Settlement On The Upper Elkhorn Chapter Twenty-Six Although the settlement on the upper Elkhorn was thriving at the beginning of the ‘eighties, the heaviest influx of settlers was yet to come. News of the wonderful opportunities in Holt County was spreading far and wide and eastern families, oppressed, unhappy, or merely restless and adventurous, were responding to the lure of “free homes in the west.” A.W. Muller was one of the adventurous ones. Alfred William was born in the little settlement of Mindenville on the banks of the Erie Canal in New York in 1859. Two years later his father, Abram, left the Mohawk Valley because of Indian trouble and settled in Kankakee, Illinois. During the nineteen years they lived there four more children were born and Alfred grew up, went to business college at Valpariso and learned telegraphy.
In company with his uncle, Theodore Wheeler, and family, young Al came to the village of Atkinson in a covered wagon in 1881. They camped where the township library now stands. Skilled in carpentry, Al built a general merchandise store for his uncle, then hired on as a clerk in the store.
The first issue of the Atkinson Graphic, printed August 10, 1882, noted that “Al Miller and Willard Wheeler will start next month for their old home in Kankakee.” Al and his cousin spread such glowing accounts of their new home in Holt County among their relatives and friends that Al’s father moved the rest of the family to Atkinson soon afterward and started a hardware store under the name of “A.W. Miller & Sons.” When Al was not working in the store he was busy building houses and barns for settlers around his own homestead six miles north of town.
In September 1884 Al married Mary Ellen Al worth. About ten years later he leased the Merchants Hotel (now the Stockman Hotel) and operated it for many years. The town’s leading hotel, it had the reputation of dispensing good food and warm hospitality. During his spare time in the early years Al was a market hunter, shooting prairie chickens for a local dealer who shipped them east. In 1902 he hired on as a pumper for the railroad, keeping the track-side water tanks at Inman, Newport, Clearwater and Atkinson full for the engines. Al traded his homestead for the skating rink-opera house building in 1903, where he hosted traveling shows and local affairs for quite awhile. In 1909, in partnership with Charlie Goodell, the station agent, he bought a gasoline engine and dynamo for power and put in the town’s first picture show. The first shows were two-reel westerns combined with a one-reel comedy’time forty-five minutes, admission ten and fifteen cents. After a couple of years the five-reel features came on the market. The biggest show ever presented in the old Opera House was “The Birth of a Nation” with its fifty piece orchestra. The projection machine was cranked by hand and Al Alfred William Miller and Mary Ellen Alworth Miller. had plenty of help right at home from his family of ten children.
In addition to his other businesses, Al served on the town police force. One of his police duties was the operation of the old steam engine that pumped water for the town and for the carbide tank in which a mixture of carbide and water manufactured the gas that lighted the village street lamps. On Saturday nights Al was especially busy as Main Street was a straight away half-mile race track and many of the Saturday horse races ended in enthusiastic fist fights.
Al Miller and O’Neill’s Arthur Mullen organized the Democratic party in Holt County, not an easy task because there were so few of that persuasion in the region at that time. Two Miller sons served in World War I, Lt. Arthur G.* A.S.S.C. Balloon Division, and Pharmacist Mate 3-c Harry F. of the Navy. Eight of Al and Mary Ellen’s grandchildren served in the second World War. Arthur Glen “Tidy” Miller, now operates the Miller 231 Theater in Atkinson, making a total of almost sixty years that the Millers have provided silver screen entertainment for the town. Minnie Miller, only daughter of Abram and Armenia, born in 1876 in Kankakee, was a very small girl when her family joined her brother Al in Atkinson. At age sixteen she graduated from Atkinson High with the class of 1892. After graduating with honors from Peru State Normal, she taught several rural schools near Atkinson. Then her brother persuaded her to file for the office of County Superintendent of Schools in Holt County.
Elected in 1902, she served for eight years, then moved to Ewing to teach in the schools there. In 1920 she married Ernest C. French. They lived in Atkinson for a few years, then operated a hardware store in Ewing until Mr. French died in 1928. She sold the store and later moved back to Atkinson. During many of these years Minnie was a correspondent for the Ewing Advocate and the Norfolk Daily News.
Another Illinois family that came to Atkinson in 1880 was that of Paul Seger. His parents, Donatus and Margaret Seger, had left Germany for Chicago before Paul was born. In 1878 the nine-year-old boy, with his parents, four brothers and a sister, moved to Omaha, and from there to Atkinson in a covered wagon. They had one cow which the boys took turns prodding along behind the wagon.
On April 1 they came to a small cluster of buildings on the prairie. They stopped and Paul went into one to ask the way to Atkinson. “You are in Atkinson right now, sonny,” the storekeeper, Frank Bitney, told him. To people who had lived in Chicago, or even Omaha, so few buildings did not look like a town.
The Segers homesteaded on the Elkhorn, five miles west and a mile north of the settlement. There Paul grew up, working at home or as a hired hand for the neighbors. Covered wagons were coming to and through the region every day, and camping wherever night overtook them. The Segers made a practice of visiting those who camped near them, interested in finding out who they were, where they came from and where they were going. One evening the campers they called on were the John Christs, from Darlington, Wisconsin. John and Margaret Christ had one little daughter, Katherine, and Paul Seger had no inkling, that evening, that he had seen his future wife in the settler’s camp. The Christs homesteaded about ten miles north of Atkinson. Both families being Catholic, they were among the founders and supporters of St. Joseph’s Parish, and Paul and Katherine were married in St. Joseph’s church in 1897. They made their home on the Christ hay claim, west of the homestead, and became the parents of eight children. Paul and his brother Donatus in 1909 bought J.J. Stilson’s farm implement business in Atkinson, and the following year established the first Ford car agency west of Norfolk. Seger Brothers operated this business for twenty-five years or more. Paul and Katherine observed their fifty-ninth wedding anniversary in 1956 and Paul died shortly afterward at the age of eighty-seven, the last of his father’s family.
Ohio born John Wesley Hitchcock and his wife Susie moved to Arming-ton, Illinois, in 1868. Ten years later they moved to Iowa, then on to Atkinson, where they settled five miles east of town in 1881. The oldest The Park Hotel was known as the Merchants Hotel before the turn of the century when Al Miller owned it. It is now the Stockmans Hotel. Pictured are Dick and Ellen Traner, Mrs. Ray (Maggie) Traner, Emma Stansberry and Mame Donnelly. Courtesy Atkinson Township Library. Six of the Miller brothers. Arthur G. is third from the left. of their four sons, Charlie, was eleven and William was seven. Three daughters were born on the homestead. John built a frame house and a sod-pole barn and dug a thirty-two foot deep curbed well. Although pretty well set up by 1888, he lost most of his cattle in the big blizzard. John had brought cottonwood saplings with him from Iowa. These, planted in an L on the north and west sides of his buildings, grew into a fine grove. Slips cut from these trees and sold to the neighbors resulted in other big groves that changed the looks of the countryside. An oval racetrack across the road west of the buildings proved a popular spot and many a “speed” record was mqde, and broken, on the track, which yet today can be traced in an irrigated cornfield farmed by Byrl Beck.
