More First Families Chapter Twenty-One Of O’Neill’s “first families,” those who came in 1873 or 1874, several left accounts of their arrival and adventures on the frontier. The stories of others, who stayed awhile then moved to new locations in the county, will be told elsewhere.
One of the hardest things for these settlers to accept was the treeless condition of the plains country. Most of them, especially the Irish, had always known a wooded land. Even in the eastern United States there was timber everywhere. Here there was almost none. Some trees grew along the Elkhorn in the vicinity of its forks in the eastern edge of the county, and some along some streams in the northern half of the county; otherwise there was no wood for building, fencing or fuel, and no trees for shade.
John Prouty, one of the settlers who came in the spring of 1873, in 1923 wrote an account of their journey and of their arrival for the Nebraska Farmer. He described the forty-three days wagon trip from Hill Point, Sauk County, Wisconsin, to the beautiful Elkhorn Valley where, on July 13, 1873, they halted their wagons on the banks of the river, which was so low that “fine” fish could be thrown out of the water with pitchforks.” On hot days, just right for mirages, he said they could see towns more than a hundred miles distant “so plainly mirrored on the nearby prairie that one could see between the buildings.” And prairie fires, with clouds of smoke in advance of the flames, could not be distinguished from the real thing, while lakes and groves of trees seemed to be situated on dry land.
The homesteaders broke prairie and built sod (and some log) houses and sheds as rapidly as they could. His house, Mr. Prouty wrote, was a fourteen by eighteen foot room with a peeled log ridgepole to give the desired pitch to the roof, which was covered with layers of sod. During a heavy thunderstorm they put the bedding and clothing under the bed, which was covered with an oil cloth. Then the inhabitants lined up sideways under the ridgepole to keep dry. Mr. Prouty had married Margaret Schultz, a successful schoolteacher, in 1867 in Wisconsin. A big-souled Christian woman, Mrs. Prouty held the first prayer meeting in the new settlement in her home and organized the first Sunday school. She visited and cared for the sick, attended burials and helped in any way she could.
That fall a party of Eastern hunters, including a prominent judge, came to the Elkhorn and stopped at the Wisconsin settlement. Continuing on about a days journey up the river they stopped to hunt, leaving one of their number to watch the team and wagon and sound an alarm if any Indians approached. Soon a band of Sioux, bound for the Loup River on a buffalo hunt for winter meat, rushed the wagon. The hunters managed to defend their wagon until an Indian signalled that he desired to hold a pow-wow. The hunters permitted him to come to the wagon and gave him sugar and tobacco, after which the red men rode away. The hunters, however were so badly frightened that they drove, non-stop, back to Rockford, arriving about midnight. The Wolf(e) home southeast of O’Neill The next morning they headed for home.
Among a smaller group of settlers that came in the fall was Samuel Wolf and his brother-in-law, E. H. Thompson. Mr. Thompson immediately took a homestead on what is now the east edge of O’Neill. Samuel, busy helping his sister and her husband get settled for the winter, did not select his homestead until the next spring. The land office at that time was in Dakota City, over one hundred miles to the east on the Iowa border and he figured he would have plenty of time to take care of his filing, come spring. The land he chose, early in 1874, included the present site of O’Neill, but that fall General O’Neill, looking for a location for his town, liked the land Wolf had selected and, having a prior right because of his service in the Union Army, claimed it away from him. Mr. Wolf then filed on a quarter southeast of present O’Neill, and on a timber claim as well.
On May 30, 1876, the first recorded weddings in the settlement took place when Samuel Wolf married Sarah Jane Thompson and her sister, Ellen Thompson, married Neil Mc- Elravie in a double ceremony. The Thompson sisters were the daughters of the Eli Thompson who came to 185 Elijah Thompson. Courtesy R. 1. Wolfe Rockford with the AAcEvony colony in July, 1873.
Samuel Wolf, born in Bedford County, Pennsylvania, in 1850 was a farmer and carpenter by trade. Twelve children were born to Samuel and Sarah Jane, the first two dying in infancy. Their children attended school in District 5, four miles east of O’Neill, and went to Sunday school in the schoolhouse on Sundays.
While O’Neill was still on the frontier AAr. Wolf every now and then put a sack of shelled corn on his back and walked the forty miles to Neligh to get it ground into meal, then carried it home again. The Wolfs raised a huge garden every summer and the children’s job was gathering and tying the vegetables into bunches for their father to deliver to his customers in town the next day. The Holt County Banner for April 25, 1882 carried an advertisement for “Wolf and Cyphers, Carpenters and Bridge builders, O’Neill City, Nebraska.” During the hard years of the middle ‘nineties, however, AAr. Wolf had to go to Leadville, Colorado to find work, and there he helped put up buildings while the boom days lasted and sent the money home so his family could eat.
Although he lived to the age of seventy-nine, passing on in 1929, Samuel never owned a car, being “scared to death of those contraptions.” After his death the family added an “e” to the name. “Wolfe,” they thought, looked less like the name of an animal. The change showed up in the abstract after the elder Wolf’s passing.
Neil Brennan, son of John and Sarah Brennan, was born in Killebegs, Ireland, in 1848. As a young man he worked in engineering shops in Scotland, sending his wages home to his parents and saving his overtime pay for his passage to America. Landing in Quebec in 1867, he went on to Boston and found work in a sugar factory, then spent the last of his British money to secure his American citizenship papers.
A few years later he joined the Fenians and was one of the group that tried to take Canada from England. Captured in the attempt by General Meade, he was returned to the United States. When General O’Neill advertised for Irishmen to go West, Neil Brennan was the first to answer. With the other members of the first colony he came to Wisner, the end of the railroad, and walked the remaining 125 miles to the site of the new settlement, arriving about noon on May 12, 1874.
Front row: Elmer, Vern, Claude and AAildred. Courtesy Frances onaw. 186 Acquiring a team and wagon, he began freighting supplies from Wis-ner, and also from Yankton, South Dakota, a town on the east bank of the Missouri. On one of his trips Neil met Margaret Keys, daughter of Thomas and Ellen Keys. The Keys had come from Canada to Nebraska and, by 1877, young Brennan had persuaded them to move to O’Neill, where he could see the young lady oftener. That same year Brennan opened his own hardware store in the new town, although he continued his freighting business for some time afterward. Neil’s son, Thomas, related later that “one of the jobs which pleased him (Neil) most was freighting the material for the first Catholic church in O’Neill.” In 1881 he married twenty-year-old Margaret Keys in the new St. Patrick’s Church.
The Brennans, among the leaders in establishing church and schools in O’Neill, also developed the town’s first park. On an acre of ground on a barren sandhill in the north part of town they planted trees, shrubs and grass— and hauled water from the Elkhorn in barrels to keep everything green. Later they put down a well and installed a watering system. On the beautiful site they built their home in 1909.
