← Before Today: A History of Holt County, Nebraska
Echos From Emmet Chapter Thirty-Two William Malloy of Sheboygan, Wisconsin in 1876 homesteaded the southeast quarter of Section 22, Township 29N, Range 13W, which now is the Jurgensmeier quarter southwest of Emmet. His timber claim was the quarter north of it, now the Harvey Halm home. His son Tom homesteaded the quarter east of him, which is the quarter south of Emmet, now owned by Bob Cole. For a timber claim Tom took the quarter north of his homestead.
On this timber claim, where the town of Emmet was first built, some sod buildings were put up. The old site is now a “Washout” with a clump of trees around it, near the southwest corner of town. In the summer of 1882 William Malloy (called “Judge” because he was the first judge elected in Holt County) and his son Tom had one of the Nightengale boys help them survey and plat the townsite on Tom’s timber claim. On the day that they finished their plat they named their town “Emmet” because it was the birthday of the great Irish patriot, Robert Emmet.
Judge Malloy built a log cabin on his homestead, and there presided over Emmet’s first post office. The little log building, which stood for many years, was also the town’s first schoolhouse and the Judge’s daughter, Maggie, was its first teacher. In the year 1881 the Fremont, Elkhorn and Missouri Valley railroad built past the homestead post office. Tom Murray was the first section foreman out of Emmet. Another man important to the history of Emmet was Mike Lyons, a real estate broker from O’Neill. He owned land north and east of the Malloys’ and helped the Judge lay out the plan for the new town.
In 1883 August Meilenz bought a plot of land from Tom Malloy and built a store, south of the railroad tracks on the west side of the street. Behind the store he built a barn, and a house which also served as a hotel. J. John Nelson established a blacksmith shop south of the store and John Calnan opened another one on the east side of town.
The Meilenz building was unusually large for a tiny new village, but it was soon adapted to other uses. The town’s first Fourth of July celebration centered there in 1885, and the following year it became the home of the Emmet Echo, a branch publication of the O’Neill Frontier.
The homesteaders round about were about due to start proving up on their claims and each one had to publish a notice of proof in a newspaper, at $5 each. These fees were the mainstay of many an early newspaper, thus the establishment of a paper handy to the Emmet settlers. Homer O. Campbell, sent to Emmet by James Riggs, the Frontier editor and publisher, took along several cases of type, a few fonts of display and an army press. After setting up his office, Campbell said, the hardest part of his job was to find any news. In those days, he noted, Emmet consisted of a lone general store, the depot and water tank, and little else. One could walk a mile for a “personal,” and as it turned out final proof notices became just as scarce. Homer could ride up to Emmet on the train, put out the Echo in two days, then return to O’Neill until the next week. “After a few short weeks that were pregnant with promise, the Echo passed to its reward.” The first railroad depot was built in 1884, also the first schoolhouse. That year, too, Tom Malloy built and moved into a new home in the northwest part of town. The next year saw something of a boom. Added to the town’s business establishments were a lumber yard, a saloon, a drug store and a hardware store. A few dwelling houses were built north of the business section.
The first Fourth of July celebration was noted for a unique feature— a tub race down the Elkhorn. Most of the tubs upset before the race was done and the racers were well dunked in deep water. William Stuart built Emmet’s first bridge across the Elkhorn where a branch of the old pioneer trail past Tom Malloy’s log house reached the river. A suspension foot bridge was built on the shortcut out from town to points south. One afternoon a band of Indians came from the west and stayed for awhile in Emmet, sharpening their knives, tomahawks and other tools of war on Tom Malloy’s grindstone. Then they went on east and met another band of Indians in a draw just east of the present Otto Lorenz place. When they returned, Tom said, it looked as if they had been in a big fight, for they had their dead across their ponies with their hands and feet tied beneath the animals’ bellies.
As time went on the Indians made a practice of stopping at the Malloy place each spring and fall as they went on their hunts. Mrs. Malloy was friendly with them and always fed them. One squaw in particular became her good friend. One year when they stopped one of the Malloy boys was very sick and seemed to have been poisoned. The squaw went to the barn and cut the hard wart (chestnut) from the back of a horse’s leg, put it on top of the stove until it charred, pounded it to a powder, mixed it with water and gave it to the sick lad. He was shortly as well as ever.
Many of the early settlers were buried about two miles northwest of Emmet in a cemetery called “Prairie Home.” Today only two stones remain to mark the spot. One is that of A. E. Storer who died on January 16, 1888; the other is that of his daughter Emma, Mrs. C. S. Ingles, who died the following August.
By the late ‘eighties most of the sod and log buildings had been replaced with frame structures, homesteads had become well improved farms and some good farms had been developed. But after 1890 the town began to decline. Quite a few settlers had given up and pulled out, the depot was closed and moved to Ewing. The last Fourth of July celebration was held in 1892. August Meilenz had the record for staying in business the longest, his being the first store to open and the last to close (in 1890). For some years then there were only three houses in Emmet, that of Tom Malloy, the section house and Mike Lyons house, which also served as the post office and the only store. Then, after the turn of the century the town took a new lease on life and began to grow again.
Mr. Lyons donated land near the top of the hill to the north to both the Lutherans and Catholics on which to build churches. The German Lutheran church was completed in the early 1900’s and used until the first World War began. Feelings toward the Germans ran high for awhile and one night the church was burned. The Catholic church was built in 1910. In time the town boasted two hardware stores, a livery barn, cream station, three grocery stores, a general 307 store, lumberyard, pool hall, blacksmith shop, a bank, an elevator, a drug store and McCaffery’s hotel, restaurant and store.
The development of the wild hay industry had a good deal to do with the town’s revival. Tom and Billie Malloy went into the hay business, as did Guy and Dean Cole. The Emmet Hay Company was established in 1908 by J. B. Ryan and William Froelich, Sr. They bought a hay barn and built an office. In 1912 Les Puckett put up another hay barn.