Susie Hitchcock passed away in 1890, after less than ten years on the claim. John carried on alone and 232 raised all his family except his youngest daughter Anna, who died in 1903 at the age of sixteen. John built up a fine herd of black Angus cattle. His saddle horses, buggy teams and big draft horses were his pride and joy. As he added to his herds he bought adjoining land, building up his holdings into a good ranch.
John lived to see all his sons and daughters married and settled in homes of their own in or near Atkinson. Charles married Laura Allbee of Iowa in 1894 and moved onto what is now known as the Sewell Johnson ranch. When their son Orville was born in 1899, Charles’ brother Wright made a flying trip with Charlie’s team and buggy to bring Dr. Sturdevant. Ever after Charlie treated that team with special kindness and respect for getting the doctor there in time.
When their daughter Feme was born in 1903 Dr. Douglas didn’t spare the horses either, for the baby was premature and there were no incubators then. However the baby’s grandmother Allbee, “with feather pillows, bats of quilting cotton, jars of hot water, unfailing endurance, the doctor’s explicit instructions and the love of the whole family” saved the mite of a baby, who lived to write her family’s history.
When his father retired and moved into Atkinson to live with a daughter, Mrs. Gertie West, Charlie moved his family to the old homestead, where he, too prospered. His favorite saddle horse, “Old Ned,” a fine three-gaited spirited animal, was held in high esteem by his children, who knew they had earned their father’s approval when he allowed them to ride the horse. Due to the mother’s failing health the family moved into town in 1911, where Laura Hitchcock died in 1914. With the help of relatives and housekeepers Charlie, too, raised a motherless family. Orville married Frances Ullrich of Atkinson and Fern married Ira L. Livingston, Nebraska’s biggest butcher. Ira, six feet, nine inches tall, weighed more than five hundred pounds.
William Hitchcock in 1898 married Margaret McKathnie, daughter of another Atkinson pioneer family. Margaret, a country school teacher, usually rode sidesaddle to her schools. After their marriage the young couple lived on a farm east of Atkinson for awhile, then moved into town. Their first car was a 1908 Ford, which William drove for two weeks before he let the family ride in it. By then he was fairly sure it wouldn’t blow up. The family moved to Boulder, Colorado, in 1920, where the children married and the parents died.
A fourth Hitchcock, John Wright, also came to Nebraska from Illinois in 1881, but his home town was Clinton and he may have been no relation to the John Wesley Hitchcock family. John W. was six years old when his parents settled on a farm east of Atkinson. He grew up, operated a livery stable in Emmet for awhile and married Ida Balleweg in 1906. They farmed southeast of Atkinson for five years, then moved into town. They were the parents of four children. A lover of livestock, John built a livery barn four blocks east of the main square and was doing well when his barn burned a few months later. He lost several horses, buggies, sets of harness and “some other livestock” in the fire. Doggedly, he rebuilt the barn and continued in the This picture spans the period ending the horse and buggy era and beginning the automtive age. Al Young and Frank Detter are the men standing in the garage livery stable. Courtesy Atkinson Township Library. A general store in Atkinson in early 1920’s. Courtesy Lawrence Kramer. livery business “as long as there were horses to be stabled.” Robert T. Hart of Pennsylvania married Nancy Gray in 1847. Eleven children were born to them before they moved to Atkinson in 1883, where Mr. Hart and two of his sons took homesteads six miles northeast of town. Robert N., who homesteaded with his father, had worked in a store in Mount Pleasant, Iowa, before coming to Nebraska. In 1883 he married May Palmer, a school teacher, at the home of his sister, Mrs. Arthur (Clara) Crossman, in Atkinson. His new wife stayed out on the homestead while he clerked at the Crossman, Sturdevant and Graham store in town.
When they proved up on the claim May Hart moved to town and she and 233 Robert opened a store of their own. The same year (1887) Alexander Hart, who had been employed by a Pennsylvania mercantile firm for fourteen years, came to Atkinson and went into partnership in the store with Robert and May. Five years later Robert engaged in general merchandising with A.P. LeClaire in a large frame building, which was later replaced with a two-story brick building. Three of their clerks at that time were Anton Zahradnicek, Joe Verzal and Tillie Christiansen. At the organization of the Security State Bank in Atkinson Mr. Hart became vice president and remained active in the bank until his death. For many years, and at the time of her death in 1934, his wife was a director in the same bank. Robert worked in the Odd Fellows Lodge, was an elder in the Presbyterian church and its treasurer for many years. He died in 1923 and is buried in Woodlawn Cemetery.
After dissolving partnership with his brother, Alex Hart became a partner with his brother-in-law, Arthur Cross-man, in his store. Later he purchased the entire stock and conducted a men’s furnishings and shoe store under the title “A.T. Hart, Head to Foot Clothier.” Alex was a member of Masonic Lodge Number 164, The Odd Fellows Lodge, the town board and the school board.
Charles J. Wilson, who came to Atkinson from Ohio in 1883 to manage Dr. C.S. Sturdevant’s new drug store, remained a druggist in the town for the next sixty-two years. He opened his own store in 1892. He had married Martha Lorinda (Rinnie) Hart, sister of Robert and Alex, in 1885. In 1909, after qualifying as a pharmacist, Rinnie became a full partner in the store with her husband. When she died in 1940 Mr. Wilson sold the store to J.J. Krska, but remained in the prescription and optometric department until shortly before his death. Rinnie Wilson was an accomplished pianist and served the First Presbyterian church as organist for many years.
Archibald and Lana Walrath came of a long line of Mohawk Valley pioneers. When diptheria took three of their four children in less than two weeks it was almost more than they could endure. They wanted to move from the site of their great loss and Holt County seemed indicated as the location of a new home. Several families from their area had gone there and the letters they wrote back about rich, fertile land, fine hunting and fishing and good business opportunities were most enticing. In March, 1885, Arch and Lana, with their one remaining child, Martin, got off the train at Atkinson’s new C. and N.W. depot. Martin, six, was delighted with the horse and hack that took them to the Boehme home, where they were to live until their own home was ready. That evening Arch, a veteran of the Civil War, entertained the Boehme children with tales of the battles of Antietem, King’s Mountain, and of Sherman’s March to the Sea. He showed them the six bullet holes in his body, mementoes of those battles, and took out his glass eye and put it back in.