The Brennans raised eight children in their handsome home and, in addition to his business, Mr. Brennan found time to serve on the staffs of two Nebraska governors, Thayer and Crounse.
When Neil Brennan died of a stroke in August, 1915, his wife carried on, building several good business houses on the streets of O’Neill and, in 1939 completing her pride and joy, a modern department store, erected on the site of the first Brennan hardware store. A few months later, in January 1940, she died and was buried in Calvary Cemetery, on the north edge of O’Neill, beside her husband. Thomas Connelly, his wife Ann McGee, and some or all of their four sons, who also arrived in O’Neill with that first colony, may have been among those who walked from Wis-ner, for they later told of the pleasure with which they “bathed their aching feet in the soothing waters of the Elkhorn at noon on May 12, 1874.” Mr. Connelly selected a quarter section one and one-half miles northwest of the town on which to build his homestead shack. Born in County Caven, Ireland, in 1830, Thomas came, by way of Scotland, to the United States in 1870. He had married before or during his years in Scotland, for his oldest son James was born in Dundee in 1868. Patrick, the second son, also came to O’Neill with his parents; for his son John notes that his funeral was held on the fifty-sixth anniversary of his arrival in O’Neill.
The Joyce, Stanton and Welsh families, driven out of Ireland by the terrible potato famine of the 1840’s, had emigrated to Stirling, Scotland, where they laid plans to come to America. The three families settled first in Youngstown, Ohio, where the men worked in the steel mills and coal mines. Before long three daughters of Nancy Whalen Stanton married sons of the other two families; Peggy Stanton to Martin Welsh, Honore to Patrick Joyce and Ann to William Joyce.
William Joyce and a venturesome friend, Thomas Connolly, had been following with keen interest the accounts of great opportunities opening up in the state of Nebraska. Irish Catholic papers were full of news about the homestead possibilities out there, and of the efforts of Bishop Spalding of Peoria, Illinois, and Bishop O’Connor of Omaha to establish colonies, or to build onto those already forming on the frontier. By 1875 Joyce and Connolly had gathered their few resources and set out, first by rail and then by ox team. At Wisner they found they could not acquire adjoining claims in that area, so went on to Neligh and then to O’Neill.
In due time they had settled on bordering claims, put up soddies and were ready for their families. The new arrivals from Youngstown added some twenty souls to the population of the colony: Mrs. William Joyce, her mother, Mrs. Stanton, the three Joyce children; Mr. and Mrs. Patrick Joyce and their two daughters; Mr. and Mrs. Martin Welsh and their five children, and the Connolly family. By the time Neil Brennan in his hardware store. This picture was taken about 1900, some twenty years after he opened his first store. Note the handsome “parlor heating stoves.” Clay Johnson Collection. they arrived the railroad had reached Neligh, shortening the wagon portion of the trip by sixty miles.
Working together, the men cut and hauled logs from the Niobrara to put up their new houses. While at this task tragedy struck when a tree fell on Patrick Joyce and killed him. The young widow and her two little girls stayed on in Holt County.
A few years later, while rounding up cattle on his claim, William Joyce’s horse fell on him, crushing his foot. Infection set in and the local physician, Dr. McMenamee, wanted to amputate. Mr. Joyce refused, then went to Omaha where he spent almost six months in St. Joseph’s hospital. Although the foot was saved, Joyce was left slightly crippled and walked with a cane the rest of his life. A tall, distinguished gentleman anyway, the cane merely added to his natural dignity. Mr. and Mrs. William Joyce reared seven children in Holt County.
Richard and Catherine Kilmurry came to Waterbury, Connecticut, from Athlone County, Ireland, and from there to O’Neill in 1876, seeking on the open prairies a refuge from the mills and sweatshops of New England. With their two children they stayed in the Grand Central hotel while the father built a sod house on his homestead a mile and a half north of town. After getting his family settled he and several other homesteaders made numerous trips to the Niobrara to cut and haul logs for the building of better homes and for a schoolhouse, Richard Kilmurry also built the first grist mill in that locality.
The first years were hard. Most of the settlers knew little or nothing about farming and their equipment was poor and primitive. In winter they 187 lost their cattle to the blizzards that came howling out of the north. In summer they lost their crops to grasshoppers and then to drouth. Small wonder that quite a number gave up the unequal struggle and went East again.
Those who stayed did so for two reasons: Some had faith in the wide new land and in their ability to conquer its adversities. The rest were so hard up they couldn’t afford to leave, or had no place any better to go to. There was something else, too— a spirit of fellowship among these hardy people that bound them together. The Kilmurrys were among those who stayed and raised five sons and two daughters. Their son Patrick, who died in 1965 after spending his entire life in Holt County, was the last survivor of the Richard Kilmurry family.
A considerable number of families came to the O’Neill area from the coal mines of Pennsylvania or the copper mines of Michigan. It was to these men, who worked under intolerable conditions, and whose families lived in squalor and poverty in the miserable smoky shanty towns around the mines, that General O’Neill took his message of free farms under a big sky in the pure air of Nebraska. Once arrived in Holt County these people, many of whom had known each other in the East, tended to settle near to one another in the new land. Soon their clustering claims came to be known as the “Michigan Settlement,” the “Scrantonian Settlement,” and so on.
Among the first of the Pennsylvania miners to head west was Thomas Gallagher, who came in 1875. Born in the west of Ireland in one of the famine years, 1844, one of his earliest memories was that of seeing the “Crowbar Brigade” raze the house in which he was born. After losing their home the father and his two oldest sons emigrated to England. A year or two later they were able to send for the rest of the family. At that time Thomas was the middle child in a family of nine.
Times were hard for years. When the parents could spare a penny for a week’s tuition, each child in turn went to school, but this was seldom, for it was all they could do to keep bread on the table. Thomas’ first job was that of driving an ass to a little cart, delivering milk. His salary was eighteen pence (36 cents) a week. As he grew older and stronger he held better jobs and worked up to fifty cents a week.
At the age of twelve Thomas went to work in a rope factory. At fifteen he was “bound” or apprenticed to the business for four years. During that time he lost only two days from his job. He had to be at work at six in the morning but was given fifteen minutes at eight o’clock for breakfast. At the end of the four years the company forgave him the two “black days” he had missed and hired him as a journeyman at a dollar a day. At that time, as often as he could afford it, he went to night school and learned to read, write and “do a little figuring.” About this time some older members of his family sailed away to America. Two years later Thomas had saved enough to follow them. He landed in New York in April, 1865, and went at once to Pittstown, Pennsylvania, where his relatives worked in the hard coal mines. He, too, went into the mines. In the late sixties he went to a Fenian lecture in Phoenix Hall. General O’Neill was the speaker and Thomas listened to his plea for money and for volunteers to fight for the cause. “He got something like $1700 in cash and twenty-five volunteers, myself among the latter,” Thomas wrote. Although the company drilled and made ready for a call, it never came.
