Chapter 20: First Families

First Families Chapter Twenty when Calvin Gunter of Van Buren County, Iowa, arrived in the spring of 1871.

Calvin had married his boyhood sweetheart, Ruth Teague, whose picture he had carried with him through Mrs. Kenneth Well in memory of her parents, Mr. and Mrs. R. A. Ballagh, who had been most responsible for the construction of the church building at its original location.

After the Rev. Pearson left to pastor another church, Rev. Everett Tatman of Wyoming came to the O’Neill church in June of 1973.

The late James Deming, who grew up in Holt County and left a good many pungent comments on affairs as he saw them, had the following to say about religious matters. “William Berry joined the church and I am sure he was a true Christian— not only because of the way he treated other folks but because he never told father about the mean tricks one of my brothers and I used to play on him. If father had known about those we would not have lived long enough to grow up and repent of our evil ways. “Berry had a very strong voice and on many occasions when the church was holding a prayer meeting on a quiet evening, half a mile away in our schoolhouse, I have been out in our yard and heard Mr. Berry praying for Mr. Deming and his wicked boys. “The Free Methodists sent some missionaries to convert people out here in the west. While some of those converted proved to be good, true Christians, it seemed that the majority were not so good. They did a lot of shouting and hand-clapping and sometimes got to jumping over the seats, hugging each other and almost making nervous wrecks out of the more nervous converts. The bad boys used to go to these meetings just to see the excitement.

“A man named Barney stole one of father’s horses. Hanging had gone out of style, so the man was sent to prison. When he got out he became a preacher in the Free Methodist Church. He got along quite well for awhile, then seemingly went back to his old habits. A camp meeting was held near Butte. The collection plate held an extra good offering, about $65, and temptation apparently got the best of Brother Barney, as he and the collection both disappeared the same night. These Deming reminiscences are taken from Mrs. Merrill Anderson’s Pilgrimage to the Prairie. most of the Civil War, in 1866. Three children were born to them before they moved to Nebraska, where their next son, James, would have been the first white child born in the county had not Guy Davidson, son of Anna 170 Elfreda Ewing and Isaac Davidson, beaten him by a few hours.

The Gunters came by ox team and lived on wild game and corn meal for awhile. Mr. Gunter was ever a friend to the Indians, sharing with them when he could. Once, when a hungry Indian came to his door, he gave him their last ham, which distressed Mrs. Gunter. Two days later the same Indian returned to give them a whole deer.

The Gunter home burned to the ground in 1900 and was rebuilt in 1901. In April, 1916, Mr. and Mrs. Gunter had the pleasure of eating their Golden Wedding anniversary dinner in that home with their eleven living children. Mrs. Gunter was a strict Methodist and would not permit card playing in the home. Instead the family gathered around the organ to play and sing, with Dewitt accompanying them on his violin and James on his Jews harp.

Mrs. Gunter died in October, 1916, following the amputation of a foot because of blood poisoning. Mr. Gunter followed her in death two years later, after which James and his family moved into the old home, which is still standing.

As a boy of twelve James herded cattle and sheep on the lonely prairie for a neighbor. To amuse himself he pulled and piled some big tumbleweeds. When the wind came up and sent them rolling across the pasture the owner of the sheep thought they were coyotes attacking the flock and advised the boy not to do it again. James was paid twenty-five cents a month for herding, and spent his first wages to have a picture of himself taken to send “back east” to his grandmother.

When the railroad was building through, James and his friend, Newt Trommerhausser, often watched the 1 men at work. When the first train pulled into Ewing in 1881 the two lads were on their ponies, watching beside a whistling post— and when the engineer blew his whistle the ponies promptly “slipped their packs,” James Gunter and Elsie Hoke, married in February, 1900, were the parents of thirteen children.

The next year (1872) young Charles La Forest Bridge came to Ford. Born in Clinton, Massachusetts in 1853, his was a restless nature. Filled with the urge to “go West,” he left his home state by stagecoach. He had traveled by ox team and on horseback by the time he reached Missouri on foot. Still on foot, he finally reached Holt County and homesteaded near the James Ewing place. Another neighbor family there was Dr. Wentworth, his wife and their adopted daughter, born Maha la Chafin, all from Missouri. Charles and Mahala were married in 1873 in the Ewing log house. Their ten children went to the little French-town Township school. Charles and Mahala are buried in the Clearwater Cemetery, only a few miles from the homestead on which Charles lived the last sixty years of his life.

A pair of fighting Irishmen, Patrick and Martin Grady, came to America in 1837, sailing from Queenstown, Ireland, in steerage at $30 each. Steerage passengers had to provide their own food, which the Gradys did— a large quantity of flour and potatoes— but their ship was becalmed on the way and many ran County supervisors inspecting new steel bridge across the Elkhorn north of Ewing which replaced the old wooden bridge washed away by one of the floods. This bridge is still standing. Courtesy Marian Van Horn. 171 out of supplies before the three months voyage ended at New Orleans. When the Mexican war broke out in 1846 the brothers joined the Army in St. Louis and Martin was killed in the assault on Mexico City. At the war’s end Patrick returned to the United States and settled at Galena, Illinois. In 1849 he joined the gold rush to California and found enough gold to bring a small amount home with him, sailing around the horn and rejoining his family in Galena. Although midle-aged when the War of the Rebellion broke out, he served with the Union forces, as did his two eldest sons, whom he advised to “beat the draft” by enlisting. The oldest, James, died in an army hospital after the battle of Lookout Mountain and was buried in Georgia.

Patrick and his wife, Roseann (O’Day) Grady, lost four of their eight children in a diphtheria epidemic in Galena in 1867. Seven years later, with their two youngest children, they took a homestead near Ewing where, at last, the restless Patrick was content to settle down. He died in 1891, his wife in 1893.

The Grady’s second son, John, also came to Holt County in 1874, but selected a homestead just northwest of O’Neill, where the airport is now. He then returned to Galena to marry Mary Ann Boyle and bring her back to O’Neill, where they became the parents of ten children. True to the fighting Irish blood of his clan, John’s second son, Henry D., went off to the Spanish American war. Upon his return to Holt County he married Mary Martha Hayes in Atkinson in 1906 and raised six children. He served as Holt County sheriff for eight years, was one of the first Star Route mail carriers out of O’Neill and then served as postmaster of that town.

Another Grady son, Benjamin J., married Elizabeth Donohue, one of the twin daughters of pioneer John Donohue, and operated a grocery store in O’Neill for more than thirty years. Several of the Grady daughters owned and operated a millinery shop in O’Neill for some ten years. The only descendents of the family still living in O’Neill, are George Hammond, a partner in the Biglin Mortuary, and J. Benjamin Grady, vice president of the O’Neill National Bank.

Well over two centuries ago the Swiss brothers, Martin and Jacob Schobe, in 1737 left their homeland for America. On the twenty weeks long ocean voyage, the brothers met Barbara and Elizabeth Heyer, sisters, coming to America with their parents. In the new homeland the Shobe brothers married the Heyer sisters. The eleven generations of the two families that have come into being since then number approximately 6,500 persons.

John Shobe, descendent of one of the brothers, was born in Ross County, Ohio, in 1820. At nineteen he married Evaline Wood. Their first five children were born in Ligonier, Indiana. About 1853 they moved to Franklin County, Iowa, and about 1870 to Neligh, Nebraska, and then to a homestead six miles southwest of Ford. One of their sons, Charles Wood Shobe, had served in the Civil War and afterward married Mary True in Iowa, where six of their ten children were born. In 1882 the Charles Shobes came on to the young settlement, now called Ewing, and took over the John Shobe homestead. A barrel, sunk in a spring on the south fork of the Elkhorn, a quarter mile from the house, was still the only source of household water. For entertainment the settlers often gathered at the Hall home on the north side of the river, for this house had a wooden floor and it was easier to dance there.

Leroy Butler, born in Wellsboro, Pennsylvania in 1847, served in the Union Army until 1865. Two years later he married Mary Kimble and moved to Vinton, Iowa. In 1879, with their four children, they came to Ewing and filed on a homestead two and one-half miles southeast of town. Mr. Butler brought a few cattle with him, and cut grass with a hand scythe to feed them through the first winter. The family of six lived in their covered wagon while they built their little sod house.

The house had the usual roof of branches and sod, but Mrs. Butler had a ceiling in her home— of muslin, stretched tightly to keep dirt from sifting down on everything below. Frequently the family watched snakes crawling on top of their “ceiling.” As in all sod homes, every now and then snakes came through the walls and crawled about inside until discovered. That same year Cicero Mills and his wife Eliza settled on a claim next to the Bulters. Mrs. Butler and Mrs. Mills were sisters. That first year Mrs. Mills taught school in her home and the four Butler children, Bill Davidson and Ann Donaldson were her pupils. The good teacher was soon “Auntie Mills” to the whole community.

As the Fremont, Elkhorn and Missouri Valley railroad crept up the Elkhorn Valley from Norfolk in 1881, Mr. and Mrs. Butler built a small hotel in the edge of Ewing and Mrs. Butler fed the track layers for some months. She charged twenty-five cents for a meal, and the same for a bed for the night. The tracks crossed the Butler homestead and when the first train came through from Neligh the engineer stopped it at the Butler house and gave the family a ride across their farm to the station at the west end of town.

