Pioneer Atkinson Chapter Twenty-Five some member of the Donlin family for almost one hundred years.
Hy Nightengale, who grew up in the Atkinson area, in his later years asked nostalgically: DO YOU REMEMBER: The old hitching posts on Main Street.
The holes dug by the horses tied there, stamping flies.
The echoing old plank sidewalks. The pump in front of Frank Bitney’s store.
The benches where the men sat and chewed tobacco and visited. Tommy Dunn’s ox team, hitched to a lumber wagon full of scrubbed and starched children.
The stick of candy Mr. Bitney gave each child that came into his store, and the sack of candy he put in every grocery box.
The big pot-bellied stove in the back of the store. The egg crates stacked in tiers.
The old calaboose.
Pat McDonald’s saloon, and Pat admonishing some of his customers, “Go on home now. Yez have had enough to drink today.
Fritz Stolte with his umbrella. John Stevenson and his fine team of black horses.
Ed Jennings and his team of oxen. John Torpy who supplied the town with the biggest cabbages in the country.
Dad Carter and his pool hall.
Jim Brown’s Livery Barn.
John Stewart and the Dexter brothers, all blacksmiths.
W.E. Scott, the lawyer.
The journeyman printer who performed on top of the old standpipe. Henry Swearing and Bert Adams, barbers.
A generation later John Olson wrote of Atkinson as it was on summer Saturday nights in 1917; the town crowded with farm families doing their weekly trading; men in overalls, visiting as they leaned against the Model T’s parked diagonally against the curb; ranchers gathered in Frank Keating’s implement store, getting ready for haying, buying equipment and repairs and visiting about the price of cattle and crops and the bad roads.
Women looking in windows and herding their children along; the three steps in front of Fred Swingley’s Bank, filled with the usual Saturday night sitters and a few farmers, trying to solve the problems of the times. Will Schultz’s drug store fountain, crowded with women and children, sitting and standing two deep, drinking soda pop and ice cream sodas made with homemade ice cream.
The meeting of the Saturday night Alfalfa Poker Players. The two cream stations with cans of cream to be tested and pails and crates of eggs to be counted, and the women waiting for the checks so they could buy their supplies. The smell of popcorn from the machine in front of the George store; the click of the balls in Ed Humpal’s busy pool hall. The two barber shops with three chairs in each and all the barbers working at full speed, hoping to get all the customers taken care of before midnight. A shave was 15c, a hair cut 25c, a bath the same, and a shoeshine 5c.
In one of the barber shops the backroom was full of men playing pitch and seven-up, the cards so sticky they had to be dusted with talcum every little while. The old skating rink, now the Miller picture show, was filling up with movie goers and Al Miller was selling tickets for 10c and 25c. Two other busy places were John McNichols and Carl Seimson’s saloons, with the illuminated METZ BEER signs over their doors. Two bartenders in each place were trying to take care of everybody’s thirst before eleven P.M.
The band stand in the main section of town, with the fourteen piece band tuning up for the eight o’clock concert. None of the players had uniforms but they all had a lot of music. The westbound passenger train came in at midnight, and when it whistled out of town at three minutes after twelve the city light plant started blinking the lights, a signal that the lights would soon go out for the night. Kerosene lamps then took over until five in the morning.
Fifteen minutes past midnight the barbers, poker players, clerks and all the other workers arrived at my Night & Day Cafe for the usual Saturday night lunch of sandwiches, homemade pie and coffee, all for 25c. By one A.M. the cafe would be empty. Looking down the street all one could see was the blinking flashlight of the town marshall. If he was not on the street he could be found in the Commercial Hotel lobby or at the depot, waiting for the early morning eastbound train, due in at 3 A.M. Once in a while a passenger got off and had to be shown to the hotel. The town was then folded up for the night’unless someone pulled the rope on the fire bell. And that is the way it was in Atkinson on a Saturday night, when it was my home.
From the first time white men saw the site along the river where Atkinson stands today, it seems to have looked like a good place for a town. A very early priest, Father Fanning, a missionary from Omaha, is said to have thought of locating a town there. However Fanningville never developed. Neither did the second attempt to establish a town come to fruition. Colonel John Atkinson, a friend of General O’Neill, was the second town platter.