During the next few years Thomas alternated between the mines and a local rope factory. By the time he was twenty-three he was looking diligently for a wife. When he met Mary Agnes Swift he looked no farther. Long years later, in 1907, Thomas Gallagher wrote, “There are still some people living here in O’Neill who knew her and they all pronounced her one of the most beautiful women they ever met. I thought so too.” Thomas and Mary Agnes were married on January 1, 1867. About that time some of the Gallaghers moved on to Boone County, Iowa, and went into the soft coal mines there. Thomas stayed on in Pittstown until the mines played out, then with his wife and little son John joined his relatives in Iowa. While there he read in the Irish World and other papers of General O’Neill’s work in the Nebraska colonies. He sent for phamplets that “treated on the subject,” and made up his mind to join the colonists.
Accompanied by his brother Patrick, who had a wife and five children, and his friend Patrick Carney with a wife and nine children, the three families, each in a prairie schooner, headed for O’Neill in April, 1875. The nineteen days journey was discouraging because on the way through Nebraska they saw so many forlorn, abandoned homes along the road. The previous summers of grasshopper infestation had driven the settlers from their homes.
Thomas here describes his circumstances upon his arrival in O’Neill. “After resting my team three days I started back to purchase feed and seed, taking $75 for the purpose. That was just half my capital and Columbus was the nearest point where those things were sold. After traveling three or four days to get here I found there was not a bushel of corn, oats or potatoes for sale, although there was an abundance to be distributed to the grasshopper sufferers. After a conference on my case the distributing committee, finding I had come one hundred miles, took pity on me and sold me corn, potatoes and oats. I loaded up with these and with flour, bacon and some other groceries and got back to my family with a nickel in my pocket.
“There was not yet a house in O’Neill, I had not seen my homestead and I had $75.05 in my possession. I had had no experience in farming and, had I known the privations and poverty ahead it would have taken a stouter heart than mine to settle down there. But Hank McEvony showed me, my brother and my friend over the prairie and we each selected a quarter about three and a half miles north of O’Neill. Then I made a tent of my wagon cover, and there we lived happily in dry weather.
“Our first misfortune came soon. After wrapping our summer stock of bacon in our bed clothes, I hitched old Kitt and Bett, our oxen, to the wagon for a drive over the prairie. When we came back I found the inside of my tent in confusion and nothing left of our bacon but crumbs and rinds. My friend Carney owned a pack of hounds and in their wandering they found our deserted tent. It hadn’t taken them long to do the rest, but it was a wonder to me how those dogs could have gotten outside that much bacon.” There was so much to do. A sod house to build, a well to dig, the prairie to plow and plant. Thomas paid a traveling well-digger $20 to put down a bored well twenty feet deep. Then, by looking at a map, he located timber along the Eagle and Niobrara, so struck out in their direction to find the ridge pole, rafters and firewood he needed. He then built a sod house at “the cost of $5 and an awful lot of labor, but to me it was a palace,” he said.
The Gallaghers soon found that it “rained inside for at least twenty-four hours after it quit outside,” and after one particularly hard rain their roof caved in and buried their new little daughter, Tessie, in her cradle. Fortunately she was rescued— and lived to mother five children of her own.
Thomas broke several acres of his 188 land and planted it to grain, potatoes and vegetables. The young crops were beautiful until the grasshoppers came again. With his fields “cleaned to the ground,” he did the only thing he knew to do— went back to the Iowa coal mines. By then Pat Hagerty had opened his first store in O’Neill and Thomas could buy groceries “on time.” “I put up some hay with a sycthe, hauled a supply of firewood and left flour and groceries at home,” he wrote, then set out on foot, with two dollars in my pocket, to travel four hundred miles to earn enough money to keep the team and family fed another year, while we waited for better times.” Out of his first wages he sent enough money home to pay Mr. Hagerty.
In the spring he came home, “full of hope,” planted the old breaking and broke new prairie for sod corn. Those years, Thomas said, it was the usual thing to see men looking up at the sky while they worked, but they were looking for grasshoppers, not rain. And the pests came again, that summer of 1876, and again ate every green thing above ground.
That time Thomas loaded his family into the wagon when he once more set out for Iowa, behind old Kitt and Bett. That winter was a mild one, with little demand for coal. By spring the Gallaghers had saved only $50. Not enough to buy seed and supplies. Not knowing what else to do, they headed back toward their claim, but on the way stopped overnight with an old farmer, Jimmy Murphy in Antelope County, and there learned of another old farmer who wanted to rent his farm and move into nearby Oakdale.
The landlord provided seed and feed and Thomas raised a splendid crop. His success there gave him “a new start in life.” He sold his grain in Columbus, and each time he made the long haul with a load of wheat he brought back a load of lumber. In the spring he hauled the lumber and a good supply of feed and seed to his homestead. By now his family included a baby son, Thomas F., and that year he built a new frame house for his wife and babies and raised substantial crops. Two years later, in December, 1879, a daughter, Ellen Jane, was born and in February, 1882, another son, James. Ten days later Mary Agnes died, leaving six children ranging in age from ten days to ten years.
Thomas found a home for the infant with the D. W. Sparks, “an excellent family,” then prepared to sell out and move back to Pennsylvania so that his mother could help him raise his children. He found a buyer for his place but could not get his money for several months. In the meantime he saw that his children “were growing hale and hearty” under his management, so he took up more land and stayed in Holt County. In time he built his holdings there to more than one thousand acres. Through the years he took an active part in the affairs of the community, holding each of the offices on the local schoolboard, handling the job of roadmaster for Center precinct, and acting as a Justice of the Peace for fifteen years. His family grew up, married and stayed in the county.
Another Gallagher, Michael, came to O’Neill with the General’s second contingent in 1876. A native of County Mayo, Ireland, he too was a coal miner from Scranton. He walked from Ottumwa, Iowa, to Council Bluffs, and from there followed a wagon train to Omaha, where he boarded a train to Wisner, the end of the rails. After staking a claim south of O’Neill Michael made his filing at the land office in Neligh and built himself a dugout. During the next two years he farmed, acquired an ox team and wagon and built a sod house.
In 1878 Michael’s wife, with the children and her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Patrick Erwin, came on from Scranton to Wisner, where he met them with his oxen and wagon. “Mingled with the joy of being reunited with his family was the sorrow of learning that one of his little sons had taken ill before they left Scranton and had died before his father could be notified.” Twelve years later another of the Gallagher boys was dragged to death by a runaway pony. The family then moved to another homestead, east of O’Neill, where little Katie choked to death on popcorn. They then moved to the farm southeast of town, which is still owned by the family.
