Nancy Ella Brown

Nancy Ella Brown was born to Joseph Thomas and Lena Virginia Gamble Place, August 24, 1922 at Fort Place, Fabens, Texas. She was the youngest of 5 children: William Atherton, Eaton Lee, (deceased at 1 and a half years old), George Boyd Gamble and Joseph Davis.

When Nancy was 3 years old the family moved to a farm in Garfield, New Mexico. This is where she got her first Shetland pony called Peanuts; starting her love of horses. Again the family moved to another farm in Solomonville, Arizona. She started school there in 1929 until 1932. Because of the stock market crash the family moved again in the dead of winter to Garland Prairie, Arizona. Later they moved to Williams, Arizona so Nancy could go to high school. She didn’t finish her senior year of high school as she could look out the window to the shipping corrals and would rather be out riding her horse, so she quit.

When Nancy was 12 she started trading books with an old Spaniard sheepherder. She didn’t know at 17 those books would lead her to a tall, handsome, blue-eyed cowboy in the White Mountains of Arizona. His name was Henry Clyde Brown. After agreeing that neither one of them liked black-eyed peas nor parsnips they decided they could get married. They were married in St. Johns, Arizona on December 30, 1940. On June 1, 1942 they had a daughter, Nancy Arlena and on July 12, 1945, Ernest Clyde was born.

Nancy always had at least one horse in her life, but did do other things, like farming while Clyde worked at a mine. She worked at a drugstore as a “soda jerk” and at a grocery store to help put their kids through school. Nancy was a rock hound, making jewelry to sell, learned to tool leather and in later years was a self-taught saddle and sidesaddle maker. She owned 2 riding stables in Sedona, Arizona and formed a 4-H club there. She began training show horses and taught some of her 4-H kids to show. Her most prized students were her grandsons.

In 1989 Clyde and Nancy bought acreage in Apache Creek, New Mexico. In their 70’s they built their dream home. At that age she was still riding her horse, helping Skip Price work cattle on his ranch. She also rode and ATV. There was no poking along; you had to ride hard to stay in her dust! During that time she got a computer, mostly self-taught on that, she wrote several books on the Place and Brown families, but to our sorrow, she never got around to writing one on their life together. It would have been a fun book to read.

Nancy loved her children, grandchildren and great grandchildren and would have loved her great great grandchildren if she had been able to have met them. All of the grandchildren are deeply saddened to not be here with their grandmother and the family, but with virus conditions, could not be.

A Graveside Service will be held Saturday, May 9, 2020 at 10:00 a.m. (NM time) at the Apache Creek Cemetery.

A Celebration of Life will be held for her, Saturday, May 23, 2020, Memorial Day weekend.