The Walraths bought a three-acre tract of land about a ten minute walk from the station, on the north side of the tracks. They built a small house, set out many young cedars from the Niobrara and planted an orchard. Catalpas, lilacs, yellow roses and spirea landscaped the yard’and the rest of the tract was set to strawberries. In season as many as twenty-five helpers picked, sorted and crated the berries for shipment. But strawberries were not a sure crop in Holt County and they “switched to rhubarb, horseradish, winter onions and a big vegetable garden.” The little acreage grew to be one of the early day show places in the town. It had other attractions, too. A big cave, built to store sauerkraut, piccalilli and chow chow by the barrel, also held barrels of choice dandelion and rhubarb wines. Some of Atkinson’s most respected citizens made stealthy visits to that cave when their thirst got the better of them.
In 1899 Martin contracted Inflammatory rheumatism and nearly died. Lana cared for him until he recovered, but the long strain was too much for her. She died about a year later. One evening after his recovery Martin went over to the Bitney home to see his friend, Bob. While he was there Winnie Dickerson, daughter of Bill Dickerson, and her house guest, Coila Uttley, came to call on Winnie’s aunt, Mrs. Bitney. It was love at first sight and Martin and Miss Uttley were married in May, 1900.
About 1903 Arch and Martin opened a meat market, “A. Walrath & Son.” Meat markets were not “cool, clean crisp establishments in those days,” wrote Martin’s daughter, Maude. “It was said there were skippers in the cheese and livestock in the meat, but people expected such things. They just returned the goods, gave the proprietor a good ‘scotchin’ and took a nickels worth of shipped-in smoked ham or bologna in exchange.
“I remember the clean smell of new sawdust on the floor, and how I loved to run my bare feet through it. As the family grew (in time there were seven little Walraths) the house became a little crowded and Grandad (Arch) had a little cot and a topsey stove put in the back room of the market. There he played many a game of whist and checkers between customers, and refought the Civil War many times.
“Old-timers recall Grandad’s fiery Decoration Day speeches, given in the old Rink. They lasted for hours. My sisters, Leola and Helen, and I would march proudly to the platform and sing ‘The Good Old U.S.A.’ Leola’s dress was always red, Helen’s white, and mine blue.” Arch Walrath was laid to rest beside Lana in Woodlawn Cemetery in 1924. Today Martin lies there too, and lilacs and roses from the old yard bloom above their graves.
Samuel Meals came from Germany with the mass exodus of some 30,000 people in 1730. The Meals family settled in Pennsylvania and stayed until about 1859, when some of them moved on to Missouri, traveling on the Ohio river boat Dr. Kane. One of these, William Meals, had married Ellen Kohlmeyer in 1846. Nearly forty years later they came to Holt County and filed on land four and one-half miles south of Atkinson. William, too, was a veteran of the late war between the states.
Andrew Jackson Meals, seven when his family moved to Missouri, at fifteen went up into Kansas and took a homestead. When a contesting settler shot at him to scare him off the claim, he left, being too young to go to court about the matter. He fell in with a cattle herd going to Utah but later, while hunting buffalo in Kansas, he built the first sod house on the Medicine River in Rooks County. During those years he drove stage coaches, scouted for wagon trains and ran pack and bull trains to Fort Niobrara.
One of his bull trains was camped near the Atkinson settlement one night when the crew heard there was to be a dance at the O’Connell place. At the dance Jack Meals met Johannah Hayes, teacher of the first school in the little new sod schoolhouse in the new village of Stuart, on up the road from Atkinson. Jack and Hannah, married in O’Neill in 1881, made their home on a farm south of Atkinson. Two sons were born to them there before Jack was elected Holt County treasurer in 1886.
The family then moved to O’Neill. While Jack was in office some of the county funds disappeared. Although Meals was never blamed for the shortage he felt responsible, sold his farm and repaid the entire amount. In 1903 Jack and Hannah, with their six children, moved to Valdez, Alaska and lived out their lives there. Both 234 are buried in Valdez.
George, the second son of the Meals, went to St. Mary’s school in O’Neill. For spending money he delivered Saturday Evening Posts and Chicago Ledger magazines. At the age of ten he began helping his father survey for irrigation ditches in the county. Later he worked on the farm of his uncle, William Hayes, south of Atkinson. At the age of fourteen he quit school at the end of the seventh grade and began farming for himself southeast of Atkinson. George was eighteen when he moved to Alaska with his family. In Valdez he clerked in a grocery store but did not like the indoor work, so bought a team and outfit and went into business for himself, delivering supplies to the mines. In 1910 he returned to Atkinson and married Mary Katherine Gonderinger, the “girl of his dreams” with whom he had corresponded during his seven years in Alaska.
The couple lived on three different farms in the Emmet-Atkinson area and raised four children, including a set of twins, Melvin and Marvin. Mary died in 1964 and George has since commuted between the homes of his daughters, Hannah Krochina of New York state, and Lorreta Black of Denver. The twins still live near Atkinson, farming and raising hay and cattle.
James Albert Boies, of French ancestry, was born in Rome, Indiana, in 1856. He married Rosalie Phelps in Central City, Nebraska, in 1875 and came to Atkinson with his wife and son in 1881. Two more sons were born there. James was a stage coach driver for A.O. Perry, the hustling owner of the early line from Atkinson to Butte. In 1891 the family moved to Boyd County and James went into partnership with Al Heilman for awhile, raising cattle and race horses. He also operated a livery stable in Butte, then moved down to Stafford, southeast of O’Neill in 1894 and continued to breed and raise good horses. Both his sons, Charlie and William (Arthur had died while a boy) had the French love of music and dancing and were noted square dance callers.
The year of Asbury O. Perry’s coming to Atkinson is not given but he is frequently mentioned in connection with very early events in that part of Holt County. He was born in Winter-set, Iowa, in 1864, so must have been a very young man when he first came West. His first wife and one daughter died in Atkinson and are buried there. He had another daughter, Bess, and a son, Clayton.