In 1898 Will Butler and his father started a livery stable in Ewing. Their rates were ten cents to tie a horse inside— and fifteen cents for a feed of grain for the animal if the owner didn’t bring his own, which many homesteaders did— and then carefully gathered up the cobs to take home for stove fuel. That same year Will and his family took a trip to the Black Hills in their covered wagon. Their little son Coe was just learning to walk when they started and, after a month on a wagon seat, had to learn all over again by the time they returned home.

George Butler and his family also came to Ewing in 1879. Born in Tioga County, Pennsylvania, in 1855, George had married Rebecca Spencer in Harlan, Iowa, in April 1879, just before leaving by train for Nebraska to look for a homestead. From Wisner, the end of the railroad, he walked to the settlement at the Forks of the Elkhorn and found a quarter to his liking just southeast of the village. That July, with a covered wagon he met his wife at Wisner and brought her back to her new sod home. A year or so later he filed on a timber claim across the river.

After the arrival of the railroad in 1882, Mr. Butler was appointed postmaster of Ewing by President Grover Cleveland. He had founded a newspaper the year before, the Peoples Advocate, and like all pioneer newspaper editors used it to boast of his town to the rest of the country. The Butlers lived to celebrate sixty years of married life, all of it spent in Ewing.

The following families from Berg- stadt, Austria, came to America on the same ship: Mr. and Mrs. Carl Cracher and three daughters; Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Thramer and three children; and Mrs. Rose Thoendel and four sons. They arrived in Columbus in March, 1879, and Mr. Cracher had only fifty cents left in his pocket. Carl worked in Columbus until he could buy a team of oxen, a covered wagon and a few necessities for the trip on west. Mrs. Cracher worked too, taking in pay some dishes, kettles and a few chickens. Before leaving Columbus that fall to file on his Cache Creek homestead, Cracher was advised to take along a barrel of cornmeal. This he did and it proved to be a lifesaver for him and some of his neighbors, for that winter turned out to be a bad one and the roads to Oakdale, the nearest railroad point, impassable for many months. Their 172 first cow hung herself while tied in the sod barn.

Carl broke his first thirty acres of farm land with his oxen and he and his daughter Anna, age twelve, planted it with a spade. It made over thirty bushels to the acre— and the farmer was on his way to becoming a large land owner.

Mr. Cracher is credited with starting the Austrian-German colony of southern Holt County. Due to his persuasion, the Schindlers, Koenigs, Lorenzes, Reinkes and others came to live there. Anna Cracher married Joseph Thoendel and Rosa married Joseph Schindler. Mrs. Cracher died in 1906, Carl in 1910.

Joseph Thramer, his wife and three children, first settled in eastern Nebraska, then came on to Holt County to file on land in Deloit Township. His son, Joseph K. married Antonia Schindler in 1890 and had nine children, raising all nine of them to adulthood. Caroline Thramer married Albert Rothleuter who ran the Ewing mill for awhile. Mary Thramer married and moved out of the area. The Thramers had the first telephone on the “Corn Stalk line,” one of the earliest in the county, and also housed the Tonic post office for awhile. Some of Joseph’s great-grandchildren still live on the original Thramer homestead.

Joseph Thoendal, one of the widow Thoendel’s four sons, lived with his mother and brothers in Columbus for a time, where Mrs. Thoendel worked as a housekeeper to support her young sons. As soon as he was old enough, Joseph went to work on a farm. Later he, too, came to the settlement in Holt County where, in October 1891, he married Anna Cracher.

Anna did not go to school in her new homeland because, while she was still a child, there was none to go to. But she had helped her father buy cattle and knew their value as well as any farmer. She could also figure sums in her head.

After their marriage Joseph and Anna settled on a farm near the Crachers. By 1895 they were buying land from Anna’s father. They raised ten children and lived to celebrate their golden wedding anniversary. Anna was also a Gold Star mother and a member of the American Legion Auxiliary.

The advent of the 1880’s brought a flood tide of settlers to Ewing and vicinity. Unlike the predominantly Irish community of O’Neill, these settlers came from many countries. Among them was Thies Detlef Sievers, born in 1859 in Nubbet, Holstein, Germany. At nine years of age he came to Omaha with his family. There he worked as a delivery boy, delivering groceries from stores to homes. At twenty-one he came to Ewing and filed on a quarter three miles northwest of town. Four years later he married Katie Pegler. Of their eight children one died in infancy and another, Detlef, was killed by lightning. The elder Detlef raised fine horses and cattle and developed his homestead into the well-known Sievers ranch. He also served his county as a commissioner for twelve years. One time, so the children were later told, Jessie James and some of his outfit camped overnight on the ranch with a bunch of horses, and one of the men came to the house to buy food supplies.

A large lake on the ranch became a favorite community recreation spot. People came from all around to hunt, fish, swim and picnic there, and it was common to see many buggies and wagons clustered there, while thirty or forty head of horses grazed on the meadow around the lake, and their owners enjoyed themselves. Sometimes the wind didn’t blow to run his windmill so, around the turn of the century, Sievers rigged up a cage he called the “dog treader.” By This last home on the Sievers’ ranch is still standing. Ranch now owned by Louis Pofahl. Courtesy Marian Van Horn. 173 putting his Newfoundland Grey Hounds in the cage to run on an endless belt, he made the pump lift water from the well.

Walter Sievers remembered “Doc Briggs, who made his calls with a team and buggy. He took care of the Frank Appleby family, about four miles from our place, when they were quarantined for scarlet fever. Mr. Appleby and a son and daughter died of it.” Mrs. Appleby and six other children survived.

The Trussell ranch originated when Samuel Henry Trussell and his wife, Rachel, settled on Section 33, Township 26, Range II, seventeen miles southwest of Ewing in 1882. The parents, their son Walter, aged nine, and daughters Mae and Bertha, came from Ottumwa, Iowa, in a covered wagon. The Trussell place became the home of two post offices, “Little” and “Deloit.” Both had been established two or three years earlier, Deloit farther southeast on Clearwater Creek on A. W. Hunt’s homestead; Little on the claim of L. B. Little, also southeast of the Trussell place.

When Hunt and Little either moved away or gave up the post offices they were relocated at Trussell’s. The mail probably came from Neligh and O’Neill. When Walter Trussell grew up he carried the mail for several years, using an International high-wheeled car. In 1900 Little was moved to the Jerry Wilson place.

Soon after homesteading, Sam Trussell set aside a plot of his land for a cemetery. Although its formal name was “Valley View,” the burial ground is still called the “Trussell Cemetery.” John A. Wood was another who came to Ewing in 1880, settling on a tree claim northeast of town. A descendent of Abner Wood of Bur- slem, Stafford, England, he was born in Cincinnatius, New York in 1844. His son, John Burk Wood, was born in Osceola, Nebraska in 1879. In 1890 John A. moved into town and opened a watch repair and jewelry store. Later he became postmaster of Ewing. John Burk Wood’s son, John A., named for his grandfather, the postmaster, grew up in the little town. “We had a village marshal,” he recalled, “but no major crimes. The main excitement was the fires. The city hall, the Methodist and Presbyterian churches, the brick schoolhouse, the depot, the bank, the Spittier ice house, the big Butler livery stable and several homes all burned down in the course of time.” Young John A. was a Boy Scout. “In those days we had to earn the money to buy our own uniforms,” he said. Numerous families of relatives also came to locate near the Wood’s place: Marshall and Naomi Swain, Mr. and Mrs. Clinton McKay, Mr. and Mrs. Dick Ruby, Mr. and Mrs. James Burnett, Mr. and Mrs. Amos Burnett, the Steven Burnetts, and the assorted children of all. The six families all settled on tree claims.

Lunette (Swain) Snyder, born on the homestead in 1883, ninety years later looked back on those early years when she was growing up amid a bevy of cousins and her uncle John was postmaster, her uncle Clint McKay was putting in the town’s cement sidewalks, her father ran the town dray line and her mother a restaurant.

“We moved into town in 1884,” Lunette said, “We had a good home, plenty of room for eight children, but plain furniture. We had an organ and my brother Mylan a violin. We lived on the main street and after supper, when the work was all done, we gathered ’round the organ. Sister Rosetta played and my sisters and I and our boy friends sang hymns until my mother would say ‘Boys, it’s nine o’clock,’ and they would leave and we’d all go to bed. We didn’t have a car but we had a nice two-seated buggy.

“There were four churches in Ewing. We went to the Methodist, where I sang in the teenage choir at night. We all had good voices. Once we went to a wedding at the Catholic church. The bride was a friend of ours. The service was so long. Finally we thought it was over and went home, but learned later they weren’t married until after we left. My mother served the wedding dinner and the Detlef Sievers with load of feed. His old home in the background. Courtesy Marian Van Horn. 174 bride fainted at the table. Later we were invited to the wedding dance at the farm. We drove out right after school and got home at seven the next morning, but we had a marvelous time. “We had lots of parties, but always on Friday nights when school was going on. Once a month we had Literary night at the high school. We had debates, duets, solos, speakers and short plays. We also had a good town baseball team and a wonderful band that played on the Fourth of July, Memorial Day and other holidays. “We used to have terrible electric storms, and tornadoes some times came near. We sat in our cave many nights on account of bad storms and in the day times, too. We always kept food in the cellar, and took fresh water and a lantern every time we went in there. I was five years old and visiting school for a program when word came to Ewing by telegraph that the blizzard of ’88 was coming. Even though we lived right in town, my father came with a team and wagon and hurried us home ahead of it.