The Colonel is described as “a stalwart military man. He wore his black hair long and rode a big black stallion that no one else could handle.” His home was in Port Huron Michigan. Just when he first came to the area is not certain, but upon his arrival he selected a quarter section just west of the Fanningville site, Section 6, Township 29, Range 14, south of the Elkhorn. He had Jim Donnelly break a furrow around the whole quarter, then had “two furrows a street wide, running east and west, plowed the full length of the piece. This was to be the main street of the town he planned to establish.” He had the land surveyed into city blocks and sub-divided into lots, all marked by cedar stakes.
The drawback was that the land was low and swampy, with the south half covered by sixty acres of buffalo wallows. In the spring of the year it would be quite unsuitable for a town; yet the F.E. & M.V. railroad had run its preliminary track survey across the land, which influenced the Colonel to plat his town alongside the proposed tracks.
In March, 1876, one John Crimmins made the first entry on the land where Atkinson now stands. He built a sod house on the intersection of First 225 and Main streets and started to dig a well. After digging nineteen feet through solid clay he came to loose sand. Having no lumber for curbing, he abandoned the place and settled on a new claim, two miles down the river.
Shortly afterward Prescott Schultz filed on the abandoned Crimmins’ claim and hired Sam Wolf and Neil McElravy to build a frame structure on the southwest corner of the quarter, part to be used for living quarters and the rest for a store. This was in 1877. However Mr. Schultz did not operate the store. This distinction went to Bill Dickerson, who wrote, “When his (Schultz’) goods came he had sickness in his family— so I opened them up and sold the first goods to John Carberry.” In a few days the first mail came in and was distributed by Mr. Dickerson.
Mr. Dickerson had just arrived on the site with his brother-in-law, Frank Bitney, who traded for the Schultz store and continued to operate the business. Dickerson lived with the family, handled the mail and freighted in supplies. Bitney then hired Charles Bauman, who owned a large yoke of oxen, to haul a load of lumber from the sawmill away north on Long Pine Creek. With the lumber he built a leanto onto the store for living quarters for his family. A little later he built a frame home about ten yards southeast of the present site of the Memorial Hall.
All of this was done before any surveying of town streets and lots had taken place. It is ironical that, while Colonel Atkinson had completely platted his town, not a building of any kind ever graced a single lot. Yet, across the river on higher ground a little town was thriving without the benefit of any platting.
The next building in the new town was a fairly large frame structure just north of the store which was used for a schoolhouse and meeting place. At this point Mr. Bitney offered the rail road officials forty acres of his land if they would build their road through his town— and then named the town Atkinson in honor of the Colonel, whose town had failed to materialize. Bitney’s next step was to hire John O’Dempsey Nightengale to survey his town, after which he donated corner lots to all who would build homes or businesses on them.
Such was the beginning of Atkinson, a village in the midst of a vast, grassy Nebraska Prairie, where the Elkhorn (named Come De Cerf or Horn of the Elk by the French Canadians) threaded its way through a series of small meadows. At first, wrote one settler, “except for a smear of willows in the bend of the stream, no trees broke the expanse. A few miles southward were the sandhills and, a day’s horseback ride to the north, rolled the bricky flow of the Niobrara.” Settlers in the area ahead of Bitney were James and Charles Donnelly, John O’Connell and William Charles. John Carberry came next and settled on a quarter on higher ground north of the river. He was soon joined by Robert Alworth, Sherrill Sagendorf, Peter Cassidy and others.
Frank Bitney filed his townsite on August 7, 1880 and the railroad came through the following year. Today the entire 160 acres once owned by Colonel Atkinson are owned by the Mack family and are under intensive cultivation.
The new town boomed. Farmers from Illinois, Ohio, Kentucky and Pennsylvania were breaking sod and digging in. Daily a new set of skeleton frames appeared along the streets and on a quiet day the sound of hammers could be heard out on the prairies miles away. Churches, hotels, livery stables and little homes rose both in the town and out on the valley. The first school was taught by Ellen Hovey in the Bitney home in the summer of 1878.
By July, 1879, Mr. Bitney had promoted a Fourth of July celebration into a reality. He had two tall poles hauled from Long Pine Creek to his store. James Davis, a young man who had learned woodcraft in his former home in Nova Scotia, volunteered to fit the poles together, end to end, to make a flagpole. Another strong young fellow helped set it in the ground at the corner of the store. At sunrise on the birthday of Independence a large crowd of “old settlers” were on hand to see Old Glory raised to the top of the pole. Simultaneously with the raising of the flag an anvil salute was fired by the local blacksmith shops, one BANG for each state in the Union.
