Strattons of Massachusetts Bay
Running Through the Sands of Time
Attorney, Prosecutor, Pulp Fiction Writer (1860–1905)
“The only thing that overcomes hard luck is hard work.” —Harry Golden
Frank Nelson Stratton was born on September 18, 1860, in Madison, Indiana, the son of Francis Joel Stratton and Hester Ann Donnellan. He was the eighth generation of Strattons in America, descended from the Samuel Stratton who settled in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 1600s. He was one of five children—two boys and three girls.
When Frank was about six, his mother and stepfather moved the family to Monroe Township in Howard County, Indiana. Whatever schooling he got was spare—a short stretch at New London and six months at a business college. The rest of his education came from sawmills, clearings, and farms, and from the kind of stubborn reading that happens after the work is done and the lamp is lit.
In 1892, at the age of thirty-two, Frank decided to study law. He had no degree, no patron, and no money. What he had was discipline and a hunger for books that his neighbors found remarkable. He read everything—law, literature, history both sacred and profane—and he did it by the midnight oil, as the newspapers would later say, until there was perhaps no one in the county better versed in the wide field of literature.
He was admitted to the Indiana bar in August 1894 and set up practice in Kokomo, forming the partnership of Herron & Stratton with Joseph C. Herron. Their offices in the Ruddell building handled both criminal and civil cases, some of them of local celebrity. By 1898, just four years in, Frank’s legal opinions were respected by the oldest members of the bar, and he was the Republican candidate for prosecuting attorney.
“Music is the universal language of mankind.” —Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Frank married young. On July 27, 1881, at the age of twenty, he wed Sarah C. Dunn in Marion, Grant County, Indiana. Sarah was a Tennessee girl—the 1880 census places her in Knox County—and she was just seventeen. The following March their son Harry Percy Stratton was born in Marion. What happened to the marriage after that, I have not been able to determine. Sarah simply disappears from the record. There is no divorce filing I can find, no death notice, nothing. By the time Frank surfaces again in the documents, he is a single man studying law.
Percy, though, left a trail a mile wide. He enlisted for the Spanish-American War in April 1898—just sixteen years old if the birth date holds—and served through November of that year in Okinawa. By 1900 he was in the Philippines with the military forces, and he would spend much of his adult life in the Pacific, including a stretch in Japan. He eventually settled in Seattle, where he lived until his death in September 1957. It is a curious parallel: Frank’s firstborn son ended up about as far from Kokomo as a man could get, while Frank never left Howard County. I know almost nothing about Percy’s personal life in those years, and that is a thread I hope to follow.
Frank’s second marriage was the one that defined the rest of his life. On March 8, 1888, he married Otilie Schellschmidt—the family name had been Anglicized to Shellsmith by then—a schoolteacher in the Indianapolis public schools and the daughter of Ferdinand and Kate Shellsmith. Ferdinand was a musician by profession, and the whole family was musically inclined, which added an artistic dimension to a household that was already filling up with books.
Frank and Otilie had three sons: Frank Arthur, Frederick, and Ferdinand. Frederick—my grandfather, the one everybody called Doc—would become a dentist in Ligonier and die too young of Banti’s Syndrome. Ferdinand would run a radio-TV repair shop. The elder Frank, their father, would not live to see any of it.
The family made their home at No. 2 Fort Wayne Avenue in Kokomo, where Frank balanced his law practice with the writing that was beginning to take hold of him.
“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” —Maya Angelou
Frank began publishing fiction in the leading Eastern magazines under his own name and sometimes under the pen name Frank Neilson. His stories were mostly tales of Western life—vivid, funny, full of people you felt you had met somewhere. The Kokomo newspapers took notice, and what they wrote about him tells you something about the kind of writer he was and the kind of man.
The Kokomo Morning News observed that Frank was “one of those careful, sympathetic observers who sees the best and the truest side, as well as the more humorous. He gets all that there is in a situation, and he knows how to write about it in a way that attracts the people.” They added that he was as good a storyteller in person as he was on paper—“the listener frequently misses other things while he listens to what Stratton says.”
In 1903, his story The Governor’s Visitor won fourth prize in a national short-story contest judged by three well-known authors, with several hundred manuscripts submitted. It was no small thing for a self-taught lawyer from Kokomo to be competing at that level, and the local papers made sure everyone knew it.
His stories were not just popular—they were good enough to outlast him. Nearly a century after his death, the scholar Robert Ohmann cited two of Frank’s stories, The Call of the Quail and The Sheriff’s Dream, in his academic work Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets, and Class at the Turn of the Century (1996), as fiction that “fed and flattered the cultural change and upheaval arising out of the magazine revolution at the turn of the century.” That a professor at the end of the twentieth century would single out the work of a self-educated Indiana attorney from a hundred years earlier says something about the quality of what Frank put on the page.
“No man is an island, entire of itself.” —John Donne
Frank was deeply woven into Kokomo’s social fabric. He held membership in the Improved Order of Red Men, the Odd Fellows, the Woodmen, the Pathfinders, and the Ben Hur lodge—an array of fraternal affiliations that reflected both his sociability and his standing in the community. He was, as the papers put it, “very popular among all classes in his own city.”
That cross-class popularity was genuine. Frank had worked sawmills and farms before he ever cracked a law book. He could talk to anyone because he had been just about everyone—laborer, student, attorney, writer. He never forgot where he started, and the people who knew him never let him pretend otherwise.
“The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living.” —Cicero
Frank Nelson Stratton died on February 15, 1905. He was forty-four years old.
At his funeral, the fraternal lodges turned out in force. More than eight hundred men walked in the procession—an extraordinary number for a small-city funeral and a measure of how many lives Frank had touched. Here was a man who had risen from a sawmill to the front rank of the bar, who had published stories in the best magazines in the country, and who had done it all without ever losing his connection to the people around him.
I never knew him—he died thirty-three years before I was born. But I have read his stories, and I have read what the newspapers said about him, and I have spent years trying to piece together who he was. What I have found is a man who taught himself everything that mattered to him, who wrote with humor and humanity, and who left behind a body of work that people are still reading more than a century later. The stories in the anthology on this site are his own words, recovered from the magazines that first published them. The original scanned pages are there too, for anyone who wants to see them as they first appeared.
He fought his way from the sawmill to the front rank. Not many people can say that.
Frank Nelson Stratton (1860–1905) was the son of Francis Joel Stratton and Hester A. Donnellan. He married first Sarah C. Dunn, with whom he had a son, Percy; and second Otilie Schellschmidt (Shellsmith) on March 8, 1888, in Marion, Grant County, Indiana. A self-taught attorney and published fiction writer, he practiced law and contributed stories to leading Eastern magazines under his own name and the pen name Frank Neilson. He and Otilie had three sons: Frank Arthur, Frederick, and Ferdinand. He is buried in Kokomo, Howard County, Indiana. He was the great-grandfather of the author.
—Wm. F. Stratton, April 2026