I lost two cousins a week apart with diphtheria. Typhoid fever was another terrible epidemic. Mother used to doctor us a lot during epidemics. She fumigated the house with sulphur and fed it to us mixed with molasses. We took so much of it we got to like it. My father passed away in 1898 and my eighteen-year-old brother Mylan had to quit school and help raise the rest of us. He never married.

“We had two drug stores in Ewing and two big department stores. We also had two doctors for a long time. Dr. Heston, our family doctor, and a younger one. But they moved away and then Dr. Briggs came and stayed in our town until he died. We haven’t had a doctor in town since, and there are no stores in Ewing any more, except for a grocery and meat market. Now everybody goes to larger towns to shop.” Lunette married Enos Snyder in 1901 and went to live on his farm near town. Two years later a frightful August hailstorm wiped out their promising crops and they sold out and moved into town. In 1907, with other relatives, the Snyders moved to Montana. Lunette still lives there, among her memories of the early days in Ewing.

After a twenty-one day trip on a stormy . sea, the parents of John Napier, who sailed from Scotland in 1854, reached America. The family was living in Canada when John’s father died in 1863. The widow then took her young children to Scotch Grove, Iowa, to join relatives, and there John grew to manhood.

With nineteen other families of the Scotch Grove settlement he came to Ewing in 1880. All of the eligible settlers took claims in an area about five miles east of town in what was known as the “Frenchtown settlement.” John’s claim was three miles east of Ewing. This colony was unusual in that day because none of its members lived in sod houses. The men, working together, built one frame house at a time (some no larger than eight by ten feet) until every family had a house. The school- house, however, was of sod.

In 1881 John married Agnes Miller who, at thirteen years of age, had come from Scotland to the Scotch Grove settlement and then to French-town. Agnes Napier was the first teacher in the new sod schoolhouse. The Frenchtown colony organized a Presbyterian church in 1881 and John was chosen a ruling elder, an office he held for more than fifty years. He also donated a site on the corner of his farm for the church building. The lumber was hauled from Neligh by team and wagon and the members did the building, finishing the new Elkhorn Valley church in six weeks time. The Rev. James Pollock, one of the homesteaders, was its first pastor. Since the most desirable homesteads, near town, were taken by the earliest settlers, later comers had to take claims farther out. Among these were two widows who homesteaded fourteen miles southwest of Ewing. With their children they came from Deutsch-House in eastern Czechoslovakia in 1880. In September Josefa Bock, aged sixty, the widow of Josef Bock, and her daughter Antonia Schindler, aged forty, widow of Konstant Schindler, with the five Schindler children, aged five to seventeen, left their peasant holding Antonia Schindler and seven grandchildren, 1898. Left to right: Fred Schindler, Rudy Thramer (back row). Bill Thramer, Antonia holding George Schindler, Joseph Thramer (back row), Anna Schindler, Elizabeth Schindler (back row). Courtesy Keith N. Gibson.

to journey to Hamburg, Germany. There they took ship for Leith, Scotland. From Leith they traveled overland to Glasgow where they boarded the steamship Anchoria for New York and debarked on October 11. They came on by train to Columbus, Nebraska, the home of Josefa’s other daughter, Mrs. Richard (Maria) Rosner.

Following a short stay in Columbus they came on to Neligh where Antonia worked in a cafe and her children went to school. The two women immediately applied for citizenship and, the next year, Antonia filed on her Holt County timber claim. Josefa filed on an adjoining quarter and each of Antonia’s children, as they came of age, filed for themselves. As rapidly as they could these enterprising homesteaders bought additional land and, in time, the seven immegrants owned considerable land in the area.

The five young Schindlers all married in the neighborhood and lived there into the 1900’s. Three Schindlers today still live south of Ewing.

George and Catherine Ettleman came to Holt County from Iowa by covered wagon in the early ’80’s to settle on a farm twenty miles southwest of Ewing. With their neighbors, they lived through grasshoppers, blizzards and drouth. In addition they lost a baby boy to whooping cough and then their house burned down. When their son Riley came of age he took a claim next to his father’s. Their third child, Isabelle, grew up, married Frank Roby and had two children. Both were born at the Ettleman farm, where the Roby’s lived, and Isabelle died at the birth of her second child, a son. The grandparents Ettleman kept the baby, George, and his six-year-old sister, 175 Wedding picture of Hallick Pierson and Marion Crane. Courtesy Marcus Pierson.

Myrtle. By the time Grandpa Ettleman died in 1912, young George was grown and he and his uncle Riley ran both farms. Myrtle had married Howard Perkins, a young farmer in the Martha community a few miles away. In her old age Grandma Ettleman left her son and grandson on the farms and went to live with Myrtle. When her life span was almost done she asked to go back to her own home, where Myrtle, George and Riley cared for her as she had cared for them in their tender years. She died there at the age of 86. When Hallick Pierson and his bride, Marion Frances Crane, came to the community in 1883 the Ewing post office was still in James Ewing’s log house on the east bank of the Elkhorn River. Hallick, born in Muscatine, Iowa, in 1861, was one of thirteen children. Soon after their marriage the couple came to Ewing on the train, drove out to their homestead northeast of town in school district 173 and put up a tent to live in while they built a house. Although the “rubber- roofed” (tarpaper) house never grew to more than three sparsely furnished rooms, fourteen children were born to them there.

Probably the only reason it was possible to raise such large families in such limited quarters was that the older children would be gone from home, either married or “working out,” by the time the younger ones were born. In most families, too, some of the children died as infants, usually of the dreaded “summer complaint,” or in one of the epidemics that swept communities every few years. The Piersons lost two infants. Only two of the twelve who lived to grow up stayed in or around Ewing all their lives. The others scattered to the four corners of the United States. One of the sons who stayed became the neighborhood horse breaker and trainer. In his time he drove horses from the Spencer Dam on the Niobrara to Page and from Bartlett to Ewing.

Rafel and Annie Schmiser left their native Austria to seek new homes in mid America. With their sons Frank and John and daughter Mary, they reached Fremont, Nebraska about 1881. A year later they came to Holt County, where they had some friends. There sixteen-year-old Mary married John Burk in May, 1883.

Decembers, 1887, was a big day in the lives of Rafel, Annie and their sons; for on that date they took out their citizenship papers and Rafel was given his final receiver’s receipt for his homestead. In July, 1902, Rafel died, only a few months after acquiring another piece of land south of his homestead. Frank then established a home for himself there while John and his mother lived on, on the original claim.

Around the turn of the century John, who never married, was still raking hay with an ox. In mid-afternoon, when the ox became tired and warm, he simply stopped working— and that ended the haying for the day. Later, John owned two fine teams, Poodles and Schwarts, Daisy and Dolly.

Frank married Cora Edwards in 1904. They continued to live on the farm near Ewing where, that same year, an apologetic note from the county treasurer informed Frank that the taxes on his quarter section had been raised from $7.06 to $8.06 for the year 1904 to 1905. He bought his first Model T Ford, touring model, in 1916 for $470.35, brand new.

Four Vandersnick (originally Van- dersnicht) brothers, John, Frank, Am- andus and Ivo, came from Belgium to Chicago in 1850. Ivo drove a stagecoach in Chicago for several years, then joined his brothers in the coal mines at Atkinson, Illinois. In 1870 Ivo, John and Frank came on west in a covered wagon to the Columbus area, where Ivo operated a saloon and, in 1879, married Amelia Gans.

In 1881 the three brothers again set out in a covered wagon, this time to Cache Creek to take claims. Ivo built a sod house on his homestead, six miles southwest of Ewing. Later he built the five-room frame house that is still lived in by Vandersnicks. He also planted an elm tree near the frame house nearly seventy years ago. Today the tree measures nearly nine feet in circumference.

When his seven-year-old daughter, Mary Josephine, died in 1899, Ivo donated an acre of land in the northeast corner of his homestead for a cemetery. The graveyard is still known as the “Vandersnick Cemetery.” In 1904 he went back to Belgium for a visit and brought home with him four Belgian Pines, which he planted in the cemetery. Two are still standing. Ivo and his wife are both buried in that cemetery.

Two families very prominent in early Ewing affairs were the John Trommershaussers and the J. P. Spittiers. J. P. Spittier was born in 1829 at Jasengen Alsace, France. His wife, Elise Feltz, was born near Metz. They were married in Washington, Iowa, in 1860 and raised eleven children. Mr. Spittier and his daughter Rose came to the Frenchtown settlement in 1884 but decided to make their home in Ewing. Apparently he had money for he built a fine house in the town, having brought Rose along to plan it and a painter from Germany to paint the interior.

