Olive Louise Buttles was born around June 1853 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to Anson and Cornelia Buttles. Her father was a farmer who owned $200 of personal property by 1860. She grew up and attended school in Milwaukee, and she married Charles Potter on October 15, 1878. They had at least two children: Edith, born around 1879; and Eugenia, born around 1883. They lived in Milwaukee, and her husband worked as a merchant. He died in the late 1800s, and she moved into her sister’s household in Fresno County, California, in the 1910s. A local writer praised her “sterling character, beautiful disposition and kind words,” adding that she was “unselfish to the extreme, and her thoughts were for the welfare of others rather than herself.” She died in Simi Valley, California, on December 12, 1922.

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