Settlers from far out on the prairies, with “wagon loads of children from babies up to lads and lassies,” were on hand by the time the parade started. Children who had cattle to herd had stayed out with them extra hours the day before, giving them additional time to fill up so they could be left penned all day on the glorious Fourth.
A Civil War veteran in uniform, with red sash, saber and scabbard, led the procession. Next came a hay rack drawn by a fine team, bearing the Goddess of Liberty in flowing robes and a little girl dressed in white for each of the United states. A prairie schooner, pulled by a yoke of oxen carried Horace Greeley, represented by a pioneer and the slogan “Go West Young Man.” Then came the “Calathupians” on horses, dressed in queer clothing; and the ragamuffins in outlandish masks and Mother Hubbards. The rest of the day was filled with orations, eating, foot races, horse races, baseball and dancing.
The tall old pole at the northeast corner of block seven on Main Street stood in its original setting until fairly recent years, when it was replaced by a modern steel flag pole, now standing very nearly on the spot where the pioneer dug well in the street intersection once refreshed freighters, travelers and animals. By September, 1880, W.D. Mathews, on his trip from O’Neill to Atkinson, part of which was related in Chapter One, reported in his O’Neill paper that “At present her (Atkinson’s) future looks bright indeed and there is no reason why it should not prove to be all its friends expect. It will no doubt have one, and perhaps two, railroads. Mr. Bitney, owner of the town site— is postmaster and general merchant. He is enterprising, thoroughly reliable and proposes to do the square thing by individuals, manufacturers and railway corporations. “Mr. Sherril Sagendorf, one of the first settlers, believes in progression and has erected three buildings, one used for a hardware and drugstore by himself; a residence and a blacksmith shop occupied by Daniel Lynch, recently of Niobrara. Messrs Theo. Wheeler & Son, newcomers, have already put up the largest livery, feed and sale stable in the country, a good one which reflects credit, on the builder, Mr. Alfred Miller of Illinois. “Dr. Ph. D. Paul is also a newcomer but takes hold heartily and is a valuable acquisition to the community. His office is at the city drugstore and he will attend to all business in his line, from prescribing a dose of physic to amputating a limb. Christian Smith is arranging to open a meat market and will see that the community does not suffer for want of fresh meat. We honestly believe this is bound to be a first class young city and an excellent trading post. Mrs. Sagendorf we unhesitatingly pronounce as adept in the art of cookery and it is with the best of feelings toward Atkinson and her people that we head our ponies homeward.” The merchants and businessmen were doing their part to promote their city by using envelopes emblazoned with the legend “Atkinson, Neb., THE STAR CITY Of the Upper Elkhorn Valley, BEST in the WEST.
Of Atkinson’s first settlers the following is known: John O’Connell, born in Ireland had married Catherine 226 Daugherty in England and six children were born to them before they embarked for America. After about five years as a lumberjack in Wisconsin, John heard General O’Neill’s story of the fine land in the West that could be had “just for the asking.” John and Catherine promptly bought a covered wagon and four oxen. John had learned that a plow and a grindstone were the prime necessities for a homesteader’so these implements were the first things loaded into the wagon. The children and other supplies were fitted in around them and the outfit set out. Except for Nicholas, the oldest son, who stayed behind to finish the logging season, then walked all the way to the new home in Nebraska. James and Charles Donnelly and William Charles arrived in O’Neill at about the same time as the O’Connells. All were disappointed with the situtation in O’Neill, “where there seemed to be friction over certain matters,” and all pulled on west about nineteen miles and staked claims on the south side of the Elkhorn. The following spring John Carberry settled on the north side, a little up-river from O’Connell’s. Immediately upon his arrival John O’Connell put up a tent on his claim. Then he and the other men drove to the Niobrara to cut and haul logs for their homes. John built log walls on the outside of his tent, then drove his oxen to Wisner and hired out to help build the railroad on into the northwest from that point. While he was away a prairie fire raced across the country, driven by a wind so strong that it swept the flames over the log and tent home without damaging it. The O’Connell’s white tent could be seen for a long distance on the treeless prairie, and on one occasion it saved the lives of two lost and famished prospectors who were returning from the Black Hills after being driven out by soldiers. Indians, too, were attracted to the tent and came quite often to ask for food and to sharpen their weapons on the grindstone. They gave the O’Connell’s wild game in return for this privilege. When John returned from his railroad work that fall he brought the winter’s groceries and lumber to roof his log house, the first finished structure in the Atkinson area. It was in this little home that Father John Smith offered the first Mass in that region. John later moved the cabin to a new site west of his original claim, enlarged it and there lived out his life. The cabin later became the home of his son, Nicholas. In 1965 the historic old dwelling was moved to the Stuart Historical Museum site. In the early years John planted oak and walnut trees in a square next to the river bank. The grove was a favorite picnic spot for the Atkinson community for many years. It also provided walnut gun stocks for the army during World War I.