Mrs. Spittier, her brother, Fred Feltz, and the Spittier children came by train when the house was ready. Mr.

Spittier went into the livery stable and blacksmith business. By 1890 he was dealing in farm machinery of all kinds. His son John and Fred Feltz started a meat market and later a land office. Another son, Leo, took over the implement business in 1905 and sold windmills, gasoline engines, plumbing and sporting goods as well. Until the Catholic church was built Mass was celebrated in the Spittier home. When the church was finished J. P. became a trustee and the bell in its steeple was dedicated to the Spittier’s daughter Theresa. The younger children all attended the Ewing school and Theresa graduated with the high school class of 1893, the second class to graduate. When Arthur Spittier graduated in 1904 the commencement exercises were held in the new opera house. Arthur worked in the Ewing State Bank and later on at the Federal Land Bank in O’Neill. In 1900 an item in the Peoples Advocate noted that, “As detectives John Spittier and T. A. Baker are an undoubted success. After hunting for two days for John’s dog they found it locked up in Dierk’s saloon building. A smooth piece of detective work.” Each summer for a number of years the Spittier boys took hay machinery and some twenty head of horses about twenty miles north of town to put up hay. With enough food supplies to last a week, they left Ewing at four in the morning and did not return until the end of the week. They slept in a tent and kept their food in a wash boiler. One night a coyote broke into the boiler, and also stampeded the horses.

176 After John and Leo, together, took over the implement business they built a brick business building, which still stands on Main Street, and sold Buick cars, gasoline, International machinery and Aermotor windmills. They shipped the latter in by the car-load and the railroad agent often said that more supplies were delivered to Spittier Brothers than to all the other Ewing businesses combined.

The town installed its water works system in 1906 and Leo built the water tower, which cost $2,325. Leo thought he should have a $50 commission on the tower. The town thought $25 was enough. They split the difference and settled for $37.50. In 1909 Leo piped the town for gas lights. The water tower still stands. The gas lights lasted until the advent of electricity. J. P. Spittier died in 1916, his wife in 1927. Both are buried in the Catholic cemetery at Ewing, as are seven of their eleven children. John A. Trommershausser, born in Illinois in 1854, came to Otoe County, Nebraska, with his parents in 1868. In 1874 he married Emma F. Hoyt. A few years later they decided to go west with some neighbor families. With their three children they made the trip to Holt County in a covered wagon and homesteaded along the railroad tracks, less than a mile from Ewing. Later they opened a store in Ewing, selling “Dry Goods and Groceries, Boots and Shoes.” Still later John owned and printed the Ewing Advocate. John’s son Newt was the close friend of the Spittier and Gunter boys and their favorite sport was mock trials. Gathering in a haymow, they held their trials in all seriousness and always convicted their outlaws. John Trommershausser, raised on a farm himself, believed everyone should know how to farm. Accordingly, when Newton graduated from Ewing high school in 1893 he traded his store and home to the Roll brothers for their ranch on Cache Creek, six miles southwest of town, and lived there a few years. When Newt decided to give up farming for law the family leased the ranch to others and bought another home in Ewing and Newt went down to the State University at Lincoln.

John then went into the insurance business and took part in all the town’s civic enterprises. He had clay hauled in from the “Yellow Banks” to make a base for the sandy streets and went to Omaha to buy the pipe and fixtures for the water works system. He was in the midst of promoting the installation of the gas lights and a new bank at the time of his death in December, 1907, at the age of fifty-three. He was buried in the Ewing cemetery.

Two other settlers of the early ’80’s were Albert Hopkins and Fred Ziems. Hopkins’ Scotch Irish grandparents came to Philadelphia in 1735, then on to Hope, Indiana, where they lived on a farm. Albert was born on that farm in 1857 and married to Flora Moor in 1881. In 1879 Flora’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. George Moor had moved west to Washington County, Nebraska. In the fall of 1880 Mr. Moor and young Hopkins went out to Holt County to select homesteads. They returned home for the winter, Albert and Flora were married in April and they all moved to the homesteads, northeast of Ewing.

Long years later Albert and Flora’s daughter Florence wrote of her childhood on the claim. “My folks were poor but we had plenty to eat and our house was warm. There were eleven of us children and we traveled by team and buggy, or wagon. We went to carnival celebrations and we never missed a Fourth of July doings. I often wondered how my mother managed to fix such a big picnic dinner for all our gang.

“My father used to work on a hay baler for seventy-five cents a day to help out. I don’t remember of any vigilantes in our neighborhood, but my brother Willis was stabbed by a man at Ewing and died from the wound. There were many prairie fires. One started in the sandhills northeast of us and burned to what we called the ‘north trees.’ By plowing and backfiring they stopped it just north of the trees. I was about ten years old and I was never so scared in all my life. We had plenty of electric storms, too, but the lightning only struck the trees around the house. There were no trees, of course, when my folks moved to the homestead and they set them all out. We The old Fred Ziems’ home. Picture taken in 1916, after they had purchased their first car. Courtesy Mrs. Ella Ziems. had two maples in the yard.

“My mother was the only midwife in our neighborhood. When my brother Jim and my brother-in-law, Tod Allen, had smallpox they quarantined our place and put a big red flag on our gatepost to warn people to stay away. No peddlers bothered us then.

“Once I fell and cut the back of my hand badly. My father put a wad of fresh chewed tobacco on it and it healed up fine. Another time I stepped on some broken glass and they put cobwebs on my foot to stop the terrible bleeding.” Fritz Johan Jochem Ziems was born and raised near Machlenburg, Germany. He came to America about 1862 to escape military service and spent some time in New York as a day laborer. He finally reached Nebraska City, where he married Margetha Klannan Ehlers, a widow with a young son. They came on to Holt County and took a homestead in Ewing Township about 1882. Mrs. Ziems died four years later and hers was the first grave in the newly laid out Lutheran cemetery. Fred (Fritz) raised their two sons, Charlie and Herman.

Fred used to say that, during those pioneer years, no one had any money but everybody helped one another. They traded work, shared food and loaned setting hens, a sow pig or a horse. Fred could read well in both English and German, at a time when quite a few settlers could neither read nor write in any language. He took out his citizenship papers in 1885 and died at his farm home in 1919, on his seventy-fifth birthday. He is buried beside his wife.

Included in the 1884 homesteaders were two Polish families, the Tom- jacks and the Rosnos. Thomas Tom-jack, Sr., with his wife and two small 177 Street in Ewing in 1887. Left to right: William Thompson, rancher; W. H. Raynor, Charles Primus, George Butler, John Cohl, ranchman; Sam Haddly, A. Closson, banker. Courtesy Mrs. P. W. Summerer. sons came to the United States from Poznan in 1874 and settled near DuBois, Illinois. Two more children were born there before the family joined an ox drawn wagon train of families bound for Nebraska in 1884. Twelve-year-old Mike Tomjack and several other boys became separated from the train at some point on the journey and had to make their way on foot, foraging for food as they went, until they finally caught up with the train.

For a time the Tomjacks lived on an eighty acre farm owned by Martin Savidge, twelve miles southwest of Ewing. In 1886 they moved to a place near Stuart, where another son was born. They moved back to the Savidge place in 1889, in time for the birth of a daughter. Mike, seventeen by then, went to work for Mr. Savidge that year, and stayed on there for several years. A good fiddler, he often played for local dances. In 1896 he married Sophia Schindler, a daughter of the courageous widow who had brought her family to Holt County in 1880. Mike and his family made two trips to Oregon during the next few years, but never found anything better than Nebraska. At the end of his last two years in the western state he sent Sophia and their four youngest children back to Ewing on a passenger train while he and the two older boys, with all their possessions in an emmigrant car, came home on a freight train. They stayed that time, on a farm twelve miles southwest of town. Things went better for them then.

Mike had had no more than a year of formal schooling and his wife only four years, so they were determined that their children should have good educations. The children all went to school, and to church, for St. John’s Catholic church had been built near them by then. In 1913 they bought their first car, a righthand drive Overland. Then they installed a pump in the kitchen and put in a bathtub “that would drain out the water that had been carried in in buckets.” One Christmas Santa brought them a little wind-up phonograph.

Ralph Tomjack went to high school in Ewing. Dick, after eight years in the grades, went to Lincoln for a two-year course in the Agricultural School. Frances, born on the Holt County farm in 1905, had gone to town school in Oregon. But the little one-room country school she returned to became the love of her life. After her graduation from high school she taught two terms in rural schools, took time off to take two years work at Wayne State Normal, then taught three years in the country school at Martha and seven years in the rural schools of big Cherry County. The younger children, too, had high school educations.

Sophia died in 1935, Mike in 1957 and both are buried in St. Anthony’s cemetery a few miles west of St. John’s church. Thomas, Sr., died in 1925 at the age of eighty-three, Mary in 1928 at the age of seventy-nine. They are buried in St. Peter’s Cemetery at Ewing. The John Rosnos were neighbors of the Tomjacks in DuBois. They located on a claim seven miles southwest of Ewing and about five miles from the Savidge place where the Tomjacks lived. They had followed a long and twisted road to Holt County.

