Morrell descendant meets restored family homes’ new owners

Lifelong residents can learn new things about their city and their home from total strangers.

A first-time visitor can meet people who care about the residential legacy of a grandfather they remember only dimly.

If the stars align, lifelong resident and first-time visitor can have a perhaps-once-in-a-lifetime encounter. They will leave that meeting with new knowledge, new friendships and history that will contribute to an understanding of another time and another place.

Those stars aligned for Kaylee Koch of Sioux Falls and Mike Foster of Pittsburg, California, last week. Since 2018, Koch has lived in a house on West 19th Street. A bronze plaque on a brick gatepost proclaims it once was home to John Morrell Foster. Yes, that John Morrell. His family owned the meatpacking plant that helped give Sioux Falls an early reputation as a thriving community.

Mike Foster is John Morrell Foster’s grandson. Recently retired, Foster and his son, Morgan, of Walnut Creek, California, traveled to Sioux Falls to visit as many of the homes where his grandfather lived as possible.

That quest took him to the two-story home Kaylee and John Koch share with their three children on 19th Street. It took him inside the stately Penmarch Place and also a house J.M. Foster had built on South Main Avenue. And he stood outside the home on Spruceleigh Lane, which his grandfather also had built before he returned to Ottumwa, Iowa.

Seeing the houses that sheltered his grandfather, his grandfather’s first and second wives and — briefly — his own father and his aunt Linda Foster Arnold Adams left Foster feeling as if gaps in his life had been completed.

“I have filled in huge missing links in my life that I’ll now be able to pass along to my siblings, children and grandchildren,” he said. “It’s a blessing. There were things my father was unwilling to talk about that part of his life and his father’s life.”

For Koch, who has extensively researched her 1912 home, talking with Foster helped add color to those ancient newspaper articles reporting on parties with 300 guests and live music played in the lower-level ballroom.

She knew already that J.M. Foster had lived in her home for only a short time. His older half-brother William H.T. Foster, who also managed the family’s meatpacking plant, lived there longer, but apparently nice guys don’t get as much credit for the work they do. An early and fervent supporter of the YMCA in Sioux Falls, W.H.T. Foster insisted family members match his $250,000 Christmastime contribution each year. He also hosted parties for administrators, staff and students at what then was known as Sioux Falls College.

J.M. Foster created his own reputation. He and his first wife, Iva, went through a contentious divorce and then battled over their son, James Whitney Foster, in a custody case that began in California courts and ended up before the U.S. Supreme Court. In the years between his divorce from Iva in about 1933 and his marriage to Wilma Koenig on May 2, 1936, he developed a reputation as a ladies’ man, his grandson said.

“My Aunt Linda said when my grandfather was first divorced, well before she was adopted, he would talk about how much fun he and a cousin had and the parties he had,” Foster said.

J.M. Foster made a more lasting impact on the houses he lived in and renovated and commissioned and the meatpacking plant that bore his family’s name and still produces products under the John Morrell & Co. label. John Morrell and Co. was founded in Bradford, England, in 1827 and established in the United States in 1864. The company opened a leased plant in Sioux Falls in 1909, building a facility in 1911.

For many years it was South Dakota’s largest employer.

Foster father and son visited the Smithfield plant, as it now is known, on Friday, viewing a mural that shows the company history from founding to present day. On the wall is a photo of workers from about 100 years ago, with J.M. Foster wearing a full-length fur overcoat.

Smithfield general manager Mark Wiggs and executive administrator Pamela Brinkman met with the Fosters.

“He knew my family; he had worked in the Estherville, Iowa, plant,” Foster said of Wiggs. “He knew so much about company history; his father is in the meatpacking business too.”

Foster’s father had worked at the Estherville plant in his tenure with the family business that took him to places as far flung as Chicago and the San Francisco Bay area. James Whitney Foster, who went by Whitney, had earned a law degree from the University of Iowa. After serving in management with John Morrell, Whitney left the company in 1964. He died in 2012. Foster’s grandfather, known as “Morrell” or “Butch,” died in 1958 in Ottumwa. He had left Sioux Falls in 1944.

