Ernest Isaac Hatch

1878 – 1952

Ernest Isaac Hatch, fourth child and second son of John and Maria Matilda McClellan, was born September 21, 1878 in Greenwich, Piute County, Utah, a small hamlet consisting of six widely separated families in Grass Valley lying in the tops of the snowbound Wasatch mountains.

Ernest’s father, John William Hatch, was born April 3, 1850, in the Old Union Fort, Salt Lake City, Utah, and grew up in Payson, Utah.  He met Maria Matilda McClellan, and they were married on March 14, 1874.  

In the early 1880’s, William C. McClellan, father of Maria was called by the Church leaders to move with others to New Mexico and settle on the San Francisco River.  The small town was named Pleasanton.  John and Maria left their home in Greenwich, Piute County, Utah and moved with four of their small children to Pleasanton.

The life of the settlers was hard. The Apache renegade, Geronimo, gave no little fear to the settlers of that area. John was called to carry, in his wagon, the bodies of four U. S. soldiers from where they were ambushed to their burial spot near the town of Alma.

John and Maria had two daughters, Myrtle and Pearl, born to them at Pleasanton. Pearl died soon after birth was buried there.  

As a Pleasanton project did not work out well for the settlers, they moved out, John Maria returning to their former home in Greenwich.

Except for three years spent in Pleasanton, New Mexico, Grass Valley was Ernest’s home until he was 20 years of age. He hearded a sheep in the summer, voluntarily being the soul shepherd for his grandfather’s sheep one summer when he was but nine years of age. His herding also included cows for his father’s dairy at Fish Lake where he helped with the milking and assisted in the making of butter and cheese for sale.

He went to school one term each winter, breaking fresh trail through the snow drifts each day. When he had finished all Grass Valley had to offer, his parents were able to send him to Ephraim, to the Snow Academy, for two years. This opportunity spurred plans to continue his education with his favorite cousin, Jim Bagley, at the Brigham Young Academy at Provo.

The long winter evenings for the Hatches were turned into a miniature factory when, seated around a blazing fire, they picked wool, sewed carpet rags, pieced quilt blocks, carded wool, knit socks and stockings as their mother read to them, propping open her book with the scissors, rocked the cradle and knit. Each child would be occupied in tasks best suited to his age.  Ernest served longest at the carpet rag sewing, saying in later years he could remember when he cut his first tooth, but not when he learn to sew carpet rags. He also took his turn at the washboard and at scrubbing the pine board floors and chair seats. His parents were thrifty and frugal and drafted every child into an organization that “kept the best side out.” “We may live in poverty,” his mother would often say, “but it will be slick poverty,” and use every child help make it so.

A crisis in Ernest’s life came when his mother suddenly decided she could no longer endure the long cold winters in Grass Valley. Of the nine children born after Ernest, including twins, five had died. I move to a warmer climate was imperative. Ernest’s strong objections to his interrupted education plans, and the need to sell everything just at the peak of prosperity, subsided as he saw affairs definitely moving toward Mexico, and he finally promised to go and help with the move, but found that nothing could make him stay. With that understanding, the move got underway.

They left their home, friends and relatives in Grass Valley in October, 1898, and arrived in Colonia Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico in mid-December of the same year. The slow team travel had taken them through most of Utah and Arizona, across New Mexico to El Paso, Texas, where Maria’s father and brother met them to help with immigration and custom inspection. From there they all enjoyed their first train ride on the newly completed Mexico Noroeste railroad, with their wagons, teams and other traveling gear being shipped with them.

It was a good time to become members of the Juarez Ward. Holiday festivities were underway, giving all a chance to make quick acquaintances.  A large family with eight unmarried children, as well as a married daughter with her husband and three children, were welcome additions to the Ward. Each member of the family found friends of their own age, and all were soon happy over the move. All but Ernest, that is, who was still determined to return to Grass Valley.

Three things changed his mind. First, Professor Guy C. Wilson convinced him that his ninth grade could offer as many advantages as could the Snow Academy and he could remain at home as he studied. Second, Dennison and E. Harris offered him a job after school and on Saturdays clerking in  his store, to keep him going as he studied. Third, and most of all, he fell under the charm of fun-loving Lillian Haws. He canceled all his intentions to return to Grass Valley and enrolled in school.

He was soon under the spell of Professor Wilson’s psychology and from it was born a desire to make a teaching career. He graduated from the Juarez Stake Academy in May, 1901, he not only was a member of the first graduating class, but he also had two engagements, one to teach school in the institution from which he had gained his training, and the other to marry the girl he had courted through the years.