John Rosno and his wife, Josephine had left Poland with five children in 1865. The voyage to America was long and difficult, and before it was over they had buried their two-year- old son at sea. They landed in New York, stopped briefly in Chicago, then took the train to Columbus, Nebraska, the end of the Union Pacific tracks. John worked on the railroad for a time, helping lay the rails on west. In 1868 their son, John Jr., was born and three years later the family moved to St. Louis, while the oldest son, born in Poland, took over his father’s job on the railroad and stayed in Columbus. From St. Louis the Rosnos went on to Texas, then north to DuBois, Illinois, where they spent ten years. Three of their daughters married there. When John Jr., was sixteen the family set out once again for Nebraska, following trails near rivers and streams until they reached Ewing in September, 1884. Dora Tomjack was only eight when the Rosnos came to the Polish community southwest of Ewing and John Jr. probably paid little attention to her, although her brother Anton was his best friend. Both boys worked for Martin Savidge who, although he had seven sons of his own, always had extra work for the needy and ambitious.

At the end of six years John Jr. had saved enough money to buy his firs-team of horses— in those days the true stamp of an enterprising young man. And by then Dora Tomjack had grown up and he had fallen in love with her. They were married in January, 1892, in St. John’s church. Theirs was a big wedding, with Anna Walters, Anna Savidge and Mike and Anton Tomjack as their attendants. In 1967 Anna Walters Dewey, past ninety, declared, “How well I remember John and Dora’s wedding. We drove to Ewing, then to Rosno’s for dinner, and in the later afternoon to the Tomjack home for a house dance, where her brothers furnished the music.” John Rosno, Sr., died in 1901, his wife in 1903. Both are buried in St. Anthony’s Cemetery. Dora outlived John Jr. by thirty-four years but both are buried in St. Peter’s cemetery at Ewing.

Another 1884 addition to the southeast Ewing community was the Frederick Nolze family. Frederick, born in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1848, and his wife Mary Ann Steige of Christina, Norway, had met and married in Wisconsin. They had several children by the time Frederick decided he would rather be a western farmer than a northern lumberman. They came to Holt County in a covered wagon pulled by an ox and a mule. Lennie, their oldest daughter, helped herd their little bunch of cattle behind the wagon. The nearest neighbor to their homestead was the Martin Savidge family. A timber claim soon doubled the size of their holding. The Nolze place, on the main 178 traveled road from Neligh to New- boro post office (in Wheeler County) was a convenient stopover for wayfarers. The Savidge place, just west of them, was the show place of the country and people came from miles around to see it and the Savidge boys’ many strange inventions.

Before they quit this world Frederick and Mary had eight children and thirty-nine grandchildren.

The Hokes, William and Lettie, also came to Ewing in 1884. Their homestead was on the edge of Ewing, near that of George Butler, an old friend. William, born in Pennsylvania in 1856, was of Dutch ancestry and the Quaker faith. His family had moved by wagon train to Illinois when he was six, then on to Vinton, Iowa, where he met and married Lettie. Another near neighbor was Will Black and the two men rigged up some kind of a communication system between their farms. History does not record whether it was a system of signals or an early type of telephone, but it illustrates the pioneer’s ingenuity. Mr. Hoke admired good horses and for years owned a splendid team which Carl Jaco, the undertaker, used to pull his hearse for the funerals of especially important people. He and some of his neighbors, with horses and scrapers, also built a much needed road straight east from Ewing along the “Yellow Banks,” which was long known as the “Bottom Road.” Lettie Hoke died in 1897, leaving five children. Three years later the oldest daughter, Elsie, married James Gunter, son of pioneer Calvin Gunter. In 1905 William married Jane Gunter, James’ oldest sister. Three children were born to Jane and William. In their latter years they lived with their son DeWitt and his family on the homestead. An invalid during the last years of her life, Jane Gunter Hoke delighted in telling her grandchildren what it was like when she first came to Holt County. How the Indians came to the Gunter home for bread and the children hid behind their mother’s full skirts, and how the wild deer kept their hand-set trees nibbled back until the country “settled up.” She had been only fourteen or fifteen when the railroad built through Ewing and had worked in the first hotels, helping cook for the builders. She died at eighty-one, William at ninety-four. The Rev. George F. Cole, son of Jacob and Arvilla Cole, arrived in Ewing in 1884. Because of Mrs. Cole’s poor health they had left New York state in 1880 to seek a better climate. Born in 1832, Mr. Cole had served in the Civil War. Of German parentage, his name had originally been spelled Kohl, meaning “cabbage.” Mrs. Cole, of French ancestry, had three brothers who came to America with Lafayette. The Coles had six children.

Rev. Cole, a Methodist minister, located three miles northeast of Ewing. Two years later his brothers, Charles and Darwin, with their families, also came out from New York. A little later Rev. Cole moved into Ewing and ran a store for a few months. The only clergyman* within a fifty mile radius, he held religious services and officiated at weddings and funerals. From Ewing he moved to Brewster, in thinly settled Blaine County, for a short time, then back to Ewing in 1895. The Methodist Conference then gave him a parish up near Paddock on the Niobrara. To reach it he drove a broncho team, Maude and Bess. It took three men to hitch the team to the spring wagon on Saturday morning at Ewing before he started on the fifty mile drive to his parish, where he held three services on Sunday and returned on Monday.

Once, on butchering day at the Cole homestead, the minister had the cow tied up and everything ready when a couple came to be married. The minister washed, put on his frock coat and began the ceremony. He had just reached the “Is there anyone who knows just cause why these people should not…” when his son Arthur rushed in, jerked the gun from its place on the wall above the couples’ heads and ran out. After the wedding Arthur explained that the neighbor who shot the cow hadn’t aimed well and the poor animal stood bleeding until he intervened.

Rev. Cole died in 1904. His widow lived on for nearly forty years, then was laid to rest beside him.

William W. Bethea was born in Springfield, Illinois in 1855. His parents moved to Rose Hill, Iowa, when he was small and there he grew up and, at the age of twenty- one, graduated from the college which later became Drake University. In the early ‘eighties he moved to Holt County, where he met and married Emma Jane Davies, a young teacher in Deloit Township.

Emma Jane, born in Wales, had come to America at age seven with her mother, sister and uncle to join her father. She was riding home from her school one afternoon when her horse became frightened and bucked her off. At the same time Will Bethea, coming from the opposite direction, saw her predicament and ran to her aid. They were married in 1887 and to their union was born seven girls and two boys. A boy and a girl died in infancy.

They made their home about nine miles south of Ewing, where Mr. Bethea farmed extensively and planted many trees. The trees later provided the lumber from which they built their three-story, twenty-three room house and a huge barn with a big hayloft. As soon as they finished the barn they “warmed” it with a square dance to which hundreds of people came from miles around. All of the children graduated from the Ewing highschool and several went on to college. Emma Jane’s children all followed her choice of vocation and taught school at one time or another, even the only son, Frank, who later went into business for himself. Faithful in community and church work, Mrs. Bethea at one time conducted a funeral for a young girl of the neighborhood when no ordained minister was available. Mr. Bethea, too, was a public spirited man, serving four years as clerk of his county and then two years in the State Legislature. The family moved into town when their family turned high school age, after leasing the farm to the Edwards family. The Betheas had lived in the Ewing vicinity for forty-six years when Will and Emma Jane retired to California. With the exception of the son, Frank, the entire family is now deceased. Also in the early ’80’s Mr. and Mrs. John Holz, German emmigrants, took a homestead eight miles south of Ewing. Soon thereafter Mrs. Holz’ enthusiastic letters to Germany resulted in the arrival of her sister Johanna Zurheide, her husband Karl and their ten-year-old daughter Minnie, in Ewing in March of 1885. The Holz family met the newcomers at Clear-water, a railroad station nine miles east of their homestead. The children walked the snowy road behind the wagon with gunny sacks tied around their feet for overshoes.

Since the word “Holz” in German means “wood,” the Zurheides had Minnie Primus, Karl Zurheide, Johanna Zurheide. Courtesy Mrs. P. W. Summerer.

179 expected to have plenty of wood to burn in Holt County, so were much surprised to find that the only fuel was buffalo chips, hay and corn cobs or stalks. Another family had come with them from Germany, but when they saw the bleak little sod houses on the bare prairie this family, with some money still on hand, went east to Pennsylvania. The Zurheides, with only five dollars left, had to stay. Karl, Johanna and Minnie lived with the Holz family in their two- room, dirt floored soddy, eating bread and potatoes, until their own sod house, with the help of the neighbors, was finished. Karl had walked northwest to O’Neill to file on his land, “a long quarter” located twelve miles southwest of Ewing. Upon his return he walked southeast all the long way to Fremont to work on farms there and learn how it was done, for he had been a butcher in Germany. With the $15 a month he earned there he bought a horse, which he rode home. That winter he worked on the Golden ranch, quite a distance northwest of Ewing, and was home only once until spring, when he came back with another horse, a cow to milk and a pig to butcher. A few days later the pig died of cholera. On the homestead Johanna and Minnie had set a hen and raised some chickens. When the hens began to lay they walked to Deloit, their nearest store, to trade their horded eggs for flour. At five cents a dozen the eggs did not buy much flour. For a bit of additional cash Johanna worked for neighboring farmers, doing washings when babies were born, or setting out trees. When a schoolhouse was built on the west side of their homestead Minnie attended the three months long sessions. She was one of the children stormed in at the schoolhouse during the blizzard of ’88. Back in the winter of 1883, two years before the Zurheides came to Holt County, there had been a bad three- day blizzard. Mrs. Holz and her children had been alone in their new sod house and before the storm was over they ran out of both food and fuel. The mother kept the children in bed, covered with the great feather ticks she had brought with her from Germany.