Michael Gallagher built the first frame house in O’Neill, hauling the lumber for it across the Missouri River from Yankton on the ice. Later, in 1890, Army wagons and canon, bound for the northern Army posts, trailed across the Gallagher farm and the family could see Indians, riding at a distance on the same trail, which was marked by a lone tree that stood for years in the south meadow. The soldiers and cannon wound up at the Wounded Knee battlefield.
The Gallagher children, four boys and two girls, grew up in O’Neill. During their years on the nearby farm they witnessed an accident on the Burlington railroad tracks which traversed the farm. Dr. J. P. Gilligan was called to attend the victims and the three younger Gallagher boys, after watching the good doctor at his work, resolved then and there to be doctors themselves. Through the help of their parents on the farm and their older brother James, who operated a general store in O’Neill for over fifty years, the boys achieved their goal. In addition, as each young doctor began to practice, he helped the next one through school.
A Gallagher grandson, raised by the family, also became a doctor; and five sons of the next generation, in their turn, became physicians, making nine medical doctors to come from this one Irish immigrant family. Michael died in 1916, Bridget in 1937. They left seventeen grandchildren, and four generations of the family are now buried in Calvary Cemetery in O’Neill.
John P. O’Donnell, another of the Pennyslvania immigrants, left his home in Ireland in April, 1869, and arrived in Hazelton in 1870. A little notebook, found in his O’Neill home after his death in 1900, shows that he regularly sent small sums of money to a Peter McDevitt, evidently payments for his passage to America. He then sent money back to Ireland to bring Ellen Brennan across the ocean, and married her in Hazelton in 1872. The family came to O’Neill with one of General O’Neill’s wagon trains, and the long grass on the prairie, waving in the wind, looked so much like the ocean that Mrs.
O’Donnell became very homesick for Ireland.
Money was so scarce that the O’Donnells took in lodgers to help out a bit and it was said that one of their guests was Doc Middleton. John later homesteaded south of what is now Atkinson and started a ranch there. Although the family continued to live in O’Neill, all of its members (which eventually included fourteen children) worked on the ranch as they grew up.
Ann O’Donnell was a member of the first class to graduate from St. Mary’s Academy; and Mrs. O’Donnell, who could read and write Gaelic, learned to read and write English by studying with her younger children as they progressed through the grades. Mr. O’Donnell had established a bank in O’Neill before his untimely death in a haying accident on the ranch in 1900.
Other Pennsylvanians were the Donohoes, Hanleys and Stantons. John Donohoe was born in County Longford, Ireland, in 1835 and Mary Biggins in Ayr, Scotland, in 1848. They met and married near Glasgow, where both their families had fled to escape the strife between England and Ireland. With their little son John they came to America on the sailing vessel Caledonia in 1870 to settle at 189 Looking north up Main Street toward the standpipe. The James Gallagher General Merchandise store at left. Courtesy E. M. Jarman Looking east on Douglas Street about 1890. White house in right foreground is O’Donnell’s hotel. O. F. Biglin house just beyond it. Little building on the right is an old gun shop. Clay Johnson Collection. St. Mary’s Academy, with additions, as it looked shortly before the fire in 1965. Clay Johnson Collection. 190 Hazelton, where John went to work as a dock boss in the mines.
Seven years later, lured by General O’Neill’s persuasion, John and Mary Donohoe with their three children, and the John Donlin family with four children, arrived in O’Neill. Donohoe took over another man’s claim, seven miles northwest of the village, on which a log house had already been built. There was no well on the place and the family had to carry water from the Blackbird Creek, a mile to the east. Every second day the two little boys, John and Tom, carried buckets of water on a stick across their shoulders. Their mother, carrying the baby, James, the first white boy born in Shields Township, and followed by their little sister, went along on every trip.
Two more sons were born in the log house before Mr. Donohoe took a preemption on a nearby quarter. Since the law required that they live on the place, he scraped a dugout out of the hillside for the family home. There another son was born in 1884. Soon afterward Donohoe added a tree claim to his holdings. The land lay athwart the creek and here they planted the required ten acres of trees by hand— and watered them the same way, with all the family carrying water from the little stream. Mr. Donohoe had attended a forestry school in Scotland and knew something about tree culture, so had better luck with his groves than most homestead tree planters did. The family also planted and raised a large orchard near the house.
Mrs. Donohoe planted and tended a three-acre garden in a low spot on the far side of the creek. To reach it they had to cross the stream on a plank— and many an unsuspecting young visitor was pushed off the plank into the water by the mischievous young Donohoes. The gardens proved so fruitful that, after canning and storing for her own family, Mrs. Donohoe had produce to give to her neighbors who could not water their gardens. Most years she raised cabbage in sufficient quantities to sell enough to Fred Gatz, O’Neill butcher, for several barrels of kraut. An Indian scare, the blizzard of ’88 and some dry years were all a part of the family’s experiences. The 1877 rumor that Indians were coming caused the Donohoes and their neighbors to flee their homes and gather in O’Neill until it was determined it was safe to go home again. The battle of the Little Bighorn had taken place only the year before and the horror of it all was still vivid in the minds of white people all across the frontier. Most of the settlers had a very lively fear of hostile Indians riding down upon them any day, any hour. Consequently, when a rider spread the dread warning “the Indians are coming,” most of the people fled their homes to gather in the nearest place that offered protection. By the middle’eighties Mr. Donohoe was able to build a fine two-story frame home on his tree claim. The first of its type in the area, the house was the show place of the country, and there in 1887 twin girls were born to John and Mary Donohoe.
During his first years in the county John had had to ride to Neligh for supplies and to carry wheat to Nollkamper’s mill to be ground into flour. All of the family sewing and mending, too, was done by hand until about 1890, when sixteen-year-old Mary Donohoe spent a winter in town where Kate Daily taught her to sew on a machine. To make use of her newly acquired skill, her father then bought her a sewing machine, an almost unheard of luxury at that time. To prepare for their first communion, the older Donohoe children walked barefoot to town, carrying their shoes. The seven mile walk, however, was considered fun rather than a hardship, for the children of other families joined them along the way and a good time was had by all. At the age of fifty-seven, John Donohoe died in 1892 while some of the children were still very young, the twins being only five years old. John, the eldest son, had had one year at Fremont Normal School before his father’s death. Now he came home to stay on the farm and help raise and educate the others, for Mary Donohoe was determined that her children should have good educations. John also stepped into his father’s shoes as a Shield’s Township Supervisor, the youngest such official in the county. Tom, the second son, loved the soil. Purchasing a farm just west of the “home place,” he became a very successful farmer. Mary stayed home and helped her mother until 1901, when she married a young Scotsman, George MacLeod. James went down to Fremont Normal for awhile, then “read law” in the office of M. F. Harrington in O’Neill until he was able to pass the state bar examinations. He then practiced law in his home town for twenty-eight years. A state senator in 1908-’09, he was a leader in the State Constitutional Convention held in Lincoln. Appointed a Federal District Judge at Omaha, he held the post for twenty-three years and was much admired for his fairness and judicial courage. Hugh Donohoe also became an attorney, practicing in Washington for many years. Patrick was a successful insurance agent and realtor in O’Neill. When he retired in 1965 at the age of eighty-five, he was the oldest person born in Holt County and still living there. Eugene, another attorney, practiced his profession in Detroit and, at age eighty-eight, was still an avid golfer.