Foster has only one memory of his grandfather, and it involves a battle over peas. J.M Foster insisted his grandson eat all the peas he had been served at Thanksgiving dinner if he wanted dessert. The 4-year-old, who loathed the vegetable, refused. His grandfather threatened to have Margie, the maid, save the plate and serve it to him for breakfast the next day. The dispute ended when he marched out of his grandfather’s home and a couple of blocks away to his maternal grandmother’s home. She sided with him in the war of the peas and allowed him to spend the night.

Being inside and outside the houses where his grandfather had lived with his first and second wives brought family history to life for Foster. His father was educated at Lawrenceville Academy in New Jersey and spent little time with his father and stepmother. J.M. Foster founded an airline in Sioux Falls and did much of his own flying in a corporate airplane. His career soared during his time here from 1920 to 1944 but floundered a bit when he returned to Ottumwa. In Ottumwa, he became corporate president. He no longer was in that role at the time of his death but still served on the company board.

In Koch’s research, while she has found few of the interior photos she so desperately wants, she has learned much about her home’s history. Koch also has reached out to a person familiar with it. After it served as an early event center, or tea house as it then was known, it became home to a Morrell plant manager, Herman Veenker. His grandson Stephen has shared his knowledge with Koch.

The history of the Foster houses weaves family stories and reflects the growth of Sioux Falls. J.M. Foster left the Main Avenue house to satisfy his wife Iva’s desire for a grander country mansion that became Penmarch Place. He swapped Penmarch Place for his brother William’s house on 19th Street after the divorce, remaining there only briefly before building the house on Spruceleigh. A 1933 newspaper article records the brothers’ exchange of residences.

That same newspaper article also indicates W.H.T. Foster had postponed plans to build in the flourishing — and desirable — Riverview Heights neighborhood near 18th Street and Kiwanis Avenue.

Dr. Arleigh Trainor now lives in the house on Main Avenue. She opened her house to the Fosters, and they also toured Penmarch Place.

“She is so passionate and enthusiastic about her home and trying to restore it to what it might have looked like when it was first built,” Foster said of Trainor. “That sticks with me. It’s an incredible home, and she’s put in so much work trying to restore it.”

Penmarch, now on the National Register of Historic Places, once occupied 10 acres. According to its nomination form, the vestibule had an imported Italian tile floor with marble trim, the double-banister staircase had a mahogany handrail, and the living room’s crystal chandelier was imported from Ireland.

“This is my immediate family’s direct history,” Foster said.

Should he return to Sioux Falls — OK, when he returns as he has s offered to help arrange the Morrell archives at Smithfield — Foster can find others willing to assist in tracking down family business and residence history. He already has worked with Adam Nyhaug of the Siouxland Heritage Museums. Sioux Falls native Chris Carlsen also offered to assist. Carlsen lived at Penmarch Place from 1985 to 2003. To date, he is the second-longest owner of the house, which underwent kitchen renovations by the late architect Harold Spitznagel in 1956. Spitznagel also designed the Spruceleigh Lane house and J.M. Foster’s final home in Ottumwa. The two resemble each other, Foster said.

The person who has owned Penmarch Place the longest? John Foster. Yes, Foster, a son of W.H.T. Foster and nephew of J.M. Foster. That puts ownership by one member or another of the Foster family for a half-century: J.M. from 1926 to 1932, W.H.T. from 1932 to 1949 and John from 1949 to 1975.

Foster’s father was the last in his immediate family to play a role in the meatpacking industry. Foster himself worked for the U.S. Forest Service until 1981 when he accepted a role in his first wife’s father’s business selling valves and valve actuators. He later founded his own company, Foster Flow Control, which operated in northern and central California and western Nevada primarily. He operated it for 18 years before retirement.

Now, he has time to focus on the past and its impact on the present.

There are tragedies to research. W.H.T. Foster was the father of three children. One of his two sons drowned on Lake Okoboji, Iowa, near Spirit Lake while rescuing his wife of one year. Foster has seen news accounts of his grandmother Iva’s death. She died of carbon monoxide poisoning in her car after turning the radio to listen to her favorite songs as she passed. Despite a $330,000 divorce settlement — equivalent to $7.4 million today — she was destitute.

But, as in any family, there are good memories to find and share with Foster’s four children, J.M. Foster’s great-grandchildren. And their children. And his siblings.

“I hope they enjoy hearing the history of John Morrell Foster and his two wives,” he said. “And how beautiful Sioux Falls is. It’s one of the most beautiful cities I’ve ever visited, and I’ve been all over the United States and Canada.”