When the weather cleared Mrs.

Holz sent her two older children to the Clearwater Creek. The Koehlers lived across the creek but the children were not to cross it, only to shout until they were heard, then ask for flour to take home. They were also to scrounge for brush along the stream and bring it home to make a fire.

During those first years on the homestead a trip to Ewing to buy supplies was a big day in the lives of the children. The storekeeper, Sam Brion, who knew the privations of the settlers, gave each child a banana, a new article to many of them. They thought it was a “big bean” until old Sam showed them how to peel and eat it.

Minnie went to school as much as she could, sometimes to their own school, sometimes to the Lefflon school in the other direction. The rest of the time she helped her father with the field and farm work. Slowly they forged ahead, building up a small herd of cattle, all free and clear of debt. It was a real tragedy when they lost seventeen head to “cornstalk disease” one fall, but they hung on. In 1892, when their good neighbors, the Gohlings, gave up and moved east, Karl bought their frame house and had it moved to his place and set down beside the old soddy.

Sophia Schindler, who had a horse and buggy, became Minnie’s good friend and took her along to many neighborhood parties and literaries. One Fourth of July Minnie put on her white dress, took her shoes and stockings in her hand and walked two miles across the dew-wet grass to Sophia’s to go with her to the celebration at Echel’s Grove. During the day the merry-go-round music box broke down and Minnie and two other girls, Lena and Lehla Lou, sang the rest of the day— in return for free rides.

Charles Primus, a young bachelor who lived in a sod house six miles west of Ewing, was the man Karl Zurheide hired to move the Bohling house to his place. Charles did a good job, and in the process met nineteen- year-old Minnie. They were married in July, 1897.

Charles had been born in Wisconsin while his father was away, fighting on the Union side in the Civil War. After coming to Holt County in 1886 and settling on his homestead and Mr. and Mrs. Karl Zurheide. In the background is the sod house the family lived in until Charlie Primus moved the frame house for them. Minnie Primus Zurheide is standing between her parents. Courtesy P. W. Summerer. 180 timber claim, he often walked the six miles into Ewing to work. A sideline was moving houses, as he owned a set of big wooden rollers, a” block and tackle and some heavy draft horses to supply the power. In his later years he lived in Ewing and tended sixty-five hives of bees. He died in 1934 and a son and two daughters survive him. Neighbor to the Rosnos and Tom- jacks was Patrick Lydon and his family. Patrick arrived in 1886 but returned to his former home in Howard County, Iowa, in 1887 to bring his mother, Bridget, back to his homestead. Bridget, her husband and four sons had come to America from Ireland in 1870. Shortly after reaching America daring Bridget had bought a kerosene lamp. Used only to candles, the rest of the family, fearing an explosion, at first left the room when she lighted it.

Patrick married Catherine Rother-ham in Ewing in October, 1891. The couple lived on the homestead for five years, then bought a quarter section a few miles away in Lake Township. With their two small children and Grandmother Bridget, they moved into a small four-room house on the new place. Three more children were born to them and the grandmother died there in 1904. In addition to their own family the Lydons raised the three children of Patrick’s brother, Nick, who was killed by a runaway team in Cedar County, Nebraska.

According to the records at Spittier Brothers hardware store, Pat Lydon bought the first riding cultivator ever shipped into Ewing— and was the envy of the neighborhood while everyone else walked behind his farm machinery. The Lydons went to church in Ewing until 1910, when St. John’s parish was established and a church built. Until Patrick bought his first car in 1927, they drove the fourteen miles to church in a buggy. Still treasured by Leo Lydon, Patrick’s youngest son, is the little lamp his grandmother Bridget bought, a worn McGuffy Fifth Reader, issued to Pat in Iowa in 1871, the family Bible and a covered glass bowl, brought from Ireland more than a century ago. Adolph Koenig, born in Austria in 1852, came to America thirty years later. After working for a year or two as a farm laborer at Humphrey, Nebraska, where he had relatives, he visited a friend near Ewing. Liking the looks of the country, he took a homestead on the edge of Dry Lake, sixteen miles southwest of the town. In 1886 he went back to Austria, married his boyhood sweetheart and brought her back to Holt County to his one-room sod house.

Adolf farmed with oxen for several years and now and then spent all day driving the slow beasts to Ewing for supplies. The Koenigs had six children and Louis, the second son, remembers being sent after the mail once a week as soon as he was old enough to ride a pony. He picked up the mail at Joe Thramer’s place, four miles away, and there was usually very little of it. Mainly the German language newspaper his father subscribed for. The post office was called “Tonic” and the mail came up from Neligh three times a week in a one horse cart.

When Thramer gave up the Tonic office his neighbor, Albert Rothleut- er, took it in, and when he gave it up Adolf Koenig was persuaded to take it. Nobody wanted it, Louis explained, because the “pay” was only the cancellation at the office not enough to pay for the bother of keeping the records. When Koenig gave it up a few years later, Tonic went out of existence.

Dry Lake had water in it end in the winters young people from all around came there to skete. There were dances, too, end Louis end his brother Joe often wolked two miles across the prairie to the Lorenz piece to dance. Walking home, toword morning, they would be soaked to the knees by the dew on the long gross. Another time, in the winter, Louis end his sister Tracy, with some other young people, wolked a mile and a half to the Fred Schindler piece. The dance started in the born. The dancers could keep warm enough but the fiddlers couldn’t. When their bonds got so cold they couldn’t play, the Schindlers rolled up the carpet in the house end the dance went on there until two in the morning. When the Koenigs got home and checked their thermometer it showed four degrees below zero. Joe Koenig taught school a few years, then married Anna Rosno. One of their daughters became a nun and taught for several years in Japan. Tracy married Joe Bauer, son of a Cache Creek neighbor. Adolph married Audrey Tomjack, Louis taught school for seven years before he married Mary Rosno and took up farming. All lived near enough to each other and to the “home folks” for a great deal of visiting.

Alouis Lorenz came to the United States from Austria. After arriving in Ewing he worked for his brother-in- law, Carl Cracher, who had paid his transportation to America. By 1885 he had saved enough money to send for his wife and five children. Their homestead was fourteen miles southwest of town in the Austrian-German colony. Two more children were born to them there. Following Mr. Lorenz’ death in 1898, Mrs. Lorenz, with the help of her family, carried on the ranch and farm work for many years. She lived to be eighty-four years of age and both she and her husband are buried in St. Anthony’s Cemetery. William Kallhoff, born in Westfallen, Germany in 1863, came to the United States in 1884 at the age of twenty-one. Katherine Lantz, born in Wellhaven, Austria in 1870, was fourteen when the John Funk family, who came to the Ewing community in 1882, sent her passage money to America. She made her home with the Funks until she and William Kallhoff were married at Clearwater in June of 1888. They lived southwest of Clearwater and raised thirteen children.

One of their daughters, Lavinnia Kobald, recalls her schooling in a one-room country school, where those who sat near the pot-bellied stove roasted while those farther away chilled. When they lived on a farm on the Antelope-Wheeler County line they had to drive about eighteen miles to church. The whole family went in a wagon and, in winter, Mr. Kallhoff put hay in the wagon box, added several heated bricks and the children, and covered the lot with quilts. After St. John’s church was built, southwest of Clearwater, they hadn’t nearly so far to go.

William died in October, 1932, and Katherine joined him in death in April, 1956.

Frank Bauer, his wife Bibiana and their three children came to Scribner, Nebraska, from Germany in 1878. Fourteen years and six children later, the family came to a farm on Cache Creek, four miles southwest of Ewing. John, one of the three children born in Germany, was with his father when he came to Ewing to look for a farm. He said later that he had never seen so desolate a country as the barren prairie that stretched away in all directions from the little depot, that sundown in 1892.

The Bauers brought a self binder to Ewing with them, the first one in that community, and young John cut grain for the neighbors with it for several years. In 1894, when the country dried out and cattle were so cheap, Frank Bauer bought yearlings for one to three dollars a head. That winter was mild and open (no snow) and he got the cattle through in good condition. The next year they sold for a good price. For cash, Frank worked on the big Thompson ranch. One of his jobs was plowing fire guards with a walking plow, a task that kept him busy for three weeks.

Mrs. Bauer, “a saintly and charitable woman,” did many kind deeds in her neighborhood. One time she took off her new coat and gave it to a neighbor who had no coat at all. 181 Ferdinand and Antonia Reinke, 1910. Another time she slipped off one of her four petticoats and gave it away. When Mrs. Snowardt died at the birth of her baby, Mrs. Bauer took the baby, Jake, and raised him as her own.