He was married to Lillian Haws, May 15, 1901, and spent the summer in Naco, Sonora, earning enough money to set them up in housekeeping. By fall they were established in the Olive Stolwell home and Ernest had started a career that kept him many years in the classroom. December 29, 1901, Lillian prematurely gave birth to a baby girl, and complications following its immediate death kept her hovering between life and death for six weeks as Ernest and the doctors fought off a stage of puerperal fever.  She survived, but was threatened by its recurrence with each succeeding birth.

By July, 1912, Ernest was certified as head of the commercial department in the Juarez Stake Academy, was teaching bookkeeping and rapid calculation, was School Registrar, and he knew and could call by name each registrant, and was a successful athletic coach, with basketball and baseball teams competing successfully with teams along the border of the United States. Business-wise he had invested in a cannery and had a car load of cans ready for use. Church-wise he was Sunday School Superintendent, a Stake YMMIA officer, and a teacher in his Priesthood class. Family-wise he had a neat brick bungalow, a family of five children:  Lillian, Fleeta, Ernest Seville, Genevieve, and Ernest LeRoy.

He had also seeing how the breakup of law and order can change otherwise peaceful and friendly neighbors into enemies with murderous intent that came with the beginning of the 1910 Madero Revolution. He had been one of the deputized officers commissioned to arrest Juan Sosa, a belligerent malcontent, and was on the ground when the murderous attempt to kill Frank Lewis was stopped with a volley of shots that killed Sosa. He had lived through the aftermath, facing the shocking fact that when the licentious usurpers are in control, there is justice for no one and anything can happen. With turbulence quieted and a seemingly reliable recognition of neutrality for the colonists, a complete evacuation of the colonies from Mexico was a horn of the dilemma not then to be considered. Nothing could more definitely halt the progress and kill the prosperity they were enjoying.

When it came, however, no matter if it was disaster supreme to him, he followed the dictates of Priesthood leaders without a murmur.

The anguish she suffered as he sent Lillian, again in a delicate condition, to the U.S. border, was endured because he was sure the move was only temporary. Lonely vigil along with other men and boys was endured for the same reason. But conditions forced the men to follow their families.

Acting on the notion that there is “no luck without pluck,” he located and provide for his family until his return, and borded the first train for home, arriving again in Colonia Juarez by September first. There, with marshaled neighbors, he canned vegetables wasting in the gardens and preserve the fruit from the orchards.  Back in El Paso he earned money to pay doctors fees when their third son Ernest Sanford, was born November 25, 1912 and for his caring for Lillian, as they fought off another siege of puerperal fever. The little fellow died Christmas Day.

Six weeks later, in February 1913, he joined a pilgrimage, 65 strong, headed by Bishop Joseph C Bentley, that took them by team from Columbus, New Mexico back to their homes in Colonia Juarez, each one choosing the hazards of Revolutionary life in their own homes to insecurity and homelessness in the United States.

For three years they endured this strippings of roving bands. The incident most closely affecting Ernest was when his father, in self-defense, killed Guadalupe Treviso, and he and his brothers were forced to endure bullying from first one party then another until he could be cleared in a reasonable court session. Watching his neighbor Ernest L. Taylor he manhandled by an extortionist, and once stood up to be executed, was another ordeal that touched him, especially when he could do nothing about it. But he still faced situations as they came and found life reasonably good until the cruelest blow of all struck him. He lost his loved companion. Lillian, with the birth of their fourth son, Ernest Herman, March 27, 1916, succumbed to her old enemy, puerperal fever on April 29. He was bereft of a wife and was left with six motherless children.

By that time Pancho Villa had made his hit-and-run attack on Columbus, New Mexico, and the Punitive Expedition of 12,000 men, under General John J. Pershing, was engaged in the famous but unsuccessful manhunt.  In November of that year Ernest was ordained a High Priest and made Second Counselor to Bishop John J. Walser in Colonia Juarez, a position he held a short time. With a partnership offer from Lillian’s brothers, Jim and George Haws in Mesa, Arizona, in the dairy and poultry business, he moved his family there for five years.

At the end of the first two years, prospects for accumulating property, machinery and teams were good. Yet life was lonely. He needed a companion, his children needed a mother and home life. On August 19, 1918, he married Nelle Spilsbury, an associate teacher from the JSA and one month later they were sealed in the St. George Temple. Home life for Ernest went on as though uninterrupted.

The first crisis in their life came when Ernest contracted the Spanish flu and narrowly escaped death in the epidemic that swept the country, leaving countless victims in its wake. The only reason he survived was his intense desire to live and his faith in the power of the Priesthood. Nelle’s first daughter, Ernestine, was born May 25, 1919.

When the partnership with Lillian’s brothers dissolved, Ernest was in possession of a 40 acre tract of land, and his share of cows, teams, chickens and sheep. When an offer came to take over a couple of the farms in Colonia Dublan, he accepted. He left Nelle to dispose of his farm to the highest bidder and went to put in his first crops.