With the increase in railroad shipping a depot was needed. Until 1907 a boxcar served the purpose, then a new depot was built. But the resurgence was fairly shortlived. By 1920 the town was fading and, in that year, Georgia and Pat McGinnis bought the last piece of lumber from the Nye, Snyder and Fowler lumber yard for their new home. With that sale the yard went out of business.
The Malloys left behind them in Wisconsin fine farms with trees, stone barns and prize cattle and horses. In Illinois and Ohio they drove through grass up to the bottoms of the wagons. Both William and Tom’s wives begged them to stop there to establish their new homes, but the menfolks, following the siren call of General O’Neill, kept on.
After filing on their homestead Tom Malloy and his wife went to O’Neill and ran the town’s first hotel. The railroad had not yet reached the county and Tom at once began hauling freight from Wisner and Long Pine. Mrs. Malloy was left to manage the hotel and, during bad weather, she had freighters sleeping all over the place. She used to tell her grandchildren that she had to be careful, when she got up at night to tend her children, not to step on a sleeping freighter.
Even though the youngest of her four children was only two years old, she seems to have managed very well; for, as one of her grandchildren said later, “she was quite an autocratic lady.” In 1881 Tom and his wife gave up the hotel and moved onto their claim. Not far from the spot where he built his two-room log house, sod corral and barn, was a level spot near the river. This plot had formerly been used by Indian women for their corn and squash gardens.
That spring turned out to be extremely wet, with a great deal of rain. The Elkhorn flooded, covering the meadows with deep, swift-running waters. The Malloy house was surrounded by water and quite a river was running between the two Malloy homes. A neighbor, Tom Graham, and his family took refuge at the Judge’s home, as did Tom Malloy and his family. The three families then spent most of the night on their knees, praying that their homes might be spared from the flood.
The waters soon went down, all except a deep lake in front of Tom’s home, which remains to this day. The swirling currents of the flood had scoured out the soil where the Indian women had taken up the sod to make their gardens.
The new house Tom Malloy built was a big one, eight rooms, for his family was growing, seven more children being born to the family in Holt County. Later Rose Malloy married Clarence Tenborg in the big house, and still later she and her husband bought it and lived in it for many years.
While the children were small the father was away and the mother had gone out to milk the cow. She left the baby in the rocking chair, with his older brother to rock him. The child rocked too hard, throwing the baby out onto the hot stove. By the time his mother got there the child’s face and neck were badly burned. The burns healed but the eye on the burned side grew shut. The parents were sure he would always be blinded on that side. Then the friendly squaw came again, picked up the baby and felt of his eye. Then she used two fingers, jerked the eyelids apart and opened the eye. The little boy screamed and the eye ran bloody water for awhile, then healed nicely. From then on his eyesight was as good in the injured eye as in the other, though he wore the terrible burn scar for the rest of his life.
Although Judge Malloy lived only until 1884, he was long remembered as a good judge. He was not a lawyer but was well read, had a keen mind and a good sense of humor. Some of the opinions he handed down are still Early day picture of Emmet.
in the statute books in Lincoln and many of his “sayings” are still quoted in courts of law.
The Judge’s two daughters, Maggie and Katie were the belles of Emmet. Katie used to ride her horse, sidesaddle, on the dead run, with her dark hair flying in the wind, and neither of the girls ever lacked for beaus. Between 1884 and 1887 Maggie married Robert O’Donnell and moved to Omaha and Katie married Thomas O’Connell and went to Chicago.
In 1887 William Malloy, Tom’s brother, married Margaret Gaffney and moved onto the Judge’s claim. There they raised a family of ten children. Eileen Tenborg, one of Judge William Malloy’s great grandchildren, wrote many years later, “It does seem sad that, after all the hardships and rough times they went through during the early days of drought and grasshoppers and, later, the dry years and depression, there is not one of the Judge’s line left in Holt County to enjoy the sight of fat cattle grazing on lush meadows, or to look out over the fruitful fields of today.” Rose Malloy, the first of Tom Malloy’s seven children to be born in Holt County, made a dramatic appearance one Sunday afternoon. Her parents had gone to O’Neill to church, and afterward had gone home with friends for dinner. Before it was time to drive back to Emmet the new baby suddenly arrived. The Malloys, who had gone visiting with four children, went home with five.
Rose grew up in Emmet and, in 1906, married Clarence Tenborg who had come to Holt County in the spring of 1883 at the age of eight years. The Tenborg history is most interesting. A Norseman, Frank Tenborg had run away from a cruel step-father to go to sea at the age of seven. He spent the next thirty-five years on sailing ships 308 and went around the horn twice. He was second mate on the ship that carried his future bride and her family from Germany to the United States. The voyage was long and a romance developed between the pretty, aristocratic Sophia (last name not given) and the young officer.
Frank and Sophia were married when they reached New York and, with other members of the bride’s family, settled in Pennsylvania. Mr. Tenborg then helped build the Union Pacific railroad as far as Laramie, Wyoming, working as a counstruction foreman. At this point his wife objected to being left alone so much in Pennsylvania. As a result Frank moved his wife and small son to Ithaca, Nebraska, where three more children were born, he then sold the Ithaca farm, went back to the Union Pacific for a time, and finally moved to Holt County, where he had built a small house for his family.