The twins, Margaret and Elizabeth, graduated from St. Mary’s Academy. Margaret then attended Peru Normal, took additional musical training in various colleges and taught school in Omaha until her marriage in 1926 to George Agnes of O’Neill. Elizabeth was one of the earliest graduates of Boyles Business School of Omaha to use the Stenotype machine for taking dictation. She worked as secretary for her lawyer brother James until her marriage to Ben Grady of O’Neill in 1921. After her husband’s death in 1938 she was a secretary of the Missouri River Division of Engineers until her retirement in 1957. One has to agree that widowed Mary Donohoe and son John did right well by the young Donohoes, back in those pioneer times.
Henry Stanton, of County Mayo, Ireland, and Mary McHale were married on St. Patrick’s Day, 1873, at Castlebar, County Mayo, and left for America the next day. A few weeks later they joined others of their nationality at Pittstown, Pennsylvania where Henry found work in the mines. Pittstown was not a happy place for the Stantons; two of their first three babies died there and they lived in constant fear because of the high accident and death rate in the mines.
When the young Stantons heard of the free land in Nebraska they, with two other families, the Tom Welches and the Tom Gallaghers, set out for Holt County. At Wisner Henry bought a horse which, hitched with an ox, made a team he used for years. Mary bought two new wash tubs. She then packed all her best clothing, including her beloved wedding bonnet, in the larger tub and turned the smaller tub upside-down over it. Before the end of their first day on the road north a heavy rain pelted them and the tubful of finery, thoroughly soaking everything. The emigrants reached O’Neill on June 15, 1877 and Stanton immediately filed on a quarter about four miles northwest of town. Like the others, these newcomers had to go to Eagle Creek or the Niobrara for timber. On one of their trips the new comers were suddenly surrounded by ten or twelve Indians, all painted as if on the warpath. The braves rode their horses in a circle around the frightened whites, then relieved them of all their tobacco, except for a handful 191 that one gave back to Stanton. Before they could do any further harm smoke signals were seen on the northern horizon and the Indians left in a hurry. Before long a cavalry patrol came riding over the hills.
On another trip to the Eagle they spied a big rattlesnake. One of the men heaved his axe at it and missed. The snake then coiled around the axe handle and held it prisoner for some time.
One Sunday morning, while the Stantons were getting ready for church, a saddled but riderless horse came running up to their house. The rider, a neighbor, had been shot off the horse back down the road aways. A little while before, this neighbor had surprised some big boys in his barn and had shot into the group, killing one of the boys, only to find they were neighbors and the one he had killed was godfather to one of his own children. On that subsequent Sunday morning, as the ranchman was riding to church, a man thought to be one of the dead boy’s brothers, was suspected of shooting him off his horse.
Both killings were tragedies, but not too unusual for the times, for those were vigilante days, suspicions were rife and triggers too easily activated. Doc Middleton was a frequent visitor to the Stanton homestead, although no horses were ever lost to him. But when Al Heilman stopped in, Stanton sat up all night protecting his horses. Seven more children were born to Henry and Mary on the homestead. In 1878 there came to O’Neill John McGreevy, his wife Bridget and three children, one of them a son, Bernard. They, too, had come from Ireland to Pennsylvania to the coal mines, and in Holt County they settled seven miles northwest of town in the Scrantonian settlement. In 1972, Bernard’s eighty-eight-year-old daughter, Margaret McGreevy, told the story of her family’s near one hundred years in the county.
“My father, Bernard, was born in Ireland; my mother, Mary Ann Mu- bray, in Scotland, of Irish parents. My father was under twenty when they came to O’Neill. The next year, when they thought they had good crops coming on, the grasshoppers came and ate everything, including Grandpa’s shoestrings. “Grandpa took a homestead and a timber claim. Father, as soon as he. was old enough, also took a claim. Later he farmed all three places. Mary, the oldest daughter, soon married Patrick Hagerty, the ‘old timer’ of 1875 who had opened the first store in O’Neill not long before. Bridget, the other daughter, married Thomas Naughten, a young neighbor. “The neighbors, Dennis Hanley, Ed Graham and Tom Welch, all advised Grandfather not to plant anything but cottonwood and boxelder trees on the dry, sandy land, but Grandpa remembered the beautiful ash trees in Ireland and he always replied, ‘I will plant ash.’ The only place to get help was from the Government Agricultural Office in Omaha and from there he obtained two large gunny sacks of ash seeds. Dad plowed up ten acres of virgin soil and the rest of the family took turns digging holes with a batter spoon Grandmother had brought from Ireland. Grandpa filled every hole with ash seeds, then everyone prayed they would grow. And for every little hole there was an ash tree, so many ash trees that they gave many of them for the courthouse grounds, the school grounds and for both sides of Main Street from St. Patrick’s church to down town.
“Mother had come from Scotland to Youngstown, Ohio, and she had a dear cousin, Mary Welch, who lived in O’Neill in a log house. Mother Top row: Mr. and Mrs. Henry Stanton, Jr. Lower row: Mr. and Mrs. Henry Stanton, Sr. (Homesteader – 1877) wanted to see that forlorn land where people lived in such houses, so she came out and it hapened to be the time of year when the corn cribs were all empty, cleared out for the next crop, and that meant it was time for a dance.
“My mother danced very beautifully, Irish jigs and Scottish reels, and my father was there to play the fiddle— and that was the beginning of the second McGreevy family to live in the old log house near O’Neill.
“In 1888, when I was four, we lost a week-old baby. Three near neighbors went around on horseback and told the rest about the baby’s burying and they came in the morning and in the afternoon and in the evening. They brought bread and cake and cookies, and my part was opening the door to let them in. We had very little furniture and few chairs, so they set up some planks on chairs for something to sit on. All my life i’ll remember the kindness of those neighbors who, though they had little or nothing themselves, helped out in 192 every way they could. And I remember Prince and Charlie O, the team that took us to town for the burial. “Mother died when we were all very small and we moved to town and our grandparents came to live with us and care for me and my brothers, John, Bernard and Will. Grandpa kept order as best he could. When we got out of hand he’d say, ‘I’ll put a nail in your ear,’ but he never did. One time, about two o’clock in the morning the Aurora Borealis, which is rare in Nebraska, could be seen all over O’Neill and Grandfather called, ‘Let ye git up, let ye git up and see the most beautiful sight ye’ve ever seen.’ All O’Neill was lighted up like it had been electrified. And after that we were interested in the stars.