Then the bottom fell out of everything. The depression following World War I struck, farm after farm went falling into the hands of receivers, banks closed their doors, and Ernest’s valuable farm, almost overnight, became a liability. Even, produced on this farm was sidetracked on an Eastern market demanding demurrage. On top of it all, his crops in Dublan failed.

At the end of two years his rosy dream of a model dairy and poultry farm, fed by rich yields from his farm, collapsed, and with things going from bad to worse, he moved his family to Colonia Juarez. His farm in Mesa, his Ford car, his machinery, most of his teams and cows were lost in the final settlement. With his family he settled into a happy home and began again from scratch from that time, there was no direction to go but up, Nelle’s first son, Garth Spilsbury, was June 29, 1923.

One by one he tackled the problems besetting the half-paid for Junius Romney orchard. Coddling moth left its pollution in every apple, killing frost could in one night wipe out a crop, and apples shriveled on the trees during the dry season.  Finding himself in a vicious circle of needing a fruit crop to buy spray material, smudge pots, and sink a well, how could he get these things until he had a fruit crop?  Yet, whipping one problem after another, he soon realized that he had made the best investment in life.

Among the other challenges that Ernest faced was that of the death of his parents. His father, John William Hatch, died January 22, 1932, at the age of 82, after suffering a heart attack. Maria followed her husband and was laid to rest at his side in the cemetery of Colonia Juarez on July 27, 1940. They were the parents of 14 children: Lillian Maria, Minnie Almeda, John Alma, Ernest Isaac, Mary Agnes, Rhoda Evelyn, Myrtle, Pearl, Cynthia Irene, George Lynn, Frances Fern, Elmer Hugh, and twins Charles and Carroll.

In 1932 he entered the fruit market in Mexico City with the first carload of apples to be shipped from the colonies since 1896 as an exhibit in the Coyoacan Fair.  He re-established the quality of colony fruit and opened up a market that has since steadily grown and still flourishes.

With his original orchard paying off, other orchards on both sides of him were purchased and soon yielding handsomely. His family was soon enjoying the fruits of his labors, though going through “the narrows” had taught them many lessons such as the worth of the dollar and the value of family unity in solving family problems.

During those years of pulling himself up by his “bootstraps,” his last child, Madelyn, was born October 19, 1925.  He had taught school a couple of years to keep his family eating, had filled six months mission in California, had continued as Sunday School Superintendent, promoted the Boy Scout program, and had acted as watermaster for the East Canal. Hi0s family followed his example and fill positions in church work along with him. He was released from the High Council to be First Counselor to Bishop Anthony I. Bentley in 1934.

In September, 1937, he was set apart as Bishop of the Juarez Ward with David Samuel Brown and Velan Cal, and later Willard Shupe as Counselors. He was now in a position to continue a rehabilitation program that is still in progress (1966).  Blackened walls of burned buildings dotted the town, homes were windowless and porches were sagging and floorless. The elementary school building (original Juarez Stake Academy and the only Church house the Ward had known) was remodeled into a modern one-story building. Church functions were moved to the Ivins Hall in the JSA building, which did service until October, 1966 when a new chapel was built.

Home rehabilitation began with his own home by removing the rotting roof and changing it into a Spanish-style residence, adding a sleeping porch and a kitchen, and commencing a system of landscaping around the grounds that is still in progress.

Ernest’s term as Bishop ended in October, 1944. The remainder of his life was spent serving as High Councilman. His sons took over the management of his orchard. Life ended for him October 7, 1952 in Dalhart, Texas, where his tired heart suddenly stopped. Leaving a posterity that now numbers eight children, 43 grandchildren, and 32 great-grandchildren, he was buried in Colonia Juarez cemetery October 11, 1952. Typical of the regard in which he was held by the Mexican people, is a remark made by a neighbor boy: “I had lost a father, adviser, banker, neighbor and friend.”

A member of the first graduating class himself, he was the first to have a daughter graduate, and the first to have a granddaughter graduate, from the Juarez Stake Academy.

An officer in both Stake and Ward MIA, six of his children have been Ward Presidents, and one has been Stake Superintendent. One daughter is currently Stake Primary President, having served first as Ward President. Two of his sons are eminent physicians, one of them a specialist in obstetrics and gynecology, a daughter an accredited nurse and anesthetist, a grandson an oral surgeon, a son-in-law a dentist and a grandson-in-law a dermatologist. Himself a teacher, four of his children have done service in the classroom, while two have made it a career. Himself and one son having served as Bishop of the Juarez Ward, another has served in two Bishoprics. Himself a missionary, a son and daughter and two daughters-in-law have filled full-time missions while two sons have served as Mission Presidents, and his 13th grandson is now in the mission field.

All the posterity can truly say, “we are following in your footsteps.”

Nelle Spilsbury Hatch

Stalwarts South of the Border, page 241