Az will be remembered as the man who undertook to build a railroad from Atkinson north to Butte, across the Niobrara. The road up the steep Badger Hill just south of the river was a horse killer for freighters that used it the year around in hauling produce to Butte and lumber and coal back to Atkinson. Even the approach to Badger Bridge was “almost as steep as a house roof,” with the hill only a short distance south of it. Many a wagon either tipped over or got stuck on old Badger, and too many horses died of exhaustion making the pull. In winter the trip was especially bad, complicated by deep cold and heavy snows. Only the Russian freighters of Boyd County seemed not to mind the weather, one writer recorded. “A group of them, who had loaded up their wagons the evening before, were seen to start the next morning when the sun was just peeping over the frozen, chopped prairie road and the thermometer stood at thirty-five below zero. Cold enough to cut the pearl of a piper’s eye.” Knowledge of these conditions prompted Az to start his Atkinson and Northern Railroad. In 1901, after the failure of his railroad, Az Perry married a widow, Anna Stennett, in Iowa. Her daughter Verna was eleven years old. The Perrys also raised Dick Bates, a son of Anna’s sister who had died and left six children. The Perry’s four children went to school in Atkinson as long as the family lived there. Mr. Perry went to Omaha to deal in real estate for awhile, but returned to Bassett in 1915 and spent the rest of his life ranching. He died of dust pneumonia in 1939. The four children are now deceased.
Neighbors to the Hitchcocks and the Perrys, northeast of Atkinson, were the Purnells, George, Eliza and their two children, who came from Illinois in 1882 in a covered wagon with other members of the Purnell family. George’s father took a homestead nearby and his brother Albert settled on an adjoining quarter.
After two years in a one-room cabin, George bought a six-room house from a departing family and moved it to his claim. This home was made quite luxurous by the rag carpets Mrs. Purnell made. She wove her strips so that the light and dark widths would join end to end when sewed together, giving a handsome effect when the wall to wall carpet was laid over straw and firmly tacked all around the edges.
The Purnell’s first barn burned. George replaced it with a huge new one, complete with stalls for horses and cows and bins for grain. He even had feed troughs and a water tank inside. Mr. Purnell and his older sons, Ramon and George, owned and ran threshing machines, first a horse power outfit, then engine powered separators. They would be gone on their “runs” for many weeks in the fall and it was “a happy day when they came home for the winter.” The Purnell’s only musical instrument was a fife— which the father played as he taught the boys to jig to the tune of “The Old Gray Nag Came Tearing Down the Meeting House.” Their one-room home school was about a mile away. A woman teacher lived in the school for awhile, with one corner curtained off for a bedroom. One year there was no school there and the three Purnell children rode a pony to another school two and one-half miles away. One morning the pony jumped out from under them and they fell in their lunches. They were not hurt but they had no lunches that day’except what their schoolmates could share with them.
A rabid dog once came by the homestead, biting a pig and the family dog. The mad dog tried to bite Ramon but his heavy clothing saved him. The bitten animals had to be shot. Later the two youngest Purnell children died in a diphtheria epidemic. In 1899 the Purnell family moved to town and young George married Verna Stennett, Az Perry’s stepdaughter, and lived on a farm east of Atkinson until 1924, when they moved into town so their four children could go to high school.
Other neighbors of the Purnells were the Werners and the Haighs. Elias and Eleanor Werner, born in Pennsylvania, later moved to Illinois, where they were living when William Bokhof of Holt County came to buy horses to take back to Nebraska. His enthusiastic accounts of the Atkinson country decided the Werners to move to a farm in the Purnell neighborhood. They brought ten children with them, and one more was born on the farm.
One of the Werner daughters, Gertie, remembers that there was no Protestant cemetery in Atkinson when they moved there. When her sister Mabel died she was buried in a little grave plot on the Bowen place, six miles east of town. However Mr. Bowen refused to give the district a deed to the burial ground and a new cemetery was laid out in Atkinson and the graves moved to town. Seven graves were moved to this cemetery, about twenty rods east of the present highschool on Outlot A. Among them was that of Laura Wheeler and the Bigelow brothers. These last lost their lives in a well cave-in on their homestead fourteen miles northwest of town in 1881. Early burials were taken care of by the family and neighbors, who dug the grave, hauled 235 the body to it in a wagon, let the casket down into the grave with a stout pair of harness lines and filled in the opening.
Wayne Werner and his sisters, Idp,. Elsie and Carrie, moved into town in later years and lived together until Ida and Elsie died. Wayne and Carrie then moved into the Good Samaritan Center. Gertrude married George Raymer. After losing both her husband and son she lived alone until she, too, moved into the Center, where she still resides at the age of ninety-four. Several members, of the family of Henry Werner, the oldest on, are still a part of the Atkinson community.
John and Sarah Haigh, who came from England to Illinois by way of Pennsylvania were the parents of fourteen children who grew up just across the Mississippi from Burlington, Iowa, where William, the fourth son, met and married Jane Elizabeth Gray, a school teacher, in 1884. William had already spent two years in Saunders County, Nebraska. Soon after his marriage he took a homestead and timber claim two miles north of the Elkhorn, above Atkinson, where he built a five-room house and a barn. Their six children were born on the homestead.
A successful farmer and stockman, William was elected a County Supervisor and served for quite a number of years, helping lay out section lines and roads. Anna Haigh, one of his daughters, was the little girl who had to stay in the house with her baby brothers while her mother helped fight the prairie fire that was bearing down upon them.
“In the early days on the homestead,” Anna wrote, “we were too far from town to go to church in the lumber wagon, and too many to go in the buggy drawn by faithful old Maude, Mother’s riding horse back in Illinois. Rev. Dillon, the Sunday school missionary, came riding through our community about four times a year, holding services. He had a guitar and sang such fine songs.” Anna wrote of the Fourth of July celebrations, of the all-day preparations for the big picnic and of getting up early so as not to miss the boom of the Dexter brothers Sunrise Salute. William, her father, was the first of her family to see an automobile. He hurried into the house, shouting, “All of you get out here if you want to see a horseless carriage.” They all ran out to watch the little machine struggling down the quarter mile of sandy road to the Haigh house.
Of a neighbor, a Mrs. Fleming, Anna wrote, “She was the one who journied far and near when a new baby put in an appearance. She was a grand old friend and as good as the doctors at delivering the babies.” Also neighbor to the Haighs was the Carl Pruss family, formerly of Glidden, Iowa. Their farm was three and one-half miles east of the northeast corner of Atkinson. The family spoke only German when they came to the community and when Henry, oldest of the five children, started to school he could not understand a word of English. He became so frightened at the strange sounds he heard, that first day, that he ran home. In 1917 he married an Iowa girl, Claire Crandall, and brought her home to Atkinson.