“We had fun the way most youngsters do in small towns— the girls played house and the boys baseball. On Hallowe’en the schoolhouse privies got tipped over. And we played cards, even if it was only Old Maid, and the boys played checkers. Brother Will still plays checkers and has a trophy from a club in Seattle. “I remember how Grandpa liked to get together with Tim and John Dwyer from the Michigan settlement at the northeast edge of O’Neill. They loved to go back to the Gaelic songs and poems they had learned in school in Ireland. Grandpa would carry his Gaelic bible catechism down to the “bank sets,” (benches outside the bank) their favorite meeting place when the weather was nice, to speak Gaelic to one another. They were always surrounded by interested listeners. “Politics interested our family, too. Grandpa took the Irish World and we got the local weekly and the Omaha paper. Being Democrats, we listened to W. J. Bryan. When I was in high school we were privileged to go down the street to hear Bryan orating on the Democratic party and the ‘no cross of gold for mankind now.’ “As we grew up our father introduced us to music. We had a gramophone and listened to good lectures and music on it. Then we got a piano, but it was hard to get me to practice on it until I went to the (O’Neill) convent and took lessons from Sister Matilda. Dad got John a clarinet and Bernard a saxophone and Will a flute. And you didn’t play by ear— you had to learn the music. Often we would be in bed by ten o’clock, and then Dad would come home with the mail and if there was new music we would all get up and try it out.
“We played for dances, a combination of Irish music and dance tunes. Among our neighbors were Nora and Tim Sullivan, from over in the Michigan settlement. Tim seemed awkward but he danced the most beautiful Irish dances I ever saw, and taught his niece, Kate Sullivan, to dance with him— not just a jig but circling around in formations that made the Irish dance most meaningful.
“When I was about twelve years old some O’Neill people organized a singing group and invited an Omaha man by the name of Schubert to come to town for a year. He brought his family and taught voice culture. I wouldn’t miss one of those classes for anything. At the end of the year the group decided to put on Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado. Tess Sullivan sang the part of Violette, Wes Evans was the Mikado and Grant Smith leader of the band. The skating rink was made up to look like a sailing vessel and the chorus was all down front. I was in the chorus.
“To this day I can still sing snatches of the music, and I can still hear Tess Sullivan singing. It went over very well the first night, with such a crowd they couldn’t all get in to hear it, so they put it on again the next night. Everything went beautifully until someone gave Wes Evans a drink. He was a fine fellow and played his part well, but after that drink Tess didn’t like his arms around her in the final act.
“Then Sister Antoinette of Buffalo, New York, came to direct the high school at the O’Neill Academy. She was very well educated and I wanted to go to high school so badly, but our good grandmother had died and I felt I had to stay at home and help with the cooking and housekeeping. But I went to Sister Antoinette and she planned it all out so I could help at home part time and still finish school with my class— my cousins and Ann O’Donnell and Agnes Clark. Later on I went to Western Reserve University and to Chicago University and to a school in Colorado for further work on my nursing certificate— and I’ll always thank Sister Antoinette for what she did for me.” Thomas Naughton, born in Scranton of Irish parents in 1862, “and sick of working in the coal mines” by the time he was twenty, joined one of General O’Neill’s immigrant groups in 1878. Among the families he came with to O’Neill were those of Pat Hagerty, Dominick McDermott, Barney Kearns, John Enright, John McCaf-ferty, John McGreevy, the Donohoes, Cronins, Tierneys, and others. Tom took a homestead seven miles northwest of O’Neill, near the Mc-Greevy claim. But times were hard and the young man had to find some way to make a living while he proved up on his claim. Steam-boating on the Missouri River provided the answer. One day his boat got stuck on a sand bar and Tom was holding a line around a tree while winching off. His orders were to “hold that line come Hell or high water!” In bracing himself he ripped the crotch in his jeans. At the same time a hornets’ nest fell from the tree and the inhabitants came boiling out to the attack. Many found the rip in his denims— but he had to hold the line. It was a tough situation.
When he quit the steam-boat Tom bought a team and wagon and a milk cow and started back to O’Neill. It was spring, the ice was getting thin and everything went into the river. He cut the harness to save his team and got the animals all out, then took the wagon apart and carried it out. Eventually he reached his homestead again where, in 1882, he married Bridget McGreevy.
The family’s first transportation was the wagon he brought home from the river, then a spring wagon, next a carriage and, in 1914, a Reo car. While young Tom was still a bachelor a young man stopped at his cabin and asked to stay all night. Naughton recognized him as the young outlaw, Kid Wade, but found him a “likable fellow” and put him up until morning. Naughton’s story of the man shot off his horse differs a little from the Stanton story. He names the men, O’Lochlin and Eddie Gallagher, and says they had trouble over some cattle. O’Lochlin then shot Gallagher, after which the latter’s friends waylaid O’Lochlin and shot him as he rode home from church. The Naughtons came by a few minutes later and found him, lying dead on the ground.
On a hot July day when Tom Naughton and his two older sons were away, threshing, their home and everything in it burned. Someone had told Tom’s teenage daughter that charcoal was very good for whitening the teeth, so the young lady fished a piece of charred wood from the cookstove, laid it on the table and covered it with a white cloth to cool. Instead it set the fire that burned the home.
The Naughtons left O’Neill in 1935. Four of their seven children survive; Charles, Mary and Bernard (the writer of the Naughton history) live in Santa Rosa, California, and Nora in San Francisco.
Lawrence Casey, born in County Meade, Ireland in 1813 and married there to Mary Casserly, came to Scranton in 1848, where he worked in the steel mills. Thirty years later (1878), with his son Christopher and his daughter Bea, he came by rail to Wisner, then by overland freight to O’Neill. The Caseys were converts to 193 General O’Neill’s homestead persuasion. Lawrence located on a quarter six miles north of town, just north of school district 37. Christopher filed on land near his father, but later moved to Omaha. The next spring Mrs. Casey and daughter, Eliza, came to the homestead. With them came the Tom Coyne family, and Mrs. Mike O’Mal-ley and her daughter Elizabeth. The Coynes settled near the Caseys. Other near neighbors were the Dan Cronins and the Mullen family. Eliza married James Brennan, Bea married Peter Mersig. Lawrence and Mary Casey and both their daughters are buried in the old Calvary Cemetery in O’Neill.
