I think that my great-grandmother Viola Adams Gallimore Brown Forman must have been a very interesting and independent woman. My mom talked about her occasionally and had hinted that she was mean, strong-minded, and manipulative.
Viola married her third husband Lou Forman in November of 1908 and the article below is from the Missoulian in March of 1909. I don’t know if she drugged him with “doped booze”, but I do know that she had divorced her first husband William Gallimore on May 25, 1900, in Indiana (they were married in May of 1896). After her divorce, she moved with her two children Albert (she changed his name to Leslie) and Leona to Chinook Montana where her brother Willis and sister Eva Underwood were living. She married her second husband Lisle Brown in Chinook in November of 1901, had her third child Lisle Brown Jr two months later in January of 1902. Lisle Sr died of appendicitis in April of 1903. Mom always said that he died in the wagon on the way to the hospital, but in his obituary, it states that he died in the hospital in Great Falls.
Sometime between 1903 and 1908 she moved to Butte with her surviving children Leona and Lisle (Albert/Leslie’s grave is in Chinook, next to Lisle Sr). In November of 1908, she married Lou Forman, a widower, his wife Nellie had passed away in April of 1908.
Viola and Lou had a tempestuous marriage, sometimes living together, sometimes not, but more on that later. In the end, they “Kissed and made up”, at least for a short time! Here are several articles from the Butte papers covering the incident.
Here are some additional articles that I collected.