Nicholas O’Connell married Alice Smith in January, 1884, at St. Joseph’s church in Atkinson and lived in a cabin on his own homestead, two miles southwest of his father’s. Nicholas and Alice were the parents of nine sons and four daughters. The children had pleasant memories of growing up beside the Eklhorn with its swimming, fishing and skating. Their school days spanned the years from 1895 to 1929.
Five of the O’Connell boys were in military service either in World War I or World War II, or both. John, a graduate of Creighton Medical College, enlisted in the Navy in 1918 and remained for thirty-two years, seeing active service in the second world war. Dan served in the Army in the first World War, then came back to Atkinson to go into carpentry and the lumber business. Lawrence joined the Coast Guard in the second war. Later he became an attorney and a judge. Donald was in the Army in World War II, and Hugh, another Creighton Medical graduate, enlisted in the Navy and served there for twenty years. Three of the girls were teachers, one became a nun, the fourth was secretary for many years to the clerk of the District Court in O’Neill. Only Francis stayed on the farm.
The Donnelly brothers, Charles and James, had been neighbors of Colonel Atkinson’s in Port Huron. In 1875 they built their log cabin near the present site of the Atkinson Airport. Evidently their father came with them. The family history states that “the old gentleman, called ‘Coochey’ was stone blind.” He was often seen walking up and down a path beside a newly broken field on his farm, using a cane and saying his prayers. There were two other sons in the family and an adopted daughter. One of the sons, George, also filed on a claim near his father and brothers. A daughter of John Donnelly later came from Port Huron to live with her uncles, Charles and James, until she married another settler, William J. Griffin.
Frank Bitney who, with his wife and two little daughters, had come to Holt County with the McEvony colonists in time for his son Frank H. to be born there in May, 1874, moved on up the Elkhorn in 1877 to settle where the town of Atkinson now stands. There three more children were born to them.
Frank, born at Beaver Creek, Wisconsin of French ancestry, was the youngest of five brothers who had served the Union cause in the Civil War. In his new home he was a busy man’building, platting, securing the post office and opening his store, which he operated for twenty years. After selling the store he bought a livery stable and ran it until 1908. During his pioneer years he helped survey the Nebraska-South Dakota state line. While engaged in this work he was reported killed by Indians. It was three months before news of the error of the report reached his family. He was also one of Holt County’s early commissioners and a member of the Atkinson Reds, the crack baseball team. In 1884 he built the famed skating rink-opera house (some accounts give the date as 1882), which stood until 1929.
Frank Bitney, Jr. the second white child born in the Elkhorn Valley, was three years old when his family moved to Atkinson. Familiarly known as “Herb,” he grew up with the town and worked for many years in his father’s store. In 1898 he married Lucy Irene Russell and became the father of two daughters.
Robert Alworth, born in County Clare, Ireland, in 1829, at seventeen earned his passage to America by dancing Irish dances on shipboard for the enjoyment of his fellow passengers. In Chicago he met Bridget Coady. They were married in her home near La Crescent, Minnesota in 1854 and lived on a farm there. During the Civil War he enlisted in the Third Minnesota Volunteers and served out his enlistment.
Robert and Bridget became the parents of eleven children in Minnesota, but brought only the eight youngest with them when they answered General O’Neill’s call for colonies to go to Nebraska. Among her possessions packed in the covered wagon, Bridget had her sterling silver and her Damask linen tablecloth picturing the twelve Apostles at the Last Supper, mementoes of some of their better wheat farming years on the Minnesota prairies.