John Bauer married Bertha Cracher and their son, John J. remembers some of the high lights of his youth on Cache Creek: His first ride in a gas buggy, “which was all the first cars were, a buggy with a motor;” the thrill of seeing the Savidge brothers flying, and Matt’s tragic death when his plane crashed at the edge of Ewing; the terrible hailstorm of August, 1912; watching his grandmother Bibiana shear the wool from his pet lamb (that died from eating too much corn), spinning it into yarn and knitting it into socks and mittens; the prohibition days when there was a “still” in almost every brush patch. As the century moved along to its last decade the flood of settlers slowed somewhat. By the ’90’s most of the good land had been taken and late comers usually had to buy available farms. This was the case with Ferdinand Reinke who arrived in 1893. Born in Germany, he first came to Columbus and worked in the flour mill there. There he met Antonia Heinz who, with her small son Joseph, had come from Austria in 1880. She worked as a maid in Columbus homes until 1883, when she and Ferdinand were married.

The Reinkes had seven children by the time they moved to Ewing and bought the John Lydon farm, southwest of town. There three more children were born to them. Mrs. Reinke, only four feet, four inches tall and weighing less than one hundred pounds, was a faithful midwife to her community. Traveling horseback, on foot, by sled or buggy, she assisted in the delivery of more than two hundred babies and “helped out” in many a home where there was sickness or trouble. In 1914 Ferdinand and Antonia retired to Ewing and lived out the remainder of their long lives. Their grandchildren numbered forty-seven.

George Russell True, born in Iowa in 1872, married Nellie Bridge, daughter of pioneer Charles Bridge, in Frenchtown Township at the home of the bride’s parents in 1891. Milo Gunter was one of their attendants. George and Nellie homesteaded five miles south of Ewing. Later they moved to North Platte, Nebraska, and then to Merna, a village in Custer County. While there their oldest son Charles, fifteen, was killed when his horse fell on him in a pasture. The family moved again and lived, for awhile, in Antelope County, where their daughter Ellen died of measles in 1915.

Back in Ewing again by 1918 George, a blacksmith by trade, opened a shop. He also worked for Dr. Briggs on the side, paying off medical bills and the pasture rent for his two milk cows. He was hauling hay for Dr. Briggs in 1921 when he someway fell beneath the front wheel of the loaded wagon, which passed over his chest. The team then ran in a circle, pulling the wagon over him again, crushing his face and puncturing his lungs with his broken ribs. He died that evening.

Four of the thirteen True children were still at home and Nellie True set out to support them by herself. She worked in the O’Donnell hotel and in the Doolittle chicken hatchery. She washed for Ewing families, rubbing the clothes on a washboard, boiling them white in a boiler on a wood stove, hanging them out to dry in all kinds of weather and ironing them with heavy sadirons. The children all helped, carrying wood, coal and water and running errands.

Her older son worked out for anyone needing cash help; the older girls made beds for Mrs. French and waited tables in her hotel, and for Mrs. Schober in the cafe. But Gladys True Closson, one of the four, remembered the good times, too: Sunday school and church picnics, Medicine Shows that came to town, the Chautauquas, and the excitement when the old flour mill burned, and the two big livery stables in 1920 and the Opera House in 1922. “The sound of the old fire bell is one I’ll always remember,” she said. “It sure sent cold chills up your spine.” August Conrad Bollwitt was born in Germany in 1860. With his parents, four sisters and a brother, he came to America twenty-five years later and settled near Chicago. Although he was a carpenter, he caught “western fever” and headed for the frontier. His progress was interrupted in Omaha, where he met Sarah Smith and married her in 1888. Six years later he put his wife and four small children on a train bound for Ewing, where he bought a farm eight miles southwest of the town. There were good buildings, including a big two- story house, already on the place, and there five more children were added to the family.

Sollwitt’s carpenter skills were much in demand by neighboring farmers who, recovering from the effects of the devastating drouth of ’93 and ’94, were rapidly replacing old sod buildings with frame houses and barns. His sons took care of the farming on the home place while he was away building for others. Later he built houses on three farms for his sons. When, in 1928, his own home burned to the ground he built a new one on the same location.

Just before his death in 1939, Mr. Bollwitt, then nearly eighty, remodeled the kitchen of his grandson, Victor Bollwitt, with a fine set of built-in cupboards. Three years later Victor and his wife took shelter from a tornado in the cellar his grandfather had built on the place some years earlier. The nearby John Leahy family was killed in the same twister. John and Frances Krejci came from Bohemia to Butler County, Nebraska, about 1880. There they changed the spelling of their name to Krachie, the way it was pronounced. Robert Krachie was born in Schuyler in 1884, later moving with his parents to nearby Linwood where they met Martin Sanders, owner-operator of the flour mill. When Sanders dismantled the mill and moved it to the South Fork River near Ewing in 1898, fourteen-year-old Robert came with him.

Sanders built a home near the mill for his family and Robert lived with them and worked in the mill. In 1908 he married Theresa Sanders. The couple farmed for a time about eighteen miles southwest of Ewing, then moved into town again to put their oldest daughter in school. At this time Robert became a butcher and soon had a meat market of his own. To this he added a pool hall and a “variety store,” forerunner of the modern “dime store,” all of which were destroyed by fire in 1931. He immediately reopened his butcher shop in a building across the street and continued to make the bologna for which he was famous.

Bob Krachie was a great lover of music and could play almost all band instruments. With the Ewing town band he played in weekly concerts in the band stand on main street, went on many a booster trip with his fellow boosters and helped entertain at Fourth of July celebrations for years. He died in 1973.

Martin Sanders had been in partnership with his brothers, Frank and John, in the mill business previous to 182 1898. When the brothers dissolved partnership John built a mill at Battle Creek, near Norfolk, but was unable to make his dam across the Elkhorn hold. After it had washed out several times he sold the mill and bought the McClow hardware store in Ewing. It was a “family” store, with the sons and daughters helping out as they became old enough. John also owned a small ranch south of town, which he stocked with fine purebred Herefords. For a number of years he served on the schoolboard and on the town council. He died in 1926.

Although Robert E. Hoy did not reach Ewing until 1899, he had been on his way there for quite awhile. Back in Kansas his wife had suffered a long illness with typhoid fever. Her recovery was so slow that her doctor suggested that she stay out of doors and do nothing but rest. So Hoy built a covered wagon, outfitted it with a special bed and a rocking chair. He put his wife in the chair, loaded in his two young daughters and headed north, destination unknown. Six weeks later they drove into O’Neill, just ahead of cold weather, and spent the winter in a boarding house. The following spring, with his wife completely recovered, he moved to a preemption claim in Boyd County. In 1899 he bought a general store in Ewing, built a new house and moved his family into it. He ran the store until his death in 1909. Meanwhile his older daughter, Grace, had married the town’s young doctor, Walter Briggs, and the younger, Mary Elizabeth, helped him in the store. The Hoy store was the old fashioned kind, the hub of the town; the place to meet friends and neighbors, to exchange news and ideas— and to buy or trade for almost anything that anyone could want or need.

The store offered all kinds of bulk groceries: crackers and pickles out of barrels, sugar and flour by the fifty or hundred pound sacks, peanuts, candy and ginger snaps from big bins, spices, China tea from big, fragrant tin boxes papered on the inside with gay Oriental pictures. The shelves were stacked with bolts of cotton, silks and calicoes, buttons, thread and braids. There were boots and shoes for men, women and children, hats and caps for men and boys, underwear and stockings for everybody. The stock of crockery, bowls and jugs was almost limitless. One could buy iron-stone ware, or delicate Bavarian china there. When her father died, Mary Elizabeth went right on running the store. Years later, after she sold it to John Wymer, she continued to work there.

In the early years of the new century young J. Albert Larson came to Ewing to look around. There he met Zella Angus, a young lady who was working for her board and room at the Bill Butler home and going to high school. J. Albert, born in Denmark in 1879, came to the United States with his parents, John and Elizabeth Larson, when four years old. He grew up in Elgin, Illinois, then lived on a farm in Pierce County, Nebraska. J. Albert was a man of many interests. In addition to the farm he and Zella lived on near Ewing, he owned meat markets in Ewing, O’Neill, Neligh, Meadow Grove and Albion. Over the years he built three new homes in Ewing and one on his farm.

Charles J. Bartak came with his parents from Bohemia while a child and settled at Howells, Nebraska, where he grew up. After a year at Fremont Normal he taught school until 1900, when he and Elizabeth Vlasak were married in Dodge, Nebraska. Charles and his brother, U. K. Bartak, then bought adjoining ranches in Wheeler County, one mile south of the Holt County line. Charles bought the Allerton Thompson ranch for its good hay and grazing land. His son, Charles Jr., and his grandson, Charles III, still ranch in this fine Clearwater Valley.