By 1887 he had built a large house and accumulated a herd of thirty cattle. It looked like the Tenborgs were on the way to becoming prosperous farmers when the blizzard of ’88 wiped out the cattle herd. The Tenborg boys, Fred, Bill and Clarence, all crack shots, earned money by hunting game for the market and shipping the birds to plush Chicago hotels. They frequently went out into the sandhills with a wagon and camp outfit, staying for a week at a time and coming in with a wagon load of prairie chickens and ducks. Fred and his father ran a livery stable in O’Neill for several years. They kept good horses but too many of their customers “drove the teams to a frazzel and brought them in, covered with mud and sweat.” This abuse of horses was too much for Mr. Tenborg, so he sold the stable. After some years Frank Tenborg sold his first claim, moved to a place a half-mile north of Emmet and built a little pink house. His son Fred, who had done blacksmithing in the Black Hills, returned to Emmet, built a house near his father’s and opened another blacksmith shop. Bill married Myrtle Nehar of Green Valley and farmed a place west of his father’s house. Both Bill and his father worked on the Perry railroad that “fizzled” out. After awhile Bill sold the farm, moved into Emmet and bought the hardware store. One evening the McCaffery hotel and the Tenborg store caught fire and burned down. Of her grandparents, Eileen Ten-borg wrote, “My grandfather was a courtly old gentleman, loved and respected by everyone. He wore a little round black hat atop his long white hair and was still a big man. In his prime he had stood six feet, four inches and was very strong. One time when the boys were trying to lift an old steam thresher with huge wheels, and had a pry under it, straining with all their might, Grandpa came along, backed up to the wheel, put his hands under it and lifted it up on the block. Then he brushed his hands and walked away.
“He was also a kind and gentle man. He kept turnips for cow feed in a pit near his house and, at a time when he was sick, my father went over to do his chores for him. When he went into the pit he found two huge bull snakes there and killed them. Thinking he had done a good deed, he told Grandfather about it. He was quite put out. The snakes were good, he said, and had been there all winter, keeping the mice away.
One day Grandma Tenborg, who hadn’t been feeling very well, got up and went out to feed her chickens. A grandson, playing near the spot, then went in and told the family that ‘Grandma is sleeping in the chicken yard.’ Grandpa carried her to the house, but she was gone. That was in 1914 and he lived alone in his little pink house until a few months before he died in 1925 at the age of eighty- nine.” After their marriage Rose and Clarence Tenborg lived in a small house in Emmet for a time. Their daughter Eileen was born there, just before they bought Judge Malloy’s big house. Three sons were born to them there. Mr. Tenborg dealt in real estate and bought and sold livestock. In 1919 the Tenborgs sold the big house and built a new home a little over a mile northeast of Emmet, where Clarence farmed and raised livestock. While living on this place Eileen was awakened one night by a glare in her upstairs bedroom. Running to her south window, she saw that there was a bad fire in Emmet. She wakened her father, who hurried down town. A big hay barn burned down that night, and with it the Methodist parsonage next door. No lives were lost and the hay barn was rebuilt, only to burn down again. Rose finished the tenth grade in the Emmet school. Although there was talk of putting in the other two highschool grades, nothing came of it and Rose went to St. Mary’s in O’Neill for her last two years. “We used to dance a lot,” Rose wrote. “We had dances in the old hall at Emmet, and we used to go to dances in the ‘Crystal Ballroom’ at Atkinson. The Crystal Ballroom was an old haybarn but its big floor was very slick from all the bales of hay that slid across it all winter. Lawrence Welk and other name bands used to come there. “Once in awhile we even went to Newport to a dance and my father used to fuss at us for driving so far, saying, ‘You crazy devils, you.’ And we would remind him of his old stories about how he and his brothers rode horseback to dances in Amelia and Chambers.” During the depression Clarence Tenborg sold his place and moved onto his father’s old place, a half- mile west. The little pink house had burned down and he built another home. Clarence died of a heart attack in 1949. His wife died in 1951. Of this side of her family Eileen wrote, “There are no Tenborgs of our line in Holt County now. It seems strange that, after all the hardships our ancestors went through, none of us stuck to the land that was so dearly bought. I remember Grandpa saying, ‘My girl, this is the most wonderful country in the world— if we could just get the rain.’ ” Eileen Tenborg Hyland has lived in Omaha for many years.
Charles O’Connor came to Emmet with General O’Neill’s third colony in the spring of 1877, settling on land three miles east of where the town of Emmet was to be. Born in County Mayo in 1826, he came to Scranton in 1852. For seventeen years he worked as a blaster in a coal mine, then ran a saloon for eight more. His wife, Mary Phillips, was also from Ireland, although the couple did not meet until after they came to America.
With their three children, Mary O’Connor came out in the fall of the year, traveling by wagon from Omaha to Emmet. Mr. O’Connor, too, worked on the railroad as it built through Holt County. When it was finished through Emmet the O’Connor boys often hopped the train as it came by the farm on a Saturday and rode it into Atkinson so they could go to Mass on Sunday morning.
Four more children were born to Charles and Mary in Holt County. Two of the O’Connor boys, James and Hugh, ran a barber shop and pool hall in Emmet for a good many years. James bought the business and continued to operate it until 1955 when he sold it and retired at the age of eighty-one. William, the youngest son, married and lived on his father’s homestead until 1954.
After selling out to his brother, Hugh O’Connor established an insurance agency in Emmet. In 1919 he associated himself with the Banker’s Life Insurance Company and moved to Atkinson. Appointed a general agent over five counties in 1920, he was may times thereafter rated among the firm’s “million dollar” men, and one year topped all the other agents in the amount of 309 Mineola. Of their five children a son, Paul served in the Air Force in the second World War. James married Mary O’Donnell, daughter of Michael and Anna O’Donnell. Their daughter Margaret married Joe Ziska, son of Fred and Agnes Ziska.
In 1899 Moses, Sr., bought the “Greek Ranch,” three miles east of his homestead. In April all the buildings on the place burned and had to be replaced. Mrs. Joe Ziska is still living in the house her grandfather built there. Mrs. Ziska, who supplied the Gaughenbaugh family history, remembers the peddlers who used to ply the country. “The one we liked best,” she wrote, “was Sadie Tadie. He usually stayed overnight with us, then gave my mother some dress goods for his room and meals.” Also vivid in Mrs. Ziska’s memory is the time her mother took Malcena, Moses and herself, three and one-half years old, to visit her family, the O’Donnells, north of Emmet. By the time they returned there had been heavy rains and the Elkhorn was out of its banks. Mr. Ziska, on horseback, met his family in Emmet and rode ahead on the flooded roads, testing them for holes and washouts. Mrs. Ziska drove the buggy team and held onto the children.
