Volney Marx Douglas

  


Grace Mary, Ann Olive, Volney Marx, ca. 1912

b. July 3, 1908 Sonoita, Arizona
d. March 13, 1977 Tempe, Arizona

 Volney was the second of four children and oldest son born to Irvin and Maude 'Daisy' Jacobs Douglas on the ranch they had homesteaded in Sonoita; his siblings were Grace Mary, Ann Olive, and Irvin 'Dick' Jr. About 1918, the family moved to the Searchlight mining camp in Clark County Nevada where his father had found a job. In Nevada, in January, 1919, Maude was killed at home and Queho, a Native American was suspected; he was accused of but never convicted for a number of killings. Soon after that Volney and his father moved back to their Sonoita homestead. The other children followed a few years later, initially going to Yuma to live with their mother's sister, Grace Ramona Jacobs until they all moved to the Elgin area.

  While attending high school in Ventura County, California, he worked for two years on an uncle's farm, caring for cattle and working with hay, fruit, and nut crops. When later at Patagonia High School he had a keen interest in agriculture and played violin in the school orchestra. When he was 16 in 1924 the family believes he bought the homestead property of Henry Belue to raise cattle, which today is the seven-acre Douglas orchard developed by his son, Mark, on Lower Elgin Road. It has over 1,000 trees representing at least 300 varieties of apples.

  According to his own account, on the day he graduated from Patagonia High in 1928, the Forest Service hired him to handle six pack mules. He attended the University of Arizona's College of Agriculture and graduated in 1932; soon after that he attended the University of Chicago for one semester, and in the spring of 1933, began working as Assistant Director for the UA Santa Rita Experiment Station. By 1935 he was working as the Canelo ranger in the Coronado National Forest.

 In 1936 Volney married Blanche Audrey Lawson; in 1937, they moved to New Mexico where Volney was appointed as Chief of Range Surveys for the state of New Mexico by the U.S. Soil Conservation Service. By 1942, he had become a Range Examiner P-4 and Zone Technician for the Soil Conservation Service handling conservation planning and economic assessments in coordination with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers across more than a million acres in Texas. During this time Volney also attended graduate school at the University of Chicago and the California Institute of Technology

 By 1947 he and Blanche were living in the Phoenix area where he was employed by the State of Arizona teaching farming to veterans who had returned from WWII. He also appraised land for the Federal Land Bank.

 Volney and Blanche had five living children: Michael Leon, Mark, Jan Karen, and two others born between 1938 and 1953.

Written and edited by Corbin Smith from an article by Alison Bunting in the Patagonia Regional Times, 1/4/2024, and from information and photographs shared by Volney Douglas, Volney Marx Douglas' grandson.

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SCS 10/4/26