Charles Eli McClellan
1875-1967
Charles Eli McClellan was the twelfth and last child of William Carroll McClellan and his first wife, Almeda Day. He was born February 8, 1875, in Payson, Utah County, Utah. When he was two his family moved to Sunset, Arizona, and lived under the United Order there four years.
The earliest memories which he has recorded were at Sunset. The family then moved to Forest Dale, Arizona. This was found to be on Indian land, so after only one year they moved on to Pleasanton, New Mexico. At Pleasanton, he recalls, he helped with the family chores and in particular with the removal of unending rocks and weeds from the garden. Here he also attended a one-room school and received the beginnings of his lifelong education.
At the age of ten, Charles Eli McClellan and his family migrated to Mexico which was to be his home for the next twenty-seven years. Here he added to his meager education in a larger school with a better building and more teachers. He learned rapidly and became a foremost student of Dennison E. Harris. Having mastered the fundamentals he was asked to teach and in the spring of 1895, at the age of twenty, he began teaching grade school in Colonia Juarez. This opened a new life for him and inspired a teaching career.
Before the year was out, he had learned much about discipline, individual differences and the common sense approach to problems. He also realized that further education for himself was imperative. So he attended Brigham Young Academy in Provo the following year and then in the fall of 1897 Charles Eli McClellan was called to serve a mission in Colorado in the newly established Western States Mission.
Charles Eli McClellan served there without purse or script for two and one-half years and was released in the spring of 1900. On April 11, 1900, he and Josephine Haws were married in the Salt Lake Temple. She was the first child of George Martin Haws and his first wife, Josephine Cluff, who had lived in Mexico since 1891. Charles began teaching at the Juarez Stake Academy in the fall of 1900 and taught there continuously until the summer of 1912.
During these years he was in charge of the English department and taught kindred subjects the entire time. For the first three years, he was a student as well, for he had not yet graduated from high school. In 1903 he and Franklin S. Harris were formally graduated from an accredited four-year high school course at the Juarez Stake Academy.
His love for oral English and his admiration for classical use of words brought deep appreciation of language to the minds of those he taught. His precise diction made him exemplary and his approach to the mastery of fundamentals was effective and stimulating.
He developed in himself an advanced philosophy of education and psychology. He put human welfare as the final goal and held that any course failing to build integrity and character was only partially achieving its objective. From the outset, he looked past the subject material to the pupil, and recognized each as being important and distinct from any other individual. This was a basic tenet throughout his lifetime of teaching. He looked for the good in every pupil. His task was not done when the class was finished. Through personal contact he set more than one pair of feet on the path of better living and greater self-realization.
Charles Eli McClellan recognized that people learn faster when they are interested and was brave enough to break away from traditional teaching procedures. One of his novel plans has been used in countless ways since he introduced it. He had pupils write to pupils of other English classes in far away places, using, of course, clear and correct English. Replies came from Florida, Maine, Michigan and other parts of the United States as well as from islands of the seas. They contained choice descriptions of the localities from which they had been written as well as interesting information about the writers. The natural result was an aroused interest in composition, letter writing and descriptive language.
Eventually specimens of the flora and fauna of various regions were exchanged which became the beginning of a school museum. Mining men donated various mineral specimens in their various steps of refinement. A room was fitted with shelves, tables and stands for the various displays. Arrows gathered by President Ivins from the body of the Apache Kid were added and taxidermists, both local and foreign, stuffed and mounted birds and animals. Bottles were filled with rare reptiles from local and foreign places, carefully preserved in alcohol. The outcome of the freshman English class project was the establishment of an enviable high school museum.
Though always busy with school activities, Charles Eli McClellan was equally immersed in church activities. Soon after his return to the colonies from his mission, he was called by Bishop Joseph C. Bentley to be the Superintendent of the Sunday School. At the same time, in the years 1902-1905, he taught a Stake training class for missionaries. This course was instigated by examining boards and the Seven Presidents of the Seventies. Those who enrolled in it were expected to make the same sacrifices to master its fundamentals and complete the course that a real mission would require. In addition to Gospel principles, lectures treating problems incident to missionary life were added by faculty members, Mission Presidents, returned Elders, and Church and Stake Authorities.
After four years he was called to be a Counselor to Bishop Bentley where he served for four additional years. In his final four years in Mexico he served as Second Counselor to President Junius Romney during the years leading up to the Exodus in 1912.
Even with all of his regular duties and callings he found time to promote extra-curricular activities for the students. Story telling, public speaking, and debating were all outcomes of his oral English classes and provided many school and evening programs, giving at the same experience and personal growth to the participating students.
He also fostered dramatics for both the school and the Ward auxiliaries. He carried on the work started by Miles P. Romney. He directed plays, promoted school dramas and provided school and community with theatrical events several times a year. The events ranged from light comedy to Shakespearean productions. On occasion he participated in as well as directed a play. He loved this activity and was particularly pleased by the training and development it brought to the participants. His was a dynamic means of teaching the dramatic arts while entertaining and having fun.
The Mexico years were exciting but also brought great sorrow. During this time Charles and Josephine became the parents of six children, four girls and two boys. But they were grief-stricken during the final four and one-half years as they stood helplessly by as death took two of the girls and both of the boys. This may have precipitated a return to the United States.
In the summer of 1912 Charles Eli McClellan returned to Provo, with his family, to continue his studies at Brigham Young University. When the Exodus occurred at the end of July, 1912, he went from Provo to El Paso to see how the refugees from the colonies were faring. He went down into the colonies to evaluate the situation relative to possible return of the colonists. He reported to Church Authorities that he could see nothing to assure the safety of a return at that time. He then returned to Provo and completed his B.A. degree in 1914.
While Charles Eli McClellan was in school another son was born. After graduation Charles became Superintendent for one year of the Independent School District in Rigby, Idaho. This was followed by two years as President of the Hinckley Academy, in Hinckley, Utah. While there, they were blessed with two more sons. They then returned to Rigby where Charles was Superintendent of Schools for the years 1918-1921.
In 1921 they moved to Logan, where Charles was a student and part-time instructor at Utah Agricultural College, later to become Utah State University. In 1923 he received a Master’s Degree there and became a full-time teacher. Soon after, in 1924, their last child, a boy, was born. This was their first child to be born in a hospital.
With interruptions for graduate study at Stanford and Columbia, he taught continuously at Utah State, advancing to Full Professor. He served one year as Acting Dean of the School of Education. He was the prime mover behind the establishment of a school for teacher training. He officially retired in 1945 but continued to teach part-time for several years thereafter.
His teaching at Utah State was characterized by a basic philosophy developed in his early years of teaching at Juarez Stake Academy. Always he put the needs of the student as an individual ahead of the course material and inculcated this philosophy into many of the hundreds of teachers and teachers-to-be who came under his influence. Many students have commented that in his classes, as in none other, they were encouraged to really develop their thinking abilities.
While teaching and well into his retirement years, he was active in church and community affairs. After retirement, Charles and Josie, as he called her, remained in their home in Logan where he enjoyed life as a Professor Emeritus and in 1959 he was presented with the University’s Distinguished Service Award. Josephine continued to extend her great love for children and was known affectionately as “grandma” to all of the little ones in the neighborhood. Failing health finally took her life in 1959 at the age of eighty-one.
A year later Charles married a widow, Mae McAllister, who had been a fellow teacher at Juarez Stake Academy fifty years earlier. She passed away in 1966 and Charles died in the fall of 1967 at the age of ninety-two.
Cyril E. McClellan, son
Stalwarts South of the Border, Nelle Spilsbury Hatch
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