Michael O’Sullivan, born in Dunn- away, County Cork, in 1828, left starving Ireland some twenty years later with a group of young emigrants bound for America. In the group was an Irish lass, Margaret McCarthy. The voyage was long, six weeks and three days, and difficult. Their food so nearly ran out that, during the last week, they were all on very short rations. But Cupid had been busy and, as soon as they docked at New Brunswick, Michael and Margaret were married.
The O’Sullivans went on to the mines of Pennsylvania and became the parents of seven children before Michael headed west in 1879 to look for a new home for his family. He located two miles southeast of O’Neill and hauled logs to build a house. By the next year the end of the rails had reached Oakdale, fifty miles nearer O’Neill, and there on July 4 Michael, with his ox drawn covered wagon, met his wife and five children. One child had died before he left Pennsylvania, another afterward, and a third, his oldest son Dan, died two years after reaching Nebraska of “miner’s consumption,” contracted while working in the coal mines. John, seven years old when his family came to O’Neill, grew up on the homestead and, in 1899, married Rose Ann Smith at Atkinson. Rose Ann, born in Connecticut in 1873, had come with her Irish parents to a homestead four miles east of Atkinson in 1879. The couple were married by Father Smith, Rose Ann’s uncle. They lived all their married lives on the O’Sullivan homestead, which John took over from his father, and there raised their seven children.
The “Michigan Settlement” families coming to Holt County in the ‘seven-ties included the Hanleys, Morrisons, Coffeys, Heebs, Harringtons and Bren-nans. Timothy Hanley, born in Cork County, as a young man came to Hancock, Michigan in 1863 or ’64, to work in the copper mines. His first wife died, leaving him with four children, he then married Mary Driscoll McCarthy, a widow with five children.
About 1877 Mr. Hanley came to O’Neill and filed on a claim in the Michigan Settlement, which began at the northeast corner of the town and extended north and east for eight or ten miles. He built a house and sent for his family. Five more children were born to them on the homestead. One of the Hanley sons, William born in the settlement in 1882, grew up and married Margaret Sullivan, daughter of James and Johanna Sullivan, also early settlers of the community.
Johanna had come to America from Cork County just before President Lincoln was shot. She was working in Boston on that tragic day and, since the name Abraham Lincoln meant nothing to her, she could not understand why everybody was making so much fuss over someone being shot. All of the Hanley children, and Margaret Sullivan as well, went to the Michigan Settlement school, District 17. Three of the Hanley sons went on to Creighton and became medical doctors. William and Margaret were married in St. Patrick’s church in August, 1917, and their two sons, rather far removed from pioneer times, loved to hear their parents tell stories of the “early days,” and of Grandfather Hanley’s ox team, Buck and Bright, and Grandfather Sullivan’s oxen, Brigham and Beecham.
William and Margaret celebrated their Golden Wedding in 1967. Their lives had spanned the period from the days of ox teams to those of driving dune buggies on the moon.
John J. Harrington, Sr. (Oh-Lon- gardail) was born in 1845 in County Cork, Ireland. His wife, Mary O’Brien, in 1848 in Castleton, County Cork. Married in 1865, they came to Boston in 1866 and hurried to join friends and relatives in Hancock, Michigan. Harrington filed his declaration of citizenship in 1878 and received his final papers in Holt County in 1883. While in Michigan John J. worked in the famous “Red Jacket” mine, under almost intolerable conditions until March of 1878, when, tired of working up to his knees in water, with death or a crippling accident just around every corner, he and his family, with their friends, the James Sullivans, boarded a west bound train.
At Wisner Harrington outfitted himself with a wagon, farming implements and a team of oxen. The latter provided his farm power for a good many years. At the end of the two-day trip to O’Neill both families moved in with some friends, the Kellys, who had arrived the year before. Harrington bought a relinquishment from a man named Carney about four miles northeast of O’Neill. On a trip to the canyons on Eagle Creek for wood, John Harrington and John Kelly were caught in a bad blizzard. There was no shelter so they plodded on through the storm. At nightfall on the second day Harrington thought he was on his own place but, unable to see anything, kept going. “But the oxen,” he said, “knew where they were and swung in a big circle, ending up at the home place.” Around the home fire of an evening the children often heard a story that set their blood aboiling; how, when the potato famine was so bad in Ireland and the people were starving, a big whale washed ashore on the beach near Castleton. The people ground their axes and knives and started cutting the beast into chunks for meat and oil. But on English maritime vessel noted the great gathering of people and came in to drive the Irish away with short arms, after which they hauled the whale out to sea and blew it to bits with the ship’s guns.” No wonder the Irish had no love for “Johnny Bull.” John J. was one of the first in his area to purchase a threshing outfit and do custom work for his neighbors, threshing for most of the Michigan Settlement and for many of the Scran- tonians. Later a Mr. Coyne entered into a long-lasting partnership with him.
John’s son, John J. Jr., in November of 1900 married Anna Stanton, daughter of Scrantonian Henry Stanton. After graduating from O’Neill high school, John Jr., had worked for O’Neill’s early merchant, J. P. Mann. In the same year of his marriage he started a store of his own on South Fourth Street. The Harrington store offered strong competition to the town’s other stores, but young John did not long enjoy his success, for he became very ill with something diagnosed as “stomach complaint.” In reality it was a ruptured appendix. O’Neill’s Dr. Flynn called in Dr. Salter from Norfolk and together they operated on the sick man in Dr. Flynn’s office. “Complications set in” and, though they rushed him to St. Joseph’s hospital in Omaha, he died on March 27, 1902 at the age of twenty-five. He left his widow, Anna, and a baby son, another J. J.
Harrington. Anna lived out her life in O’Neill and was nearly ninety-one when she died. There have now been Harrington’s in O’Neill for almost one hundred years, the present John J. having served the city as mayor from 194 May 1968 through April 1974.
Twenty-year-old John Coffey, another County Corkian, immigrated to Hancock in 1858. The next year Johanna Murphy arrived in Hancock from Ireland. In 1860 she and John Coffey were married. During the eighteen years they spent in Michigan, where John worked in the mines, nine children were born to them. Two died in infancy. With the remaining seven the parents joined a group of Irish families and followed General O’Neill to Holt County in 1878.
The Coffeys settled five miles west of O’Neill on the Elkhorn, where three more children were born to them. Their first home was a five-room house and their furniture was shipped in from the east. Although they enjoyed better living accommodations than most settlers of their time, they still lived through some Indian scares with the rest. Mayme Coffey Clark told of one occasion, after an alarm was spread that Indians from the Pine Ridge were headed their way, when Mr. Coffey put quilts and blankets on top of a load of hay, packed the family in and drove to the far side of the Elkhorn, where they spent the night. The next morning they went home— without having sighted any Indians.
