The Days of ’76 was going on in Deadwood last week, and so was the Wong family reunion. These are the descendants of Fee Lee Wong, who was the best known resident of Deadwood’s Chinatown in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Fee Lee was a comparatively wealthy guy, and was pretty popular around town. He had several children, and their family portrait has become the symbol of Deadwood’s only sizable cultural neighborhood. You can see the photo all over town – even in the Pizza Hut.
I met Edith Wong, one of Fee Lee’s great-granddaughters, several years ago. It was just after the demolition of Fee Lee’s emporium building, the last real architectural remnant of Deadwood’s Chinatown. Edith had assembled some incredible details of her family’s history. Besides being a talented researcher and brilliant organizer, she’s incredibly warm and friendly. Her mother, Beatrice, is just as fun – and she’s got a few more decades of stories to tell.
And as it turns out, one of those stories involves our house. Shortly after marrying into the Wong family, Beatrice had almost immediate connections to Deadwood. A lot of people who grew up in Deadwood ended up moving to California, including her new father-in-law, Som Quong (one of Fee Lee’s children). That’s where Beatrice married her husband, Kam Leung Wong. I’m a little hazy on the details, but somehow Beatrice ended up meeting other descendants of Deadwood pioneers in California. One of them, Juanita Lucas, was a good friend of her father-in-law when he was at Deadwood High School in the early 1910s.
In 1954, Beatrice made a trip to Deadwood. One of the people they visited was a friend of Juanita’s, a woman named Ethel Mattley (or Mattly, or Matly, or any number of other variations). And in 1954, Ethel lived in our house.
Beatrice Wong told us about our house's history when she was in town last week.
We gave Beatrice and Edith a tour of our house last Monday. It was pretty brief, and Beatrice didn’t seem to find anything too familiar. Then again, it’s been 56 years since she’d been there. I usually can’t remember breakfast.
But we have a lot more information about our house now: we know that H.B. Wardman built the house and lived here through the 1920s, and now we know that someone named Ethel Mattley lived here in the 1950s. That’ll be really helpful for us in re-creating the chain of ownership of the house.
Thanks, Edith and Beatrice!
Unexpected Victorian 