One of the children, Julia, only five at the time, walked with her older brothers and sisters ahead of the wagon, driving the livestock the Alworths brought with them. One day a big buck deer charged out of the forest, scooped Julia up on his antlers and disappeared again into the woods. The other children ran back to tell their parents, and all went hunting for the little girl. They found her, unharmed, sitting on a path near the road. The deer had just stopped, she told her frightened family, lowered his antlers and let her slide off. After the family crossed the 227 Missouri and headed west they found fewer and fewer trees. By the time they reached the Elkhorn Valley all they could see was miles and miles of grass’and thousands of bleaching buffalo skeletons. At “O’Neill City” Robert left his family and set off with two other Irishmen to look for homesteads. Some twenty miles up-river Alworth selected a spot about a mile west of present Atkinson, where thickets of plum and chokecherry shrubs grew along the river. There he built a sod house against a small rise beside the river and set out trees to mark his farmstead. The trees still stand today.
The Alworth house had the first wooden floor of any home in the area, and there an early Catholic Mass was celebrated soon after the family moved in. They also had Saturday night dances on the floor and the Catholic neighbors stayed over for Mass the next morning. Bridget Alworth was one of the most active members of the faith in raising funds for the first church at Atkinson. Her favorite means for this project was giving oyster suppers’after the railroad came through and the oysters could be shipped in.
St. Joseph’s cemetery, laid out in the early days a half mile northwest of the church, on land donated for the purpose by John Carberry, soon had several occupants. The first was the infant daughter of N\ary Crowley, the Alworth’s oldest daughter. The baby died in August, 1886. Her little cousin John Bauman, filled the third grave that October. Previous to the laying out of this cemetery three people had been buried on the John Welch homestead, due west of the new cemetery. The first had been Mr. Welch, then James Mallory, who died in an 1883 blizzard, and Patrick Martin Barrett, eight months old son of Patrick Barrett.
Julia, the little girl who rode the deer’s antlers on the way to Nebraska, was a daring child and loved to race her pony across the prairies. Her older brothers and sister tried to discourage this by telling her that, if she didn’t stay closer to home, a big black monster would come running after her some day. She was about eight years old the day she saw the first train steaming down the track’a big black monster, spouting smoke and making a terrible wail. It was coming straight for her and she and the pony went for home at top speed. The Alworths later moved from the sod house to a new frame house on their tree claim, three miles farther west.
John O’Dempsey Nightengale born in County Kildare in 1827, came to New York in 1851. In 1858, at the age of thirty-one, he married Ellen Connell and moved to Kilkenny, Minnesota, where they lived for twenty years and became the parents of nine children. Ellen Connell, born in Ballengarry in 1842, left Ireland in 1856. On the three-weeks-long voyage to New York she saw a man lose his balance and fall overboard. Although the captain ordered the lifeboats into action the man was not recovered and Ellen never forgot the tragedy. While living in Janesville, Wisconsin, she met and married John O’D Nightengale.
By 1876 John, weary of the heavy labor of trying to clear his eighty acre plat of timbered Minnesota land, decided to go out to Nebraska to look around. Leaving his family to look after the farm, he walked all the way to the Elkhorn Valley’and was delighted with the land he found there, where he wouldn’t be bothered with grubbing out timber before he could plant a crop. He filed on a homestead and a tree claim.
Before he started back to Minnesota John Crimmons, his neighbor, gave him some money to buy a team of horses to bring back with him when he returned. But it took John almost two years to sell his Minnesota land and get ready to move, and Mr. Crimmins, wondering at the long delay, walked to Minnesota, picked up his team and took it back himself. Part of the delay had been due to Ellen’s reluctance to leave her home for the Nebraska wilderness. By August 1878, however, the Nighten- gales, except for Ellen and the baby, were ready to leave with all their worldly goods and some poultry packed into two covered wagons, drawn by a team of oxen and a team John O’Dempsey Nightengale, pioneer settler, lived in Atkinson area from 1878 to 1889.
of horses. Seven head of cows followed. One night in camp one of the oxen got tangled up in his picket rope and strangled. They yoked a cow in with the other ox and finished the two months trip.
John halted his caravan on his new claim, neighbor to the Donnelly brothers, O’Connell, Bitney and a few others. Leaving his younger children with these neighbors, John and his oldest sons, John and William, hauled lumber from the Niobrara and built the “Nightengale castle,” so called because, in a community of sod and log homes, this first all frame dwelling seemed like a castle, even though it was only a plain little story and a half house, fourteen by sixteen feet in size.
When the house was finished Ellen and the baby came by rail to Wisner, where young William met them with the team and wagon for the long drive to Atkinson. Shortly afterward the Nightengales opened the first public school in their home. John O’D and his older daughter Mary were the teachers and the terms of three months duration.