According to the Pruss history the Ku Klux Klan was active in the Atkinson and Emmet area during the 1920’s. The organization held meetings and burned corsses in Emmet, and when the bank attempted to foreclose on a hard-up farmer and force a farm sale, the Klan stopped the sale. A tombstone in Atkinson’s Woodlawn cemetery bears the name and number of one of the members. Several other Pruss family members, including Carl’s grandfather and his Uncle Frank, came to Atkinson, where they dealt in hogs and grain for quite a few years. Charlie Pruss ran a store in Emmet for awhile, then returned to farming. Henry spent most of his life farming northeast of Emmet, then retired and moved into O’Neill. Now eighty-nine years old, he lives in Inman.
Joseph Schaaf, “a great tree lover,” planted a big orchard of many kinds of fruit trees on his homestead ten miles north of Atkinson. A skilled grafter of trees, he amazed his neighbors by growing four different kinds of fruit on one tree.
Joseph, born in France in 1850, came to Muscatine, Iowa, at the age of twenty-four. There he married Mary Rosa Fix, then came on to Holt County in 1882 and built a comfortable farm home for his family. It was from this home, on the morning of the great blizzard of ’88, that ten-year-old Joseph, sent on an errand to a neighbor, perished in the storm. Another son lost his life in a farm accident and two children died in infancy, leaving only four to grow up, Michael, Clara, George and Gertrude.
In the early ’70’s quite a contingent of immigrants came from Wisconsin to Colfax County, Nebraska. Among the group were Frederick Stolte and his wife Marie. Both were born in Germany. Both came to the same Wisconsin community at about the age of twenty-four and were married in 1870. All of the families came to Nebraska in ox-drawn wagons, walking most of the way because their possessions Tiled me wagons. All took homesteads in Colfax County and remained there until 1882. Of the six Stolte children, twin sons died in the same week of diptheria and another child died of measles. Fred, Jr., the second child, was ten years old when his father took a timber claim a mile southwest of Atkinson. Mr. Stolte also bought, from John Brady, the quarter section which Colonel Atkinson had originally intended for the site of Atkinson. He bought more land as time went on and eventually owned several quarters, which he later sold to his sons, Fred and Henry.
In 1902 Fred married Ella Olday, whose family lived on a farm near Hemingford, Nebraska. Two years later he bought the Walter Armstrong homestead three and one-half miles southwest of Atkinson. There the six Stolte children were raised. One of the girls, Ethel, remembers a barn on the farm where hung burlap bags full of buffalo horns and skulls that her father and uncle had picked up when, as boys, they had herded cattle on the prairies around their home. They were all destroyed when the barn was struck by lightning and burned to the ground.
Mrs. Stolte had wanted to be a teacher but hadn’t had the opportunity for an education in her isolated western Nebraska home. All of her children, however, five girls and a boy, were college educated and all were teachers. While all six were teaching the Omaha World Herald carried a feature, complete with pictures, about them.
“It was an Indian Summer evening in 1882 that our covered wagon, drawn by a team of roan mares that two months before were wild horses on the range, arrived in Atkinson,” wrote Homer Campbell. “We made camp that night a hundred yards east of the newly built depot; to our surprise a watermelon patch lay not many yards away’medium sized melons, ripe, raised on first-year sod.” In the town, the Campbells noted, was a fairly large wooden building, a hotel and boarding house, used by the men who built the depot. It was called the “Crowbar House,” after the custom of pounding on the side of the hotel with a crowbar to call the hands to meals.
Homer grew up in Atkinson, went to school there, swam in its old swimming hole and worked for Harry Mathews on the popular Atkinson Graphic.
Carroll Raymer, of German parentage, came to Atkinson with his parents on a freight train, riding in the caboose. His father filed on a 236 homestead near town and earned a little extra “eating money” crying sales in the community. Forced to put a $150 mortgage on his claim, he was unable to pay it off and lost the place in 1902.
Carroll finished the eleventh grade in 1910, then quit school to conquer the world. He began by hiring out to G.C. Funk to work in the hayfield. First thing, a bee stung one of the horses and the team ran away. He stayed with his machine until the horses ran into a haystack and stopped. This incident convinced him that ranch work was not for him, so he went back to town to work in a store for fifty cents a day for a fourteen hour stint. Later he went to work “full time” for $25 a month. He also sold paddle bluing from door to door for a dime a paddle.
In 1924, wrote Carroll in his family history, lone Chrestensen came to town from Friend, Nebraska, to teach Home Economics. Two years later she gave up her good paying job, married C.C. (Carroll) Raymer and went to work in his store at half the pay and double the hours.
The store in which Carroll worked belonged to Robert Hart. His fourteen-hours-a-day job was driving the old one horse delivery wagon on Saturdays and through the summer months. In 1910 he began his “full time” job as a clerk in the store. In 1913 he was able to buy a small partnership interest in the firm. Three years after his marrieage (1929) he bought out the principal owner. He related that he wasn’t foresighted enough to see what was about to happen during “the terrible thirties,” so had a long, hard time paying off. In 1922 Carroll paid $275 for his first car, a 1919 Model T Coupe. He played golf on Atkinson’s first course in 1915 when the “greens” were in the Lemmer pasture, east of the steel bridge south of town. Upon the death of A.T. Hart, secretary-treasurer of the Woodlawn Cemetery Board, in 1924, Raymer took the office. He has now held it for forty-nine years. “I will always remember Dr. McDonald,” he wrote, “because he wore a high silk stovepipe hat. Dr. Sturdevant was about the same vintage but without the hat. He made quite a name for himself during the big 1918 flu epidemic because he did not lose a case.” Peter Gonderinger’s father was born in Luxemburg in 1858, his mother in the same country in 1863. Mr. Gonderinger came to Holt County in 1882, the girl who was to be his wife in 1884 and they were married in Atkinson the same year. Their first transportation was an ox team, their first home “a schoolhouse and a homesteader shack, coupled together.” Their children were Peter, Charles, Michael and Mary.
Peter married Mary Verzal of Atkinson in 1920. Mary’s sister, Josephine was shot and killed by an ex-boyfriend one evening in May, 1925, while she and her mother were walking home. Her killer was given a life sentence, but paroled in 1943. Oran R. Bowen, born in Illinois in 1875, came to Atkinson with his parents, Mr. and Mrs. William Bowen in 1883. They settled six miles east of town, where their first home was built of two carloads of lumber shipped from Illinois. The first Methodist service in the area was held in the unfinished house. Upon Mr. Bowen’s election to the office of county judge a few years later, the family moved to O’Neill. J.P. Mullen, elected to the state legislature in 1891, took young Oran (about 15) to Lincoln with him to serve as a page.