They had bought groceries in Emmet and, in crossing the river the water came up into the buggy box, floating some of the packages down- stream. Malcena and Moses cried as they watched their sack of cookies sailing away on the flood. “I’ll never forget that river, the water all around us and my father on horseback ahead of us,” Margaret Ziska wrote, “And I am still afraid of that river.” The Gaughenbaughs went to school in District 141. One year twenty-three pupils were enrolled in the school, but they were never all there at the same time. In good weather the big boys had to stay home to work, in bad weather the small children couldn’t come.
Clark Gaughenbaugh homesteaded and married in South Dakota, where he lived until 1920 when he bought a ranch southwest of Atkinson and moved his family there. For some years he worked on the Wagner or “Ditch Camp” ranch. This ranch, two miles wide, extended from a short distance east of Emmet almost to Inman. One of Clark’s two daughters, Mabel, married Justin Butterfield in O’Neill in 1937. The couple now lives in Inman and their ten children are scattered across the country. One son, Woodrow, and his family also lives in Inman.
Alex Maring grew up in Iowa, neighbor to the Gaughenbaughs. Both Alex and Moses Gaughenbaugh, Sr., had served through the Civil War, and both had been friends in Ohio before that. Alex married Lucinda Maring in 1864 and moved to Missouri. Their first two sons, Willie and Dillie, died very young. The four who lived were “Logan, the red-headed son; Thomas, the curly headed son; John, the fat one; and Joseph, the one with big blue eyes.
In 1882 they packed their belongings in ox-drawn covered wagons and headed West. Logan and John rode the pony and drove the cattle. The family had to camp at Schuyler until the river froze over so they could cross on the ice. They reached Emmet in the spring of 1883 and were met by the Gaughenbaugh boys. They took a homestead near the homes of these old friends and built a sod house. Lucinda Maring’s brother, Tommie Maring (apparently the two families had the same last name), a broom maker, lived across the road from them. Alex and Lucinda’s four sons grew up and married. The parents finally sold their farm to Mat Brown and moved into Atkinson. By the end of their lives the friendship of the Gaughenbaugh’s and the Maring’s had lasted for almost two centuries. William Luben, born in Germany in 1853, came to a German settlement in Appleton, Wisconsin, in 1877. By working in the paper mills there, he earned enough money to bring his parents, Henry and Henrietta Luben, his brother August, with his wife and four children, and his brother Carl to America.
Soon afterward August left Appleton for Antelope County, Nebraska. There he worked on the railroad until he had saved enough money to bring the rest of the family to Nebraska. By this time William had married Auguste Berg. August’s family, William, his wife and their two children, and the old parents all lived together in a log cabin north of Clearwater until August traded a calf for a quarter section and William homesteaded another quarter nearby.
Two more children were born to William and Auguste before she died, leaving him with the four small children. In 1891 he married Miss Bertha Rohnis, and the same year moved on to Holt County, to a farm three miles south of Emmet. With the help of his family, Anna, William, Louis, Emma and Gene, Mr. Luben went into the hay business; cutting, stacking, baling and hauling the product of their meadows.
William, a great tree lover, is still remembered for the hundreds of trees he planted by hand during the dust bowl years in an effort to hold the blowing soil. He is also remembered for a merry-go-round which he designed and built himself. He was also known far and wide for his “water witching” powers. During the widespread drouth of the ‘thirties people came for miles, seeking his help in obtaining wells.
Another of William’s inventions was an unusual Christmas tree. To the top of a cone-shaped framework he attached revolving vanes. A tree with candles was placed inside the open framework. When the candles were lighted the thermal energy turned the vanes above.
A steerage passenger when he came to America, Mr. Luben worked hard, prospered, and firmly believed that Holt County had no equal anywhere. His son, William, married Julie Barnes and made their home on the quarter north of the Luben homestead. Louis married Selma Glaser and lived on the Glaser place northwest of Emmet. Gene and his wife, the former Nora Barnes, spent all their married life on the Luben homestead. James and Emma Diehl moved from West point, Nebraska, to a farm nine miles north of Emmet in 1884. Their daughter, Lillie, was two years old at the time. In 1904 she and Edward Steskal, youngest son of John and Mary Steskal, were married. The couple lived for awhile on the old Steskal place where Ed was born. Their oldest daughter, Laura, was born there. Later they moved to the Diehl farm where Lillie had grown up. “One time,” wrote Laura Steskal Walnofer, “when I was eight or ten years old we went visiting on Sunday afternoon. Then it got so foggy before we got home that Dad walked ahead of the horses to find the way. We aimed for the place where Hugo Alfs was batching. He wasn’t home but we went in and stayed all night. For our supper we had a slice of ham from a whole one he had, and to sleep all of us (there were three or four children) laid cross-ways of the bed.” In 1973 Laura Walnofer took her grandchildren on a tour of the places she had lived. At the place where she was born they ate their lunch under a mulberry tree, then went through the old house, “which really brought back memories.” Recovering from pneumonia, contracted from exposure while lying in siege before the city of Metz as the soldiers of Napoleon marched by to surrender, Henry Winkler longed to go to a country where war was not a part of the life of every young man. He was finally able to persuade his father, owner of a large landed estate, to give him, the oldest son, his inheritance, which he used for passage money to the United States. Arriving in New York in 1879, he 312 learned that the free land he sought was in Nebraska.
With his second cousin, Joseph Winkler, he traveled to Butler County. There the two young men became farm hands, thus learning the ways of the country and its farm methods. At a Catholic church near David City Henry met Agnes Steskal, who was working in the home of a Crete merchant. Although Bohemian, the Steskal family also spoke German. They befriended the lonely Henry, and a year later he and Agnes were married.
Joseph Winkler, the other young immigrant, married Barbara Spatz in Omaha. All four of these young people came to Holt County at about the same time but not together. Joseph homesteaded northeast of Emmet and there he and Barbara raised five sons. One, Henry, lived on the homestead after his father retired; two others, Casper and Joseph, Jr., also lived all their lives in Holt County. Marten went to Canada and Paul to Pennsylvania.
