2026 - 36 They Called Him "Daddy Page"

 

Charles Page, Founder of the Sand Springs Home and Colony for Widows

52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks

Week 36 of 2026

Prompt: More Than a Name

For my mother's first Christmas, she received a doll from a man her parents called “Daddy Page.”

The doll Charles and Lucille Page gave my mother, Margaret Nolen, for her first Christmas in 1926. Charles Page died the following day, December 26.
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Charles Page had promised his widowed mother that when he made his fortune, he would care for widows and children. He kept that promise.

Charles Page, known to the children of the Sand Springs Home as "Daddy Page". 
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Page made his fortune in the Oklahoma oil fields near Tulsa. When he acquired 160 acres several miles west of Tulsa, land blessed with abundant springs of water, he set out to create a place where widows with dependent children could have a home and where orphaned children could be cared for.

He selected B. F. Breeding, a young Salvation Army captain, to serve as superintendent of the Sand Springs Home and its Colony for Widows.

In July 1908, Captain Breeding moved his own family to the site. The following month, he brought the first mother and her children to live there, sheltering them in a tent until the first cottage could be built.

That mother was my great-grandmother, Mattie McCorkle Nolen Jones. Her children were Robert Luther and my grandfather, Leonard Nolen.

Mattie would live there only a few months. She died of tuberculosis on December 27, 1908, leaving Robert Luther and Leonard in the care of the new Sand Springs Home.

There is a complication to Mattie's story. She was not actually a widow. She had left her husband, P. J. Nolen, in Batesville, Arkansas, and married William F. Jones on May 2, 1907, in Eureka Springs, Arkansas. Mr. Jones was hospitalized when Captain Breeding brought Mattie and the boys west to the place that would become Sand Springs.

Whatever the circumstances that brought them there, Robert Luther and Leonard became two of the children Charles Page had promised to care for.

Leonard grew up at the Sand Springs Home, where several men would have a lasting influence on his life. B. F. Breeding, the Home's superintendent, and Ed Galloway, his manual arts instructor, were important father figures. But it was Charles Page who seems to have guided some of the most important decisions Leonard made about his future.

When Leonard wanted to become a railroad man, Page told him he must first finish school. When the United States entered World War I and Leonard wanted to enlist, Page advised him that he was needed more on the railroad. And it was Page who gave Leonard his first railroad job—as a water boy for the Sand Springs Railway.

That water boy made the railway his life's work.

The Sand Springs Railway had begun as an interurban passenger line connecting Sand Springs with Tulsa. Leonard remained with the Railway throughout his career, eventually becoming Superintendent of Maintenance of Way. He retired on March 1, 1957.

The Sand Springs Railway still operates today, although it now carries freight rather than passengers. I remember those familiar green-and-gold cars from my own childhood—and they are still green and gold today.

Page's influence on Leonard went far beyond providing him with a place to live. He helped point a young boy toward the life he would build for himself.

And Leonard was only one of the children whose lives Charles Page touched.

Page did not simply build a home for widows and children. Around the Home and the Colony for Widows grew a remarkably self-sufficient community. Sand Springs eventually included oil refineries, a steel plant and a cotton mill. The Home had its own cattle and dairy farm, orchards, wood and metal shops, hospital, greenhouse and garage. Sand Springs Lake became known throughout the region as a place to swim, boat, picnic, enjoy rides, visit a zoo and listen to music. Page also built the Shell Creek Dam and reservoir to provide a dependable water supply.

But to the children, all of those accomplishments mattered less than the man himself.

Opal Bennefield Clark told the story in A Fool's Enterprise of the day the children decided what they would call him. One little girl caught Page by the sleeve and asked if they really belonged to him.

“Are we really yours?”

“You sure are. You can ask Cap, here,” Page replied.

Then another child asked the question that would give Charles Page the name by which generations of Sand Springs Home children would know him.

“Are you our daddy now?”

Page thought for a moment.

“Well, you belong to me and I belong to you, so I suppose you could say that I am.”

The children erupted in delight.

“Daddy Page, Daddy Page.”

Even Captain Breeding's children joined the crowd. Breeding later recalled the mixture of embarrassment and joy he saw in Page's eyes.

“No father could be prouder of his children,” Breeding said. “I've never seen him so happy.”

And “Daddy Page” he became.

My grandfather Leonard was one of those children. Charles Page was not merely the name of the wealthy oilman who founded the institution where Leonard lived. He was the man who had taken responsibility for him as a boy, encouraged him to finish school, helped guide his decisions and gave him the start in a career that would last nearly half a century.

Perhaps nothing illustrates the affection Leonard and his future wife, Elizabeth Moore, felt for the people who had helped shape their lives at the Sand Springs Home better than the names they chose.

Neither Leonard nor Elizabeth had been given a middle name. Yet on their marriage license they became Leonard Page Nolen and Elizabeth Lindsay Moore.

Leonard had borrowed the name of Charles Page. Elizabeth had borrowed hers in honor of Margaret Lindsay, a matron at the Sand Springs Home.

The names were not theirs by birth. They were names they chose for themselves—and names that honored two of the people who had helped shape their lives.

But Margaret Lindsay's name did not remain only on a marriage license.

Years later, when Leonard and Elizabeth welcomed their youngest daughter, they named her Margaret.

And that brings me back to the doll.

For Margaret's first Christmas, she received a doll from the man her parents called “Daddy Page.”

In 2001, seventy-five years later, Mom gave the doll to me for Christmas along with this note. She mistakenly remembered Lucille Page's name as Mary.
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