By teaching school in Atkinson between terms, Oran put himself through Wesleyan Academy and the University of Nebraska, earning Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees. A member of the Wayne State College faculty from 1917 until 1953, he died in 1965. A high-rise dormitory on the college campus has been named “Bowen Hall” in his honor.
Mrs. William Bowen had been married previously to Louis Appleman of Light Street, Pennsylvania. They had one daughter, Alice, born in 1859. Louis was killed in an accident and the widow married William Bowen, a deeply religious widower with two young sons. This was the family, except for Alice who stayed with her grandparents in Illinois, that came to Atkinson.
William Earl Scott, born in Hackettstown, New Jersey, in 1857 was a law student in Toulon, Illinois, when he and Alice Appleman met. They were married in Cambridge, Illinois, in 1881. Will read law in the office of Justice White in Chicago for a short time after their marriage, then caught “western fever” and boarded a train for Colorado. Their first daughter, Agnes, was born in a two-room shack in a mining camp. They then moved to Leadville, where the young lawyer built up a good practice; and Alice, an accomplished musician, was first organist in the new Methodist church. Their second daughter, Rose, was born in Breckenridge in 1884, and soon afterward their home and all their possessions, including Will’s law books, were lost in a fire.
While the Scotts were in Colorado the Bowens were settling in Holt County. The Scotts followed them to Atkinson, where, in 1889, Will opened the town’s first law office. Alice, by then the mother of three daughters, gave music lessons in Atkinson for many years and led in all musical and dramatic affairs. She usually had about fifty music students, and often took her fees in vegetables, fruit and sometimes meat. A son, Earl, was born in the Scott home in 1891 and a fourth daughter, Jo, in 1897. After her husband’s death Alice went to California to teach in a girls school. The three younger girls followed musical careers. Earl became an actor, teacher and writer. His death in 1971 in New Mexico marked the passing of the last of the Scott family, once so active in the life of Atkinson.
George Walter Blake, born in Ohio in 1857, homesteaded northwest of Atkinson in 1883. After being bunted over a fence by his milkcow, he took a dislike to farming, relinquished his claim and moved into town. A carpenter, he was kept busy building homes and business houses. He also helped survey the permanent cemetery site west of town, and helped build the old mill at the end of Main Street.
In April, 1886, he married Mary Olive Beebe of Ohio. Mary had come to Atkinson by train in 1884 to visit her homesteader brothers, Dolph and Watt. She and George were among the last of the pioneers to be married in a soddy. In 1887 they moved from Mary’s homestead into town, where George built them a home by the railroad tracks. A short time later their first son, William Harrison, was born there while George was calling a square dance. Another son and two daughters were born within the next decade.
Mary was a charter member of Atkinson’s Avon Shakespeare Club, which is still active. George became the city engineer and worked in his carpenter shop up until the day he suffered a fatal heart attack in 1931. Mary was just short of ninety years at the time of her death in 1955. Hiram Beebe came to Atkinson in the early ’80’s and opened a general store on State Street. His brother, Howard, and sister, Lucy Jane Rutter, followed him west in 1886. Lucy Jane’s husband had been killed in the Civil War and she and her five sons came with Howard and his wife from Marietta, Ohio to a homestead and tree claim northwest of town. Lucy Jane later married again and had seven more children.
Howard, a night watchman in Atkinson for many years, and Nancy, his wife, had six children: Samantha, Milo, Laura, Alexander, Mary and Lulu. Samantha married Dave Dawson and had three children before her 237 husband and their infant son died of typhoid fever.
Milo married Myrtle Homes. When their fifth child, Donald, was a baby Myrtle died. Milo later married Lucy Bitney. Donald was killed in the first world war. Laura married Charles Davis and had two children. Later she married Anton Dobrovolny and had another son, Thomas.
Alexander married Mae Elsbury and fathered seven children. With his brother-in-law, Claude Hall, he operated a butcher shop in Atkinson and broke horses on the side. A fine horseman, when some of his relatives in South Dakota had typhoid he frequently rode horseback to help care for them, swimming his horse across the Niobrara on every trip. Mary married Al Neely. He owned the Atkinson flour mill for quite awhile, then sold out and moved to Beemer, Nebraska, where he ran a mill. Lulu was the wife of Claude Hall and the mother of seven children. The Beebes were all music lovers and enjoyed nothing more than all getting together of an evening to play the organ and mouth harp and sing. David Neely, one of Atkinson’s 1884 settlers, was born in Pennsylvania in 1832 and was a soldier in the war between the states. He married Rebecca Phillips in Pennsylvania in 1854. With their twelve children they came first to Iowa and then to Atkinson. Mary, the youngest child, was born in Iowa in 1878, went to school in Atkinson and became a school teacher. She and her parents are buried in Atkinson.
Elmer Neely, born in Pennsylvania in 1868, married Matilda Tasler in Atkinson in 1889. Elmer worked in one of the town’s livery stables and ran a dray line for years. Later he worked in the flour mill, became a proficient miller and operated flour mills in Stuart, Battle Creek, Platte City and Humphry. In 1916 he took charge of a flour mill in Madison, operated it for twenty-five years and died there in 1961 at the age of ninety-three. Among David Neely’s twelve children is listed an A.J. Neely. He may have been the Al Neely who married Mary Beebe and ran the Atkinson flour mill. Merle Neely is named as one of the Holt County boys who gave his life for his country in World War I.
Mr. and Mrs. Wilbur H. Blackmer came from Massachusetts to Blair in 1870 and engaged in extensive farming and hog raising. In 1884 Mr. Blackmer accepted a good offer for his farm, came to Atkinson and bought land south of town where he raised cattle. He then opened a meat market in the town, supplying it with his own beef. He also harvested enough ice each winter to fill three large ice houses. There were eating houses in all the towns along the railroad and Mr. Blackmer supplied them all with meat, all the way to Buffalo Gap in South Dakota; a sort of chain store deal, via the railroad. In 1886 Wilbur pursuaded his sister Hattie to come out from New York City and open a millinery shop in Atkinson. His wife was associated with her in what became a very successful business. Her hats were all hand made. Many of her customers brought their hats back from year to year to have them retrimmed in the latest fashion.
The Wilbur Blackmers had four children, Effie, Alta, Minnie and George. Effie married Washington Irving Chapman in 1895 and had eight children, seven sons and a daughter, Lileth Alma, whom everyone called “Blossom.” After farming for awhile, Mr. Chapman opened a real estate and insurance office in Atkinson. Harold Chapman, eldest of the seven sons, was know as “Shine” for many years because he was once the town shoeshine boy. Later he was in business with his father. After Mr. Chapman passed away in 1920 Mrs. Chapman moved to a ranch they owned in the Inez Valley. In 1923 she married George S. Withers and continued to run the ranch, with the help of her sons, until the boys had to go into the service in 1945. They then sold the ranch and bought a home in Amelia.