Henry Winkler, accompanied by his wife and her parents, John and Mary Steskal, made the long drive to Holt County together. . After some two weeks on the road they sighted smoke on the horizon. When they arrived at its origin they found themselves in the dooryard of the Heeb family, German speaking people from Switzerland.
The location of the Winkler homestead is not given but it must have been north of Emmet, as Henry took his grain to the mill on Eagle Creek to have it ground. They lived in a sod house on the homestead. Later, to fulfill the conditions for a preemption, they moved into a dugout near a creek. Plastered inside with lime, the dwelling was clean and comfortable. Lightning once followed the stovepipe into the ground, but did no damage to the earthen house, or even to the clutch of baby ducklings in a box under the bed. Another time, when a raging prairie fire swept over the hillside, Agnes used a broom and wet sacks to fight off the flames that threatened her doorway.
Later, as discouraged settlers gave up and left, Henry bought their claims or abandoned buildings. One quarter section of creek and meadow land was purchased with butter and egg money Agnes saved. There was a year, though, during the ‘nineties, when there was no market at all for butter. The Winklers used it for axle grease until the market recovered. Both Mrs. Winkler and her mother, Mrs. Steskal, delivered babies and laid out the dead for their community. These families, too, harvested, hauled and sold hay over the years. The Winklers raised eight sons and daughters. None of them stayed in Holt County.
Henry Winkler was always proud of the fact that his citizenship papers were signed by none other than the Hon. M. P. Kinkaid, Holt County’s own congressman and judge.
Christian E. Ernst and his wife Susanna moved from Canada to a homestead five and one-half miles northeast of Emmet in 1884. Their house was a two-story frame building set into a hillside, with the upper floor also at ground level. The entire quarter is now pasture but the dimple in the hill, where the house stood, and some ancient apple and plum trees still show that there was once a home there.
John J. and Caroline Harris settled on the homestead just south of the Ernsts. With eight children they came from Ohio to the Holt County prairie to make a home. A nurseryman as well as a farmer, John raised trees for himself and his neighbors. One year he planted a pound of mulberry seed. The seedlings did well and his youngest daughter, Melinda, helped set them out, using a teaspoon to dig the holes for the tiny trees. Many of them grew to huge size but most are gone now, bull-dozed away to make room for irrigated fields.
The Ernsts had ten children, as did the Harrises, after two more were born on the homestead. Joe Ernst married Sarah Harris and Jacob married Melinda Harris.
A Mr. and Mrs. C. B. Yantzi came to the community in 1883 and bought or filed on a quarter. From his land Mr. Yantzi gave two acres to be held in trust for the Amish Mennonite Church and Cemetery. A church was built and some of the first weddings held there were those of John Schweitzer and Mary Hershberger on Sunday, December 19, 1884; Joe Yantzi and Kate Ernst on Monday, December 20, 1884; Joe Ernst and Sarah Harris on March 5, 1888; and Chris Yantzi and Lizzie Erb on March 6, 1888.
It seems that when the bishop could get out to this church he stayed for several days and all the couples wishing to be married set days for their weddings at that time.
Melinda Harris and Jake Ernst were married in October, 1893. After a crop failure in 1894 they went to Iowa to work for a farmer there. Three years later they returned to the home place in Holt County. In 1904 the family moved to a farm three miles northwest of O’Neill. That summer they had twins. The youngest of their nine children was born in March, 1917. Because of a blizzard the doctor was unable to reach the farm and the baby died on the day of its birth. The children grew up, married and settled in the community. A daughter Martha married John F. Dick. After Jake Ernst’s death Martha and John bought the home place.
During his active farming years Jake and the family raised as many as forty acres of potatoes, shipping them to eastern markets by the car loads. Each spring the married children and their families came home to help cut the seed potatoes. At harvest time they came again to help pick up the crop. The families enjoyed working together and handled most big jobs, such as butchering and filling the icehouse, the same way.
August Karl Hoppe, born in Germany, came to Omaha in 1884 at the age of twenty-seven. In the Nebraska metropolis he met Anna Margaretha Sophie Paulsen, also a native of Germany, who was working for a Jewish family. August and Sophie were married in Omaha in 1889. The summer before August had ridden the train to O’Neill, then walked to Chambers, where he was told his best chance to find good land for sale was to contact Peter Claussen of Emmet. This he did— and Mr. Claussen showed him a farm adjoining his own, a little way north of Emmet. The farm had a house, a horse barn and an open shed on it.
After his marriage August came back to his farm to make it ready for the arrival of his wife, who came to Emmet in January, 1890. There, to her great surprise, she found that her nearest neighbor, Peter Claussen, had been her mail carrier, back in her home town in Germany. Another German friend, Fred Martens, also lived nearby.
Sophie Hoppe was the farmwife who burned shoe leather for medicine. She also served her neighborhood as midwife and helped out wherever there was sickness.
The Hoppe’s two daughters married and moved away. Their only son, Carl, stayed on the home place, married and raised two sons. He is still living there with his son, James, and family.
The Pucketts came to America before there were any eligibility requirments. Leslie Irvin Puckett and his wife, Clara Louella Roberts, were both born in Iowa and were of old Quaker stock.
During the hard times in the early ‘nineties Leslie Puckett and his father- in-law found that it would be cheaper to feed and pasture their cattle in Holt County than in Iowa where they lived. Therefore Leslie and his wife, with their three older children, moved to a place near Chambers, where they pastured the cattle for awhile. Later they moved to the “Greek Ranch,” where the Ziskas now live.
