Archives West Finding Aid

Below was prepared by Ann Fourt, daughter of John E. Fourt and Dorothy Perkins Fourt.

The Fourt family is of French Huguenot ancestry, believed to have been from La Rochelle, France. The immigrant ancestors, Bartholomew Feurt, arrived in New York City in the late 1600s. The Fourt family migrated from New York City to Somerset County, New Jersey before the Revolutionary War, to Maryland in the 1780s, to Kentucy in the 1790s, and then to Missouri by the early 1800s.

D.L. Fourt was born 20 May 1895 in Houston, Texas County, Missouri and lived there through high school. After serving in the U.S. Army during WWI, he received bachelor's and master's degrees in agriculutre from the University of Idaho in Moscow in 1923. After graduation, he served as a county agent of Teton County for two years before teaching at the university. In 1946, he was named professor of dairy husbandry at the University of Idaho and served as head of the dairy science department from 1947 to 1960 when he retired. He died suddenly of a heart attack on 3 September 1961, age 66. He married Ellen O'Donnell in 1923.

Ellen O'Donnell was born 26 August 1892 in Independence, Oregon. Her mother was Nancy Ellen Butler a member of an early Oregon pioneer family. Ellen was briefly married to Frank McCready, who died of the Spanish Flue after less than a year of marriage. Whe was a postmaster before marrying D.L. Fourt, having beat out over 100 men for the job. Through Mary (Lord) Ingalls she is a Mayflower descendant from Francis Cooke. Her father John Franklin O'Donnell (born Stillwater, Minnesota in 1863) owned a number of hardware stores in Portland, Oregon. Her grandfather Michael R. O'Donnell, born 1833, was an Irish famine immigrant who came to the state of Maine as a teenager (probably via Canada). Through her paternal grandmother, Elizabeth Malloy, Ellen was related to several second cousins of Bing Crosby. An avid geneologist, Ellen was Idaho State Regent of the Daughters of the American Revolution.

Ellen and D.L. had one child, son John Edward Fourt, born in April of 1924. After graduating from Moscow High School, he enlisted in the Army and attended the university until 1944 under a deferral program. He served with the Third Army tank corps under General Patton and fought at the Battle of the Bulge in the Ardennes Forest in Belgium, and then participated in the occupation of Germany and Austria. Returning to the U.S., he attended law school at University of California Berkley on the G.I. Bill and pursued a career with the California Department of Justice as a deputy attorney general until his retirement in 1978. He died of a sudden heart attack in 1995 while on a trip in Bangor, Maine.

Dorothy (Perkins) Fourt was orphaned at an early age and raised by a maternal aunt in California, Alice Lewis Pearson. After graduating from the University of California Berkley, she married John Fourt. The marriage ended in divorce in 1968; she was killed in California n an automobile accident in 1972.

John and Dorothy Fourt had six children, three of whom had severe developmental disabilities and were institutionalized at an early age. Collection contains divorce agreement of John and Dorothy Fourt and commitment papers for the three developmentally disabled children.