Miner Davis and his wife, Clarissa, came to Atkinson from Minnesota. Of English descent, he was born in Nova Scotia. A carpenter and blacksmith, he was also a maker of fine violins. Many of his violins are still in existence, highly prized by members of his family and early residents of the community. He built and lived in the house now owned by “Skip” Shane.
Miner and Clarissa had nine children. Bertha married Wesley Slaymaker. Charles married Pauline Mlinar. Jess lived in Atkinson, played his violin in different orchestras and, with his wife, operated the Cottage Hotel and Motel. Clyde, an Atkinson barber and musician, married Phoebe Smith. All of the Davis children attended the Atkinson schools. Late comers to the neighborhood were Carl and Tonia Friedrich. Carl, a direct descendent of Frederick the Great, was born in 1867. With his parents he left Germany in 1879 and came to Columbus, Nebraska. He was in his early thirties when he met Tonia Brethower, a young Dutch girl, at Creston, where she had come to board and room with the Friedrich family while she taught the local school. She taught Ernest and Otto, the younger Friedrich boys, and fell in love with Carl.
They were married in Creston in January, 1900, and shortly afterward settled on a sandy farm three and a half miles southeast of Atkinson. They arrived too late to make an early garden and their food, that first winter, was mainly fall-grown turnips, with fish and jack rabbits for variety. Their seven children attended the “Pat Hayes” rural school, walking the two miles or, sometimes, riding in a “rickety contraption” pulled by a horse.
Carl Friedrich was noted for his generosity and would give the “shirt off his back” to any and all comers. A conservationist, he carried grass and clover seeds in his pockets to strew along the roadside as he traveled. He is said to have brought in and planted the first alfalfa in the county, and often got out of his wagon to do battle with any patch of thistles he happened to see, on his own or a neighbor’s land. His neighbors often invited him to come over and plow the first arrow-straight guide furrow in their fields.
For a while the family rode in an ancient carriage, then in a fine red-wheeled buggy, in which only two or three at a time could ride in high style. Later Carl owned a Hudson Super Six, upholstered in leather and fitted with two collapsible seats in the roomy back portion. He only drove it once, keeping to the back streets and driving in low gear all the way. The years of hard work and scrimping resulted in some fair sized herds of cattle and horses on the Friedrich farm, and Carl even became quite a dealer in hay and alfalfa. But, with all his honest industry he somehow failed to capitalize solidly on his efforts.
Tonia, in her girlhood, had wanted to be a doctor, and proved unusually wise in the care she gave her family, administering home remedies most successfully. The family depended, too, on J.B. Tedrow, “the beloved Raleigh agent who drove out from Inman on periodic rounds. His well-fitted van stocked with everything from pencils to pills and vanilla.” When a son, Ralph, a toddler, climbed onto the oven door and helped himself to a drink of lye water from a scorched apple butter kettle, Dr. Sturdevant was called in all haste. He barely pulled the child through, somehow healing his mutilated throat and burned-out “innards.” Tonia’s parents and three of her sisters came over from Holland to live near the Friedrichs on the Elkhorn. Her father, Christian Brethouwer, spent 238 Very early Atkinson football team. Top row: Superintendent, name unknown; Bill Mlinar, unknown, Emanuel Mlinar, unknown, Cracker Miller. Middle row: Robert Blackburn, Bill Donnelly, Bill Humpal, next three persons unknown, Zane Dickerson. Bottom row: Albin Matousek, Kemp Hanks, Frank Brady. David Smith home. Mrs. Bert Miller on fence. Picture taken in Atkinson but undated. 239 most of his time in a mysterious shed, working on his perpetual motion machine’a dedication that robbed his family of a comfortable existence. Johanna Brethouwer married Robert Maclachlan, a roncher north of Atkinson. Christine married Swan Seeberg who ran a clothing store in town. Both girls had been rural teochers. An older sister, Hannah, morried a man named Yel Yelsma and lived an impoverished existence in a tiny log house just east of the Friedrich form. She died there at the birth of twins. The log cabin in which she died was, long years later, moved into the Atkinson city park for display as a feature of early Holt County history.
A few of Carl and Tonia’s many progeny still live in the area, most are scattered through many states. Carl died in Spencer at the age of eighty-seven. Tonia outlived him only three years.
By the end of the ‘eighties Atkinson was a well established young city of one thousand population in the midst of a large trade territory. It had three banks, two school buildings, five churches, four dry goods stores, seven grocers, two drug stores, five hotels, two newspapers, two lumber yards, (the demand for building supplies was so heavy that the firms couldn’t ship lumber in as fast as they sold it) nine lawyers, three doctors, three restaurants, a bakery, three livery barns, two hardwares, five blacksmiths, two saloons, two barbershops, a hay dealer who couldn’t get railroad cars to transport hay as fast as it could be baled and delivered to him, a sorghum mill, a broom factory, a brick manufacturer, a flour mill, cigar factory, a creamery and a brewery. The hardware stores maintained a small red building north of the railroad tracks in which to store bulk gun powder. A safety measure in case of a fire in the town. The dealers kept enough on hand in their stores to supply the daily needs of those who used the old hand-loading muzzle guns, the kind most used by hunters at that time.
“The soil around Atkinson,” wrote B.L. Snow, a real estate dealer and one of the town’s most ardent promoters, “seems adapted to the production of children, from the appearance of the streets at nine, twelve and four o’clock. I am certain there are in the vilage 350 school children, and if you could be with us on the Sabbath you would think you were in a city of 5000 from the appearance of the streets, as nearly all of the people are church goers.” By this time, according to Mr. Snow, Atkinson had numerous wealthy men, including Howard Miller, David Neely, Frank Bitney, A.P. Sinclaire, the Harts and H.L. Putnam.
Quite early in its history the town boasted of a beautiful park, five acres in extent and enclosed with a tight board fence eight feet high. One hundred and fifty fine trees furnished cool shade and the grandstand seated 1000 to 1,500 people. Banker Joe Bartley and J.B. and Charles Sturdevant were principally responsible for the fine park, built to provide a “resort” for their favorite sport and pastime— baseball.