313 After the great prairie fire of 1899 took everything they had, they built up the place, seven miles south of Emmet, which now belongs to Walter Puckett. Ten of the Puckett children lived to grow up. As young people they enjoyed picnics, often in Mar- ing’s Grove. When Chautauqua came to Emmet about 1919 Mr. and Mrs. Puckett and some of the family drove seven miles in a spring wagon to take in the afternoon and evening performances. Walter and Guy, the teenage sons, rode horseback to see the afternoon show, then rode home to milk and do the chores, then back to see the evening show. By the time they reached home that night they had ridden twenty-eight miles on horseback since early noon, and taken in the two shows.
The Puckett boys made out all right with the girls as long as buggies were in style, but when most of the other young fellows of their neighborhood began to drive cars they had to watch the girls of their dreams ride off with someone else.
On election day in 1920, the first year women had the vote, Mr. and Mrs. Puckett and a neighbor and his wife drove nine miles in a spring wagon to cast their votes. As they were coming home they discovered that the Pucketts had voted for Cox while the other two had voted for Harding!
The Pucketts, too, put up a lot of hay. Horses used on the horse power balers used to get as tired as the men before the long days were over. “One time,” said Guy Puckett, “I was standing on the little platform over the gears, keeping the team going, and carelessly let my foot get caught. When I frantically hollered ‘Whoa/ the horses were so glad to stop that my foot was not crushed badly at all. “Pitch forks were much in style in those days,” Guy went on. “We used them to feed the baler, to load hay to haul to cattle, to fill the hay mow or the feed rack. Also to load manure from the farm yard and to spread it on the fields. It was not uncommon for us to have 16 to 20 horses harnessed each day during haying season, or when we were hauling baled hay to town.” Guy Puckett attended elementary schools in Holt and Merrick counties, Nebraska Central Academy and College at Central City, then did graduate work at the University of Nebraska and the University of Southern California. Except for missing four years of school, he was in school from 1909 to 1929, with several summers added later. He earned his Master s degree at the University of Nebraska. No date is given for the coming of K. L. Tunender to the Emmet area, but he must have been in the county in the early ‘nineties as he married Mary Steskal in St. Patrick’s church in O’Neill in 1893. The family lived six miles north of Emmet and became the parents of eight children. A daughter died there of burns at the age of seven. When the mother also passed away, Mr. Tunender moved the family to Sioux Falls.
Two grown sons, Raymond and Leo, came back to Holt County. Raymond married Lena Remold and moved onto a farm seven miles northeast of Emmet, near his old home. Their four sons all live in Holt County.
Philip Bausch was born in Germany in 1862. He came to Iowa with his parents in 1868. In 1882 Philip married Rosa Schneider at Maringo, Iowa, and took her to live in Miller, South Dakota, where he operated a blacksmith shop for fifteen years. In 1897 the family moved to a farm north of Emmet, near the homestead his father had taken in the early ‘eighties. In addition to farming, Philip did blacksmithing for his neighbors. Philip and Rosa had four sons and a daughter. All walked two miles to the Diehl school. The Diehl and Tunender children were among their classmates. In 1909 the Bausch daughter married Albert J. Lawrence, whose father, George Lawrence came to the United States from England as a young man. The Lawrences moved to Emmet in 1900, neighbors to the Bauschs. The newly weds lived on a farm in the Phoenix neighborhood for a few years, then moved to Atkinson in 1917. For many years, while their five children were growing up, Bert Lawrence sold Standard Oil products, delivering gas, oil, kerosene and grease to farms and ranches by a mule drawn tank wagon, later by truck.
The Otto Hoehne family came from Germany in 1901 to settle on a farm north of Emmet, near the home of Mrs. Hoehne’s brother, August Hoppe. They brought four children with them, the baby only eight months old. With the help of August Hoppe and the neighbors a house and a few other buildings were put up on the homestead. The second daughter, Anna, four years old when the family came to the claim remembers the cockleburrs she and her sister had to pull, for her father farmed a lot of ground and it all had to be weed free. Young as they were, they had to get up at five in the morning, all year long, to help with the chores and -get their work done.
Three more children were born on the farm. Mrs. Hoehne died at the birth of the youngest. The oldest daughter, Bertha, was sixteen at the time, Anna fourteen.
Matt and Nelllie Brown came as bride and groom to live on a ranch south of Emmet in April, 1908. The parents of both had been born in Germany and the two families had met, years later, in Battle Creek, Iowa. Matt and Nellie’s first son, Muri, born in 1909, went to school in a little country schoolhouse near his home, grew up on the ranch and, in 1935, married Lenora Lehman and moved back to the Brown farm in Iowa where he still lives. For many years Muri dealt in hay, buying it from Holt County ranchers and selling it in Iowa.
Gerald Brown, seven years younger than Muri, while still in his ‘teens trucked hay from Holt County for several years. He then went down to the Nebraska University, did a hitch in the U. S. Navy, and finally got his Doctorate in Education from Stanford University. Since then he has taught in the University of Hawaii, in Kingston, Jamaica, and Queens College, Melbourne, Australia. When their third son, Wayne, was an infant, Matt and Nellie moved to Sioux City in 1917. Following the first World War they moved to Coleridge, Nebraska, where their daughter Marjorie Fern was born in 1920. Marjorie, who never lived in Holt County remembers her parents saying often that the happiest years of their lives were spent on the Emmet ranch, where their neighbors were the Gaughenbaughs, Hiatts, Pucketts, Marings, and Mr. Frank Kintigh, who ran the general store in Emmet. Matt Brown had four brothers and sisters, Tillie, Andy, Otto and Ollie. Apparently none of them ever married. Through the mid-thirties the four of them spent their summers on the ranch where Matt and Nellie had lived, then returned to the Sioux City home where they had lived since 1911. After they stoped coming out to the ranch the four of them lived together until 1961, when Tillie, eighty-nine, and Andy, eighty-four, died. After Otto died at the age of eighty-seven in 1967, Ollie went into a nursing home until her death in 1972 at the age of eighty-nine. Both Matt and Nellie are now deceased. Andrew Johnson, born of Swedish parents in Illinois in 1858, moved west with his parents to LeMars, Iowa. Sereldia Bixler, Pennsylvania Dutch and English, was born in Ohio. She was teaching school in LeMars when she met Andrew. The couple married and had eight children by the time they moved to Emmet in 1909.