The “Castle” was also the community meeting place for church services (Father Brophy was one of the first priests to hold Mass there), political meetings and dances. Wrote one of John’s sons, Hy, years later, “the ladies would dress in their best calicoes and slyly powder their cheeks and brows with the only available cosmetic, cornstartch, to hide their tan,” and so make ready to dance the nights away at the castle. Doc Middleton sometimes came to dances there.
John, a surveyor, helped lay out the towns of Atkinson, Stuart, Emmet and part of O’Neill. He located new settlers as they came into the region and, with some knowledge of law, helped them with their legal problems. He died in 1901. Ellen, or “Mom” as she came to be known to the community, had some peculiar adventures after she came to the homestead. One day while she and her daughter Tillie were gathering vegetables in the garden an angry hog rushed out of an adjoining cornfield, knocked Mom down and sank his long tusks into her leg above the knee. Courageous Tillie pulled up a stout cornstalk and beat the pig off her mother. At the house they cleaned and bandaged the wound. The next morning neighbor John Torpy came over, heard the story and told Mom she’d better take the first train to Omaha, as pig’s tusks were poisonous.
Mom took his advice’and the Omaha doctor told her she had barely made it in time. Another four or five 228 hours, he said, and she would have lost her limb and maybe her life. The wound was many weeks in healing. Another time she was on her way to market with a cow tied behind the spring wagon. The cow became frightened, or contrary, and overturned the wagon, throwing Mom, wagon seat and all, to the ground with great force. Mom came out of that one without a scratch.
Still later she was on her way home from town in the buggy with her groceries and a sack of plums she had picked. A wire, wound around the singletree, in some way came loose and jabbed the horse in the leg, causing her to run away. The faster she ran the harder the wire poked her. Finally the buggy tipped over, stringing Mom, the groceries and the plums along quite a strip of roadside. Although her face was badly bruised and scratched, Mom walked to the Mike Cross home, not far away, for help.
Mike was home that day, suffering from some infection of the nose and eyes that caused those members to be badly swollen and inflamed. He got his own horse and buggy and took Mom back to where her upset had happened to help her gather up her groceries and take her on home. Mom wanted to pick up her scattered plums, too, but Mr. Cross objected. That road was rather heavily traveled and he didn’t relish lingering on it any longer than necessary, fearing that any folks who might come along and see them in their disfigured condition would think they had been in combat.
The first regular undertaker in Atkinson was Thomas Gallagher, who bought the first hearse seen in the town. When he unloaded it from the freight car he drove it down through Main Street. Mrs. Mike Cross and Mom were talking together on the street when it went by. Mrs. Cross jestingly said to Mom, “Maybe I’ll be the first to ride in that grand vehicle.” A short time later she took violently ill while walking home from Torpy’s where she had been visiting. The doctor called her attack “inflamation of the bowel,” (appendicitis) and she died two days later, and was the first to be taken to the cemetery in the new hearse.
After her husband’s death, Mom, a shrewd and active woman, took care of her farm and her town rentals until 1931, when she fell and broke her hip. Still alert and interested in all about her, she lived past her one hundredth birthday and died in 1942. Three of her children, Margaret, Thomas and James, spent their entire lives in the Atkinson community and all lived to be past ninety years of age.
When, a few years ago, Hy Nightengale wrote his reminiscences about “This Old House,” the Nighten-gale “Castle” that had sheltered him in infancy, childhood and youth, was still standing, unoccupied, on its original site, surrounded by trees grown old that he and his family had planted. He was the last living member of the family that had come from Minnesota almost a century before and it saddened him to see the old home, once so grand, “isolated, deserted, devastated and desecrated.” For vandals had wrecked the interior not long before. Since then Hy, too, has joined the rest of his family beyond the Great Divide. For the benefit of his country customers Mr. Bitney, a kindly, congenial man, had installed a pitcher pump in the street in front of his store and a long bench on the board sidewalk at one side of his door where the men folk could sit and visit. There was a pot-bellied heating stove in the rear end of the long room. Behind it, hidden by its bulging sides, some of the older women gathered to reach into their skirt pockets for their little corncob pipes. Mr. Bitney kept a cigar box full of loose tobacco on the end of the counter there for these ladies, who smoked and visited in comfort until time to get to their “trading.” In the meantime the good storekeeper was passing out stick candy to all the well scrubbed country children’the girls in startched calico and the boys in knee pants and long black stockings. After they finished their sweets their mothers took them out to the pump for another cleaning. Sherril Sagendorf, the young man “who believed in progression,” had opened a dugout saloon when he first Mr. and Mrs. George Donnley, neighbors to the Nightengales. Mrs. Donnley assisted Dr. Douglas in baby cases, administering that first spank to many a present Holt Countian. Mr. Donnley wandered for ten hours in the blizzard of ’88 before accidentally bumping into a house near Holt Creek, where he was taken in and cared for.
came to Atkinson. He was also the first dentist in the town. His only dental service was the extraction of aching teeth and one account notes that he couldn’t always find the aching molar on the first try and sometimes pulled some sound teeth before locating the one causing the trouble.