Here Hy Nightengale, Atkinson’s lively story-teller, provides a little more of the history of the Atkinson Reds, that mighty ball team of old. Its almost invincible players were Chever Hazelett, Ed Butler, Harry Mathews, Jim Davis, Frank Bitney, Fred Dashley, Merch Farney, McVicor and Elmer Blake. McVicor was the only professional, hired each season. The Reds packed the ball parks wherever they played’until after that grim day when West Point put them down. On that day, as on all V. /: Birdseye view of Atkinson around the turn of the century. A pioneer parking lot. Park Hotel in background. The time is winter. Note snow on the ground and buffalo robe in foremost wagon. Some horses farther back are blanketed. Courtesy Bernice Davis. other days when their prized team played, banker Bartley and others had bet large sums on their boys. Their losses were heavy. The reason they lost the game, so it was said afterward, was that the Boston Braves’ ace pitcher, Kid Nichols, whose home was at West Point, was spending the week with his family. The Reds knew nothing of this when the West Point team challenged them to a game. They accepted and, from the first, the National League pitcher had the Reds at his mercy. Losing the game “broke the heart of the old Reds” and ended their sizzling career.
Twice, while hotly contested games were going on at the park, tragedies took place down town. One was the runaway that took Anton Tasler’s life when he was caught in the wheel of his wagon. Townsmen ran to the park to summon the doctors, but it was too late. Mr. Tasler was dead when they took him from the wheel.
On a hot August afternoon a match game was going on at the park when the three doctors were again called to 240 attend an emergency. A Valentine homesteader, attempting to get on a moving freight train, had fallen under the wheels, which severed one of his legs above the knee. Bystanders carried him to the Brooks Hotel. Dr. McDonald, the railroad physician, assisted by Sturdevant and Blackburn, did all they could, but the poor man died that night.
For awhile Atkinson held the honor of hosting the State G.A.R. annual encampment of “Old Soldiers Reunion.” The meeting grounds were on Jim Humpal’s land, near town, and a half-mile race track encircled the camp. Inside the track a great tent city arose each encampment week. The special speakers held forth in a huge tent, where the crowd sat on the soft sides of planks supported by myriad beer kegs.
For entertainment there were sham battles, horse races, games and dances. Two brass bands furnished daily music. But probably the best times of ail were those enjoyed by the greying boys in blue as they swapped tales of the battles they had fought and the skirmishes they had won.
Atkinson’s first stockyard was operated by George Kirkland, who came to Holt County in 1882 and lived on his homestead in the Phoenix area until 1905, when he came to Atkinson and set up his yards on the east edge of town. He dealt in cattle, hogs and grain and did a very good business until he retired in 1934.
During his early years in the Phoenix community the Vigilantes held a meeting in a grove one night to decide whether or not to hang a man suspected of stealing livestock. The majority was in favor of hanging and wanted to set a date for carrying out the grisly sentence. Then someone suggested they talk it over with George Kirkland first, as he was “pretty level headed.” When the proposition and the evidence was put before him, Mr. Kirkland said, “Men, you have no positive proof this man did all you think he did. Get positive proof, then swear out a warrant and have him taken in charge. He has a wife and family and if you hang him they will become a charge on the taxpayers.” The Vigilantes listened’and followed his sage advice.
According to Hy Nightengale’s records, W.H. Dudley, owner and editor of the Atkinson Bee, published his paper in the Nightengale Blue Front building and lived in rooms above the plant. His wife had been a bed-fast invalid for a long time when, one day, a strange woman came to the office where he was very busy setting type by hand.
They fell to visiting and he told her of his wife’s sad condition. She said her profession was the teaching of Christian Science and she might be able to help the sick woman. The editor, “a pretty well educated man,” wondered if his friends would think him daft if he took the stranger to see his wife. In spite of his doubts, he showed her to the invalid’s bedroom, then went back to work on his paper. An hour or so later the Christian Science teacher came down and told him his wife was sitting in a chair in their front room. He hurried upstairs and found it to be true’his wife, who hadn’t been out of bed in many months, was sitting in a chair. She was soon doing her own housework as ably as before her illness. After his wife’s recovery Mr. Dudley was elected County Superintendent. He sold his paper and moved to O’Neill, where Mrs. Dudley continued in good health.
Mr. Nightengale also related a Livestock yards as they looked in 1935 and as they are today. Courtesy Atkinson Township Library.
strange tale about Dr. McDonald’s wife. The McDonald’s had lived in Chicago before coming to Atkinson, and there the lady had been very ill and had finally fallen into a coma. Her husband had been unable to revive her and had at last pronounced her dead. “Our friends came to our home,” Mrs. McDonald said, “where I was prepared for burial and placed in a coffin. The lid had a glass cover which was closed over my face. Just before the services my husband and others were viewing me, and someone said they thought the glass showed a coat of moisture. My husband opened the lid and felt my wrist and, to his great surprise, found a faint pulse. The shock turned his hair white.
“He administered strong stimulants and I soon sat up and was taken out of the coffin. All the time I laid in the coffin I could hear them talking about the funeral but was powerless to speak or move. I had barely escaped 241 being buried alive.” Mrs. McDonald lived in Atkinson for quite a few years and her daughter Flo married Bob Bitney and was still living in Fremont in 1949.
Another event ‘that set tongues a-wagging in Atkinson was the birth of the daughter of Jim Davis. Shortly before the event a fellow from O’Neill by the name of Jimmie Triggs came to Atkinson to paint the hundred foot tall cross on St. Joseph’s church. The day he finished it he looked down on some workers below and, to show them how steady his nerves were, stepped out on one of the cross arms and, balancing there, swung his arms back and forth.
Mrs. Davis was watching the workmen from her window and saw Triggs do his daring stunt. It frightened her, and when her baby was born a few days later it had the mark of a perfect cross on its forehead.
The first doctor in northern Holt County lived near Eagle Mills. One day he came to Atkinson with a newborn baby in his big saddle bag. The child’s mother had died and he was taking it to a woman south of town who could care for it.
And finally, Hy Nightnegale as a boy had had a sad experience of his own. He and a good friend, Johnnie Nester, and both he and Johnnie had bad colds at the same time one winter. Hy was still in bed with his when Johnnie’s people came to the Nightengale home with some lumber and asked Hy’s father to make a casket for Johnnie, whose cold had turned into pneumonia and killed him.
“It was very sad for me to have to watch the making of the last resting place for my pal,” Hy wrote. “The family came for the casket about nine o’clock in the morning and I could hear the wagon wheels screeching through the frozen snow.” They buried him a couple of hundred yards north of their log cabin, with the intention of moving him to a cemetery when one should be laid out. But by then the location of the grave was lost “and Johnnie still sleeps in that unfound place, forgotten until the judgement day.”
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