Eesley · Wildermuth
Alice Gertrude (Anderson) McMaster

Alice Gertrude (Anderson) McMaster

also known as Alice Anderson, maiden

b. 1871-07-09
d. 1961

Alice Gertrude Anderson was born 9 July 1871 in Pennsylvania to Reverend Abraham Ramsey Anderson the Presbyterian minister and Nancy Jane Shaw Anderson, two years and three months after her older sister Margaret Florence Anderson — the namesake whose given name would pass forward to Alice’s own daughter Peggy. She married Robert Thompson McMaster in 1902 and was the mother of Donald Anderson “Don” McMaster (1903–1967) and Margaret Jane “Peggy” McMaster Eesley (1914–2007) — Chuck’s grandmother.

Robert died in 1919, age 53; Peggy was only five years old. Alice was forty-eight, with twenty-six more years of teaching school still to come and two children to finish raising on her own.

Alice Anderson as a young woman — cabinet card by the Eyer studio of McDonald, Pennsylvania, late 1880s / early 1890s. Profile portrait in an oval mount, her hair swept up, a lace collar at the throat.

The schoolteacher

Alice ran the Clifton School in Pennsylvania. The deck preserves a 1928 class photograph of her with her students. A second photograph, undated, shows her alone in her schoolroom. Her granddaughter Maggie Eesley’s Four Generations archive catalogues both, plus a young-woman cabinet card by the Eyer studio of McDonald, Pennsylvania (late 1880s / early 1890s), plus a 1910–12 frame of her on a porch with her young son Don.

Alice Anderson McMaster on a porch step with her young son Donald A. McMaster, c. 1910–12, Pennsylvania. Alice wears a large feathered hat — the deck notes it is trimmed with a whole bird — and Don, in a wool coat and cap, sits solemnly beside her.

Alice Anderson McMaster with her students at the Clifton School, 1928 — a glossy black-and-white class photograph. Alice stands in the doorway at the back; some three dozen children are ranged on the school steps in front of the brick building.

She died in 1961, age 90 — thirteen years before her son Don and forty-six years before her daughter Peggy. The Clifton School where she had taught for decades is the institutional trace of her in the world Maggie’s deck preserves.

Alice Anderson McMaster in her schoolroom, undated — posed in front of the blackboard where she taught, her hair gone white, looking down. One of the quieter frames in the deck.

The last six years — living with the Eesleys

Charlie Eesley’s 12th-grade autobiography (c. 1964–1965) records that “Grandmother died two years ago at the age of ninety. She had lived with us for about six years.” The arithmetic places Alice moving into the Eesley household around 1955 — when Peggy and Will’s eldest daughter Jeanne was about ten and Charlie was about eight — and living with the family at their Marietta house through her death in 1961. The household Charlie grew up in had his great-grandparents’ generation present at the dinner table for most of his childhood. The dry-humor-from-Grandma-McMaster line that the eulogy traces from Alice through Peggy through Charlie was a living transmission, not a memory.

Photographs in the archive

  • Alice Anderson as a young woman (Eyer, McDonald PA, late 1880s / early 1890s) — cabinet card, 2⅞” by 4”, in a 5” by 7” frame.
  • Alice on the porch with son Donald A. McMaster (~1910–12, Pennsylvania) — 4” by 3”, faded and yellowed.
  • Alice with her Clifton School students (1928) — class photograph.
  • Alice in her schoolroom — undated.

All four are shown above, reproduced from Maggie’s deck; each carries the full archival catalogue (title, medium, measurements) in the deck itself.

She is Chuck’s great-grandmother through Peggy → Charles McMaster Eesley → Chuck.

Sources: Maggie Eesley, Four Generations of the Eesley Family (PowerPoint archive); deck IDs AAM001 en, AAM_DAM001 en, plus the Clifton School and schoolroom frames.

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