Charles and Elizabeth’s first home had only two rooms. Later he and his father, Karl Bartak, built an eight-room one and a half story house on the ranch. Karl, a cabinet maker, built part of the furniture for the new home, the rest was purchased from the Jaco furniture and undertaking company in Ewing. He bought his first car, a Cadillac, from Spittier Brothers in 1912. C. J. served his county as a commissioner for twelve years, his school district as treasurer for forty years, and was president of his local Federal Land Bank for several years. The Jaco’s had come from Indiana in 1879 to homestead southwest of Ewing. They were the parents of nine children but eight died in infancy. Mr. Jaco moved his family into Ewing in 1886 and went into the furniture and undertaking business. He later sold out to his only son Carl, who conducted the business successfully until ill health forced him to sell it in 1923.

The first American Woeppel, Carl, was born in Prussia in 1833. After coming to America he lived in Illinois for three years, then came to Nebraska, filed on a homestead in Stanton County and lived in a dugout for several years. He married twice, lost both wives and raised thirteen children. His son Richard, with his wife and family, took a homestead eleven miles southwest of Ewing in 1903. Two of his eleven children, Walter and Elmer, still live at Ewing. The Woeppels had as neighbors the Douglas brothers, the trappers who walked their trap lines from the South Fork to Goose Lake. Walter married Elsie McClanahan and one of their five children, Warren, is among those listed as “killed in action” in World War II.

Joseph A. Weibel, born in Alsace Lorraine in 1866, was fourteen when he came to live with his brother, Michael, in Wisconsin. As a young man he was a cobbler’s apprentice, learning a trade that was to serve him well in repairing shoes for his neighbors and his own large family in the years to come. He took out his citizenship papers in Nance County, Nebraska, while working at anything he could find to do.

In 1891, at Cedar Rapids, he married Elizabeth Dobson, who died nine years later, leaving him with four small sons. Joseph kept his family together and moved to Holt County in 1905. In May of the same year he married Rose Cracher Shind-ler, the widow of Joseph Schindler. Rose had been trying to make a living for herself and her two small children on her farm near the one onto which Weibel moved. Joseph and Rosa then became the parents of six more children, making twelve in all. After a tornado destroyed the barn and outbuildings on Rosa’s place, they moved the house to Joseph’s farm. Until the night of the tornado the Funk boys (from a neighboring community) had been sleeping in Rosa’s barn while putting up hay. For some reason they were called home that evening— otherwise the barn could have been their death site. Theodore Schueth, one of the nine sons of Mr. and Mrs. Julius Schueth, was born in 1881 near West Point, Nebraska. Educated in the rural schools of the area and in the Catholic school at West Point, he grew up and married Mary Vogel of West Point in October, 1907. In the spring of that year Theodore had visited Holt County and bought a quarter section farm three miles north of Ewing. The Schueths lived there for three years, then moved into town where Theodore went to work for the P. M. Conger Lumber Company.

At that time lumber yards also bought and sold hogs, supplying their home town markets and shipping them out to central markets. Theodore continued in the hog buying business until the Ewing Livestock Market was established some years later.

The Schueths had one son, Leo. In his later years Theodore became diabetic and lost both legs by amputation, the last one in 1962. A few months later he died at the age of 183 eighty-one. Mrs. Mary Schueth, now in her late eighties, still spends the summer months in her home in Ewing.

William Medcalf and his wife, Effie Jane Anderson, were born and raised in Ireland, Indiana, and married there in January, 1891. They moved to Adams, Nebraska the next year and lived there until 1909 when they came on to Ewing. A year later they moved to the Trussell ranch. Of their five children the oldest, “Hap,” was born in Indiana, three more at Adams and the youngest, Hazel, on the Trussell place near Martha.

In 1916 the family moved to Bliss and took over the post office of that name. In 1927 they moved again, to Chambers, where William bought the Porter harness and shoe repair shop and ran it until 1951, the year of his death. He and Effie had then been married sixty-two years. She died twelve years later.

Alfons Beelaert, his wife Marie and their three children arrived in Ewing, by train, from New York city in March, 1910. Previous to that they had spent three weeks on a ship from Belgium. Letters from Alfons’ brother, Epolite, and his sister, Mrs. Fred Rosschaert, who had preceded them to Holt County, had persuaded them to come to this new land of opportunity. An uncle, Evo Vandersnicht, and his daughter, now Mrs. Angela Bauer, met the Beelaerts at the depot. While the men loaded the wagon for the journey to the new home, the lines were placed in Marie’s hands. Since she had never lived on a farm and had never handled horses, she was not only frightened by this experience but awed by the vastness of this great country, so different from small, densely populated Belgium.

Their brother-in-law had rented them the southwest quarter of the school land he leased in Section 36 of McClure Township, near the Thompson ranch. As soon as they were settled Alfons went to work on the ranch, hauling baled hay to Ewing, leaving early in the morning and returning late at night. Marie and the children milked the cows, tended the garden and did the other chores. The children attended both the Lone Tree school and the Lydon school, as they lived about midway between the two. They walked the two and one-half or three miles, of course. A neighbor, little Mrs. Ferdinand Reinke, was midwife for several of the children born to Alfons and Marie on the farm, although Dr. Briggs attended the later births.

In 1915 the family moved to Deloit Township, where they lived until 1921, then moved to a farm five miles north of Ewing. They later purchased this farm three times. They lost it twice, during the depression, but kept on trying until the late 1930’s— when it finally became theirs. Their son, Alfons Jr. has owned it since 1951. Alfons and Marie retired in 1941, moving into Ewing where Alfons passed away in 1952 and Marie in 1967. Down through the years the Beelaerts preserved a tradition brought from their native land— that of meeting on the fourth Sunday in September to celebrate “Kotimist,” a church (Catholic) holiday. “Vloeien,” a pudding-dessert, was always eaten on that day.

After her family was grown Mrs. Beelaert resumed the making of Belgian lace, an art she had learned in her homeland. Today her family and friends cherish the gifts of this lace that she gave them. Her son, Frank, still lives in Page and several grandchildren reside in the county. Edward Ferguson was another of the county’s long remembered bachelors. Born in Almira, New York in 1870, he was working in a fireworks factory when an explosion injured him severely and came near blinding him. The following year he went to Oregon and worked at the printers trade. In 1914 he came to Clearwater and ran a photographers shop for awhile.

He next rented the Savidge telephone line from Phil Savidge, and there proved his considerable skill as an electrician and technician. The Savidge line had its beginning in 1904 when Martin built a switchboard in his ranch home, south of Ewing, and ran lines from it to Ewing, Clearwater, Bliss, Chambers and O’Neill. The first phones in Ewing were installed in Spittiers’ garage and in Brion and Weaverley’s dry goods store. When Phil bought the line from his father he moved the switchboard to his home in Deloit— and that was the lay-out The old schoolhouse in District 118. The District was organized in 1884. The first schoolhouse, a sod structure, stood on the southwest corner of Section 4 in Deloit Township. It was known as the Pleasant Valley School after 1918. In 1961- 62 District 118 consolidated with the Bauer and Vandersnick districts and is now known as the District Number 6 school. Courtesy Zella Ziems. Ferguson kept in operating order. It was Mr. Ferguson’s great love for children that endeared him to his neighbors. His Easter Bunny baskets, Hallowe’en treats, Christmas Specials and expert fireworks displays were eagerly looked forward to by a host of youngsters. He also helped coach the high school plays and declamatory contests. He had been a Shakespearian actor in his younger days and had traveled with road companies. No wonder his youthful following were awe-struck when he quoted long passages with great emphasis and feeling. “Fergie” died in March, 1965, at the age of ninety- four.

Other late comers to the Ewing area were the Edwards and Archers.

Delbert Edwards, born in Iowa in 1877 and left motherless at birth, was raised by relatives near Bassett. When a young man he went to Tilden, southeast of Neligh, to pick corn. There he met and married Blanche Radke in 1899. They lived on a farm near Tilden until 1915, then bought a farm on Cache Creek. There, in addition to farming, Mr. Edwards trapped along the creek, running his trap line on skates. After a few years they sold out and moved to the Frank Bethea farm where they lived in the huge house. There they raised many hogs, hundreds of chickens and milked a large herd of cows.

In 1925 they moved to the Martha community and went into the turkey business. The eldest of their five children, Vanetta, met a tragic and untimely death in 1938. With her husband, Carl Primus, and their four children she was living in the old Charles Primus house in Ewing when the building caught fire and she was burned to death.

John Q. Archer was born in Imogene, Iowa, in 1888. In 1911 he 184 married Bertha Keenan at Shenandoah, where the couple lived for several years. In the spring of 1916 the Archers and their four children moved to a farm northeast of Ewing. In 1928 they moved into town where Mr. Archer became the manager of the Ewing Cooperative Creamery, a position he held until he suffered a stroke in December, 1949.

During his active years John Q. was a member of the town board, also its chairman for a time. He was also a member of the Chamber of Commerce, a director of the nebraska Cooperative Creamery Association, and served on the Holt County draft board in World War II. He was active in St. Peter’s Church and a member of the Knights of Columbus. He died in 1956, his widow still makes her home in Ewing.

No date is given for the arrival of the John Stinka family. They lived somewhere in the Ewing vicinity on what is now part of the Joe Weibel farm and Mrs. Stinka was buried on the homestead, after “she froze to death around the turn of the century.”