Volney Marx Douglas

  

b. July 3, 1908 Sonoita, Arizona
d. March 13, 1977 Tempe, Arizona

 Volney was the second of four children and oldest son born to Irvin and Maude 'Daisy' Jacobs Douglas on the ranch they had homesteaded in Sonoita; his siblings were Grace Mary, Olive Ann, and Irvin 'Dick', Jr. When he was eleven the family moved to Nevada where Irvin went to work in mining. In January, 1919, Maude was killed by Queho, a Native American accused of but never convicted for a number of killings, and soon after that Volney and his father moved back to their Sonoita homestead. The other children followed a few years later.

 Growing up he was part of a community of family living near each other in the Elgin area: the Emory and Olive Ann Stoddards (his sister's family) and the Frank and Mary Grace Burches (his other sister's family). He and his siblings all attended school in Patagonia where he had a keen interest in agriculture and played violin in the school orchestra. When he was 16 in 1924 he bought the homestead property of Henry Belue to raise cattle - today it's the seven-acre Douglas orchard developed by his son, Mark, on Lower Elgin Road. It has over 1,000 trees representing at least 300 varieties of apples.

 After Volney graduated from Patagonia High in 1928, he went to work for the Forest Service as a mule packer, and then switched to forest research while attending the University of Arizona's College of Agriculture. He graduated from the UofA in 1932 and began working as Assistant Director for the UA Santa Rita Experiment Station. By 1935 he was working as the Canelo ranger in the Coronado National Forest.

 In 1936 Volney married Blanche Audrey Lawson; in 1937, they moved to New Mexico where Volney was appointed as Chief of Range Surveys for the state of New Mexico by the U.S. Soil Conservation Service. By 1942, he had become a Range Examiner P-4 and Zone Technician for the Soil Conservation Service handling conservation planning and economic assessments in coordination with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers across more than a million acres in Texas. During this time Volney also attended graduate school at the University of Chicago and the California Institute of Technology

 By 1947 he and Blanche were living in the Phoenix area where he was employed by the State of Arizona teaching farming to veterans who had returned from WWII. He also appraised land for the Federal Land Bank.

 Volney and Blanche had five living children: three boys (including Michael, Leon, and Mark) and two girls (including Jan Karen) born between 1938 and 1953.

Written and edited by Corbin Smith primarily from an article by Alison Bunting in the Patagonia Regional Times, 1/4/2024, and from information by Volney Douglas on FamilySearch.com.

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