Another son was born there.
A realtor named Michael Berg had acquired a good deal of land from 314 homesteaders who couldn’t make a living on it. He persuaded Andrew to invest in some of it by describing its abundant water and hay and its level valleys— good selling points in the eyes of a man used to rolling hills and a scarcity of water.
The house the Johnsons built near Emmet was something of a show place. A large two-story structure with ceilings nine feet high, four bedrooms with a hall and bath upstairs, it was heated by a coal furnace in its basement. Before it was finished three of the family had been married in its parlor.
Sewell, youngest of the children who moved to the farm, remembers a night when his mother got the children out of bed and told them to get dressed. A prairie fire was burning toward the home and the youngsters dressed by the glare that lighted their rooms. The yard was full of men who had come to help save the big house.
The Johnson place was one mile south of the Elkhorn River. A fire guard had been plowed a mile south of the buildings, but the fire had started inside the guard and a steady south wind was pushing it directly toward the Johnsons. In spite of the fire fighters’ efforts the flames had come within one hundred yards of the corral fence when the wind changed to the southwest and began to die. The fire just missed the buildings but burned on to the river. Hay stacks, dead trees and fence posts smoldered for days afterward.
Sewell’s father owned a brand new 1913 Model T touring car, which was used only in the summer. All winter it stood on jacks in the garage— and only when the weather was just right was it pushed out by hand and gone over lovingly and thoroughly before it was put on the road. When Mr.
Johnson bought a new car in 1928, Sewell became the owner of the Model T, which he drove to school. Sewell made most of his spending money as a boy by shooting crows. The County paid a bounty of ten cents for each dead bird, and Mr. Johnson added another dime for each crow killed on the ranch. The boys located the trees where their prey roosted at night, then blasted away at the trees in the dark. The next morning they picked up their kill.
Sewell married Leona Zuehlke of Chambers in 1934. Her parents, Ernest and Anna Zuehlke had settled southeast of Chambers in 1913, on a place that had a fine flowing well. Sewell and Leona’s three daughters went to the same country school that their father had attended. When the girls were of high school age the family moved to Atkinson, (where Sewell had graduated) but continued to maintain the ranch.
Kay Johnson married Jim Puckett, Jeanene married Verne Hickok and Karen married Jim Kuhn.
Robert Martin Pease born in Pennsylvania in 1882, was of English and Welsh ancestry. In 1903 he married Cora Estella Spint of Columbus, Nebraska. Robert and Cora farmed four miles north of Shelby, Nebraska, for several years before buying a ranch southeast of Emmet in 1914. They lived in Emmet while hauling lumber out to the ranch, that spring of 1915, and starting to build a house. That was Nebraska’s wettest year and water stood everywhere. The lumber haulers had to pick their way along the high spots and the house had to be built on a rise that was not covered with water. By winter only the first floor had been laid. By the second winter the house had been lathed and plastered and the second floor had been laid.
Besides herding cattle, the Pease children herded turkeys, keeping the flocks fairly near the house and safe from coyotes. In the fall, when the buyers came, they herded the flock into the barn where they were caught and weighed. For a short time Mr. Pease tried to raise sheep, but was not successful in this enterprise. The main road to Emmet in those days was west of the highway used today. When the bridges washed out and rigs had to ford the Elkhorn the water often covered the wheels and came up to the seat of a spring wagon. Holt Creek, too, was much wider and deeper than it is today. The Pease family also made haying its main business. In the winter when hauling the hay to Emmet they got up at four in the morning, fed and harnessed the horses, ate breakfast, hitched the horses to the racks, pulled to the meadows and loaded from the bale piles. On the way back they stopped at the house, fed the horses and ate dinner, then went on to Emmet with their loads.
The Peases also milked cows, never less than seventeen and, in the summers, as many as twenty-nine.All by hand, of course. Such chores had to be done before the children went to school.
The school in the Pease district was subject to moving every once in a while. The people in the district thought the schoolhouse should be located nearest the largest cluster of children, so they moved it as the population center shifted. The Peases also kept the teacher for several years. Although crowded for space, they managed by putting a bed in one corner of their living-dining room and curtaining it off for privacy. Barn dances were popular in the summer and some barns Were espe-. daily equiped for them by building an “orchestra box” above the dancers. Mr. Pease had one in his barn, where he played his violin and Mrs. Pease “seconded” on the piano. Robert and Cora Pease retired in 1947, after forty-five years of ranching, and moved to O’Neill. They were the parents of two sons, Walter and Raymond. Walter married Catherine Hagensick. Raymond married Blanche Spann, who wrote the well-known feature, “Lines From A Little House,” carried for many years in the Omaha World-Herald.
Daniel and Catherine Beckwith came from Pennsylvania to Fremont, Nebraska, soon after the Civil War. Their son, Frederick Fremont, was born there in 1869. In 1885, while the family lived at Gordon, Nebraska, Daniel ran a hotel and livery stable and sixteen-year-old Fred drove the “hack” which met the trains at the end of the railroad at Valentine, ninety miles to the east.
In September, 1893, Fred married Irene Palmer, daughter of Oakdale’s first storekeeper. For awhile Fred worked at his trade of painting and paper-hanging, until, in 1906, he began farming south of Neligh. In 1911, with his wife and eight children, Patrick Bannon, “A carpenter of some talent,” who built the Andrew Johnson home. He also built the Fletcher Barnes three-story, twelve room house, “the first of its kind” in the area. Patrick is here shown in his Knights of Columbus regalia. Courtesy Gladys Davis Denby.
315 he moved to a farm three miles west of Emmet. Two years later his ten-year-old son, Kenneth was killed in a tornado south of Chambers, where the family was putting up hay on a newly purchased farm. Frank Welsh of Emmet, who was helping them, was also killed, and Fred and his oldest son, Guy, were badly injured.
