bell still ringing in her memory. In December 1944, mourning a friend, she wrote a memorial poem beginning, “Backward, turn backward, O time on your way.”

In 1933, at their 50th wedding anniversary in Santa Monica, more than a hundred guests gathered. Libbie, then seventy, gave a reading.

A 1942 newspaper profile, written when she was seventy-nine, noted: “It isn’t wool yarn she’s spinning here… it’s tender memories of a rich life.” The article describes her rock garden, built stone by stone, with friends often adding to it, and her collection of Indian mortars. By then she had eight grandchildren and six great-grandchildren. As the paper put it, “there has never been a break in the family chain.”

By 1944, caring for a bedridden Barak, Libbie wrote to her nephew Ralph Arnold: “I seem to be among the very few that are left, I feel rather lonely.” But she kept remembering, until her death in 1947 at 83. She is buried next to her husband Barak, his mother Deborah, and her parents John and Elizabeth in Altadena. [447 words]

Sources

This entry draws on the 1942 Tulare Advance-Register profile “Bouquet of the Week: Portrait of a Grandmother”; Beth Page’s recorded oral autobiography; Libbie Mercer Pierson’s 1911 Thanksgiving poem, her 1928 poem “LeGrand and Friends Academy,” and her December 1944 memorial poem for Sarah Ramsey; Libbie’s November 20, 1944 letter to Ralph and Winninette Arnold; and city directory, newspaper, and land record research compiled by Laura Atkins.