Patrick Peter Barrett, another of Atkinson’s first families, was born in County Mayo in 1841. He emigrated to Boston in 1862 and found work in a shoe factory. Ten years later he married Annie Finnegan, also Irish born. With her family she had come to America in 1861 and was working in a J.P. Coates thread mill in Providence, Rhode Island, when she met Patrick. They were married in Boston and had two children by the time they followed General O’Neill to “the land of milk and honey” in 1877. The Barretts came by train to Wisner, where Pat assured himself of half of the General’s promise by buying a milk cow and a churn. Their homestead was six miles southwest of the tiny new village. Their first son to be born in the new land was the baby buried on the Welch homestead. James A. Davis and his wife, Arina Wyman Davis, were the first of six generations of Davises to make their home in the Atkinson community. The couple came in 1878 and settled four and one-half miles southwest of town, neighbors to the Barretts. James, a Welshman, was born in 1820. In 1855 his family moved to Minnesota. “Twenty-four years and thirteen children later” James and Arina moved to Atkinson.
The family history states that “Social life got off to a flying start when the Davises held the first dance in their sod house. From that time on, 229 dances and parties at the Davises were many and enjoyable.” After awhile James’ mother, Philandra Davis, and her daughter moved to Atkinson to be near the family. Only three of James’ thirteen children stayed on in the Atkinson community but they account for a goodly number of the remaining three generations to make the region their home. Eva James, who married young Bill Dickerson, had twin boys, Gilman and Gilbert. Gilman married Jennie Weekly in 1901 and had four children. Five of their eight grandchildren live in Holt County, as do twenty-four of their great-grandchildren. Gilbert married Mayme O’Connor and had nine children, but of their nineteen living grandchildren only one, Philip Wyman, uses Atkinson as his home address. Mr. and Mrs. John Bouman left Baden, Germany, for America when their first son Charles was six months old. Seven more children were born to them in Honesdale, Pennsylvania. Charles went west very early and found the adventure he sought in Newton, Kansas, where he was a deputy marshal for awhile. The town was new and wild and, at the most popular saloon, he frequently saw a boy of about sixteen in a red velvet suit, hanging around the gaming tables.
One night things got a bit out of hand and bullets began to fly. Charles was shot in the hip, and as he fell he saw the boy in the velvet suit going out a window. Charles recovered, went on several buffalo hunts and then returned to Honesdale to marry Mary Ann Moran. After working in a meat market for four years he took his wife and two children to a homestead west of Atkinson.
The year was 1878 and another family, the Leopold Ulrichs, came with them. The two men hauled stone and logs from the Niobrara to build their homes. On one of these trips Charles shot an antelope and was skinning it when a man on a black horse rode up. Charles had his gun ready in case the stranger proved unfriendly. Instead he seemed amiable and Charles invited him to get down and have supper with him. While they were eating antelope steaks the stranger said, “I know you. Do you remember me?” Charles said no and the stranger said, “You were the deputy in Newton and I was the kid in the red velvet suit.” They spent the night together and went their separate ways in the morning. Charles never saw him again.
Five more children were born to Charles and Mary Ann on the homestead and three of Charles brothers, Henry, John and Jacob, followed him to Holt County. Henry took a claim near his brother, married Anna Alworth and fathered six children. John married Jennie Segar and raised a family. Jacob contracted to build a section of the railroad on from West Point and hired Henry and John to work for him. After completing his contract he returned to Pennsylvania. After a few years Charles moved into Atkinson and ran a saloon on the site where the Night and Day Cafe now stands. John moved over onto Charles’ farm and built up a good herd of cattle. The blizzard of ’88 wiped him out and he moved to Omaha. Charles moved back onto his farm. When the Kinkaid Act was passed he filed on another half section. His sons, Henry and Charles, Jr. and his daughters, Ella and Mary, all past twenty-one years of age, filed on four more sections. All of this land was about thirty miles south of Atkinson, and there they built up “the ranch.” They traveled between the Atkinson farm and the ranch by horse and wagon at first, later in cars when the roads were good enough that they didn’t get “high-centered” or stuck too often. In 1910 Charles sold his farm and built a home in Atkinson. John Bauman, after twelve years in Omaha, came back to Holt County, farmed again for awhile, then moved into town and ran a grocery store until his death in 1933.