In 1885 John Coffey built a new eight-room house. During the years the Coffey children were attending District 7, the school was known as the finest in Holt County. Presiding over the one-room school in that period were John C. Morrow, who later became County Superintendent of Schools; his sister Lavinia and his brother Will, all outstanding teachers. When Mrs. Coffey became paralyzed in 1901 her husband sold the farm and moved into O’Neill, where she lived on in her paralyzed condition for twenty-two years. In the spring of 1914 seventy-six-year old John Coffey spent many weeks setting out trees all around the new library building— then died in August. Both Mr. and Mrs. Coffey are buried in Calvary Cemetery among their many Irish friends.
C. J. Coffey, son of John and Johanna, born in Michigan in 1875, grew up on the home place west of O’Neill. In 1891 he had helped plant the great cottonwood grove that surrounded the house on the north, west and east sides and grew to become a well-known landmark. Con taught school for awhile, then went to work for John McCafferty in his O’Neill hardware and furniture store. In the late ‘nineties McCafferty established a furniture and undertaking business in Spencer and put Con in charge. In 1900 Con married Mary Holt County’s new Courthouse in foreground. Public school building on the left. The little board “cages” protect new trees set out all around the courthouse. Clay Johnson Collection.
Mr. and Mrs. John J. Harrington, Jr. on their wedding day, November 5, 1900. Courtesy John J. Harrington.
195 Anna Dailey, a school teacher. Mary Anna’s parents, John and Ellen Dailey, were born in Ireland and married in England. John had brought his family to Pennsylvania, then on to O’Neill in 1878. Mary Anna had grown up on her father’s homestead eight miles northwest of the town, where the Daileys and the Coffeys had been neighbors. Frank Dailey married Margaret Coffey. Catherine Dailey married Patrick Biglin and lived in O’Neill. Nellie Dailey married James Gallagher, another O’Neillite, and William Dailey married Frances Menish and lived in Emmet, where he was president of the Emmet State Bank for many years.
Shortly after his marriage Con Coffey and his brother-in-law, John Dailey, bought the McCafferty store, which was known as the Coffey and Dailey store until Con bought out his partner. In 1919 Mr. Coffey sold out and moved his wife and four sons to Wichita Falls, Texas. There, two years later, a daughter, Mary Ellen was born to them. Mary Anna died the next day and the baby two days later. Con brought them both home to O’Neill for burial. Fourteen years later their bodies were taken back to Wichita Falls for reburial.
Patrick Brennan, born in County Kerry on St. Patrick’s Day, 1835, came to Montreal at age sixteen. There he learned to make boots and shoes by hand, then moved on to Indianapolis where, in 1859, he married Honora Brennan, an Irish lass with the same surname as his own. They were living in Memphis, Tennessee when the Civil War broke out. Pat served three years in the Confederate Army, then moved to Ladoga, Indiana. Fifteen years later, in 1879, Pat and Honora, their sons, James, Frank and Mike and their daughter Anna, boarded a train for Stanton, Nebraska, then the end of the rails. From there, with several other immigrant families, they came by wagon train to O’Neill, arriving on October 8.
Patrick, one of the few Confederate soldiers to come to Holt County, seems to have been welcomed to the colony— no doubt because he was as Irish as the others. The Brennans settled on a timber claim and homestead near the District 37 schoolhouse northeast of O’Neill, put up a sod house and planted the rhubarb, horseradish and gooseberry roots they had brought along. These plants are still growing in the garden on the James Brennan place, now owned by his grandson, Walter Brennan. Three years later Patrick was able to build a frame house for his family, but Honora died in October of that year, after living in the new house but a short time. The daughter Anna then took over the housekeeping for her father and brothers.
After losing all his cattle in the blizzard of ’88, Patrick moved to Omaha. In the meantime James Brennan, nineteen when he came to Holt County with his parents, had attained his majority and filed on a homestead on Redbird Creek, near the home place. In 1889 he and Eliza Casey, daughter of neighbor Lawrence Casey, went down to Omaha and were married in the Brennan home. The next year Pat and the younger members of his family came back to O’Neill, where Pat opened a shoe shop on the corner of Fourth and Douglas.
James and Eliza lived out their lives on the Redbird and died in 1943, James in February and Eliza in March. They are buried in the old Calvary Cemetery, near Patrick and Honora. The Heeb family is the only non-lrish household listed in this group. John, a brick layer, and his wife had come from Austria in 1860 to settle in Allentown, Pennsylvania. The next year Mr. Heeb enlisted in the Union Army and served to the end of the war. Mr. and Mrs. Heeb and their seven sons homesteaded twelve miles from O’Neill in 1878. John supported his family by freighting from Battle Creek (near Norfolk) to a cattle ranch at Chadron in the far northwest corner of the state.
During their first year on the homestead the family walked to O’Neill. Later they owned a team and buggy. In 1882 Johnny Jr., left home one day to walk to a neighbors— and was never seen or heard from again. Closer to O’Neill, neighbors to the Kilmurrays, were Philip and Mary Morrison. Natives of County Cork, they came first to Danville, Illinois, then to Holt County in the late seventies. They brought six children with them and two more were born on the claim. In 1900 one of their older sons married Ellen Kilmurray. When eight-year-old Dennis H.
Cronin came with his family, the Daniel Cronins, to O’Neill in 1877 he had no way of knowing what a long and active part he was to play in the community’s affairs. His civic and political activities have been related elsewhere but here further details of his family life are in order.
In 1894 he married Kathleen Lorge in Cedar County and brought her home to O’Neill. To their union seven children were born. The eldest, Julius D., born in 1895, was a graduate of the Creighton College of Law. Following overseas service in World War I, Julius came back to O’Neill to practice, and to serve as County Attorney from 1922 to 1946. He was president of the Nebraska County Attorneys’ Association in 1929 and 1930, and President of the State Bar Association in 1953 and 1954. In 1961 he was elected to membership in the American College of Trial Lawyers and was a member of the American College of Probate Council. At present he is Chairman of the Board of the O’Neill National Bank.
Francis Cronin, the second son, graduated from O’Neill High in 1917, then went to work as a bookkeeper in the bank the next year— when its assets totaled $600,000, its deposits $450,000 and its capital accounts $112,000. As the years passed he was successively elected cashier, vice president and (1948) president, the position he still holds. In June, 1973, the O’Neill National Bank’s assets stood at $13,675,000, its deposits $12,500,000, and its capital at $1,232,000.
In 1929 Francis married Mary Irenaeia Biglin, daughter of pioneer Owen F. Biglin. His mother, Kathleen Cronin, died in 1911 and eight years later his father, then serving in the state legislature, married Faye Fer-rand and fathered two more children.
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