Conrad G. Boehme, born in Holland in 1842, was well off when he came to the United States. He and his wife located on a farm near Springfield, Illinois and at one time had $60,000 in gold in a bank there. During the Civil War he served in the Illinois Volunteer Infantry. He first saw Nebraska in April, 1865, from the deck of the Montana while making a nineteen days trip up the Missouri from St. Louis to Omaha.
He married Mary Yates in Springfield in 1871. Seven years later he came to Holt County as an employee of the track department of the Elkhorn Valley railroad, ballasting the road from the Missouri River to Valentine. In 1881 he took charge of the gravel pit west of Atkinson, where his outfit loaded from thirty to forty gravel cars daily. A careless train crew caused him to be thrown under the cars and nearly cut in two by the wheels. The doctors packed him in ice and pronounced his case hopeless. He was three months in recovering.
When the Boehmes first came to Atkinson there was no depot or water tank. Later, when the town had two school houses, one for the lower grades and one for the older children, there came a bad October blizzard. Mr. Boehme helped get the fourteen children out of the first school by stretching a rope from the depot to the school house. After getting these children to his own home, the section house near the depot, he and some other men stretched the rope to the other schoolhouse, rescued the inmates and kept most of them in the depot until the storm was over. The Boehmes raised eight children in the section house, which was their home for many years. The first depot, a small shack, stood about six hundred feet west of the present depot. Billie Bryant, called the “Kid” was the first depot agent.
George Howard Dexter and Eliza S. Jewell were born in Vermont, George in 1828 and Eliza in 1830. They met years later in Pennsylvania, where they were married on Christmas Day, 1850. While living in Pennsylvania George and four other men started to put down an oil well, something of a pioneer industry at that time. When they ran out of money and were unable to raise the $200 they needed to buy more pipe, they lost their chance to become oil men.
In 1865 the Dexters moved to Michigan. Their oldest son died there and their daughter Ella married a George F. Phillips, moved to Kansas and helped establish the town of Phillipsburg. In 1876 George Dexter, his wife and part of their large family moved to eastern Nebraska. Four years later George and a son, William, came to Atkinson. They liked the country and, the following spring, brought the mother, a daughter Emma and a son Albert to a homestead near the town. George and William then opened a blacksmith shop, “Dexter & Son,” which they operated until the father died in 1892.
In 1890 the rest of the family moved into town and built the home in which “Aunt Em” lived for sixty-three years. In 1898 the brothers, Bill and Bert, opened the “Dexter Brothers” blacksmith shop. Their partnership lasted for forty-eight years. By then Bill had been the village smith for sixty-nine years.
Bill and Bert were good hunters and wild fowl were plentiful. Every fall they ordered two cases of twelve-gauge shells from Montgomery Ward and for weeks kept the town supplied with game. Many an Atkinson housewife filled pillows and feather beds with feathers from ducks the Dexters shot. Every Fourth of July at five in the morning the Dexter brothers wakened the town with their big “firecracker,” the traditional pair of anvils and a quantity of black powder. One busy fall day the brothers kept count of the shoes they fitted and nailed on horse hoofs between daylight and dark. They totaled ninety-four.
230 Bill married Bertha West in 1894. Their five children grew up in Atkinson. Bert married Bertha’s sister, Clara. For spending money young George Dexter, Bill’s son, sold the weekly Grit on Fridays and the St. Louis Post Dispatch on Saturdays. When he was a little older he did a good deal of trapping. One winter he teamed up with Paul Adams and the boys cleared about $200 apiece, a lot of money in those day.
When the first horseless carriages came to Atkinson things got exciting. There were one or two runaways of teams and rigs every day and the town council found it expedient to post signs declaring “Speed Limit 8-12 Miles” around the village. One evening Bill Dexter came home and ordered his children to stay off the street. “There are some crazy fellows running around town at twenty miles an hour,” he exclaimed in dismay. George and Eliza Dexter are buried in Woodlawn Cemetery, as are William and Bertha, Albert and Clara and “Aunt Em.”
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