During the 1920’s Fred owned and operated a store in Emmet. The store burned down. When the Holt County AAA was organized in 1933 Fred was elected a member and later served as County Chairman for a number of years. He was especially interested and active in the creation of shelter belts, of which hundreds were planted in his area. Mrs. Beckwith died in 1933, Fred in 1948.
In March, 1913, Mr. and Mrs. Louis Linville and their sons, Willard and George moved to Holt County from Glenwood, Iowa. The parents came on the train; George came in an immigrant car with all their possessions on the same train and Willard, with his friend, Everett Rhodes, drove the family’s new car, an Overland Touring, through to the new home. Before they started the car’s speedometer registered thirty miles. The boys were two days getting from Glenwood to Norfolk. The morning of March 12 they started out about seven in the morning, in a freezing rain. They reached their new home, the Henry Winkler farm, about five that evening, cold, wet and hungry. They were ahead of the family traveling by train and were without food or dry clothes.
They could see smoke coming from a chimney in the distance, so, leaving the car where it sat, they headed for the house, which belonged to Frank Heeb, who fed and bedded them for the night.
The train arrived in Emmet that afternoon and Casper Winkler, Rush and Ralph Keyes, Clarence Genung and Earl Wright met and unloaded the immigrant car of its furniture, farming equipment, livestock and provisions. With the family, the new neighbors set out and got as far as the Little Eagle bridge, where the loaded wagons stuck in the deep mire. Night was coming on and the rain had changed to snow.
Leaving the wagons until a better day, Rush Keyes took Mrs. Linville to his home and Earl Wright went home with Casper Winkler. Ralph Keyes, Genung and George Linville went on to the Winkler place with Mr. Linville to check on Willard and his friend. They found the car in the corncrib but no boys. Early the next morning the four men located the boys at Heeb’s and had breakfast with them there. By that time the storm had turned to a raging blizzard and the visitors ended up staying with their involuntary host for three days. There were eight in the Heeb family, besides the six extra men. All Mrs. Heeb did for the three days was cook.
After the blizzard the Linvilles retrieved their possessions and set up housekeeping on their new farm. The family rarely used their new car in Holt County. They found they could save time in going to Atkinson, Emmet or the neighbors by using a team and wagon. It took longer by car.
“I was ten years old when my father, F. W. Chase, moved the family to a farm one mile south of Emmet in 1917,” wrote Vida Chase Mullins, over half a century later.
“Our new life was very thrilling to me as we had come from the big clay hills west of Sioux City. I loved the expanse of hay meadows in all directions, and was delighted to find that we lived near a river, even though it overflowed its banks, that first spring, and all we could see was water.
“Emmet was a busy little hay town. My sister Mabel and I enrolled in the school. She was in the ‘big’ room and I was in the ‘little’ room. They had only ten grades in the school. Some of the Tenborgs, Aborts and Conards went to school when we did.
“I loved to bring in the milk cows in the evening. It always seemed so peaceful and there was a bed of wild mint that smelled so fragrant when I walked through it barefooted. A great deal of traffic passed our place the year around. There was the Amelia Freighter, traveling from Emmet to Amelia, some sixteen or eighteen miles southwest. There were the inumerable loads of baled hay, on their way to the big hay barn in Emmet. And there were the big bunches of cattle driven by by cowboys.
“One beautiful spring morning as I was walking to school I was dismayed to see a bunch of cattle coming my way. A cowboy called to me, ‘Roll under the fence, little girl.’ I was only too glad to oblige. At the south edge of Emmet the road turned west and meandered through a sandy place between two bridges, then across a meadow to our farm. At one time one of the bridges was condemned as ice had knocked the piling out from under one end and the bridge sagged badly. However, the hay wagons continued to cross it.
“One evening I was riding home from school on a hay wagon. When we came to the bridge I told the driver I didn’t want to ride across on the hay wagon. I guess I thought that if I was to fall into the Elkhorn I didn’t want to be mixed up with a big old hay wagon. He stopped and let me off, then drove on while I trudged along behind him. At the end of the bridge the rancher solemnly stopped and waited for me. I hopped on and we went on our way.
“About that patch of loose sand in the road. Our family soon learned to put plenty of hay in that spot, especially when my older brother was coming home in his Ford Run-About. “Then came the war years. Two of my brothers were overseas and my older sister took their place in the hayfield. There was great patriotic fervor when we met in the hall west of the school house for bond drives, and to sing the patriotic war songs. The boys left so high-heartedly on the long troop trains, leaving their homes and families to fight the war to end all wars and make the world safe for democracy.
“But even a war must end, and one November day my sis and I were in town and we heard the wonderful news that the war was over. We ran all the way home to tell the folks. My brothers came home and life settled somewhat into its familiar pattern. “As I was growing up we owned a single-seated buggy. But when the whole family went anywhere we had to take the double-seated buggy. That one was strictly useful and not at all ornamental. It didn’t have one redeeming feature, as far as my sister and I could see, and we were heartily ashamed of it. We often trudged to church through the hot sand, rather than be seen in it. We didn’t own a car until we moved to town and bought a Model T.
“All good things must end— even my carefree days in the hay country. In the fall of 1920 Dad decided to move to Plainview and Casper Wink-ler became the new owner of our farm. As Mama and I were speeding toward our new home on the train I was feeling lonesome and uprooted. ‘Mama,’ I said, ‘Do you suppose we’ll ever live in Emmet again?’ She smiled at me and said, ‘No, I dont suppose we ever will.’ ” Frederick John Sexsmith, youngest son of William and Jane Sexsmith, was born in Iowa in 1876. The family, whose ancestors earlier came from Scotland and Ireland to America, had come from New York State to Iowa to join a brother and cousins in the mid 1800’s. Fred had married Letta M. Heaton, who was born in Illinois, in Greenfield, Iowa, in September, 1904. The couple lived on the Sexsmith family farm, where their first daughter, Edith Jerusha, was born on her father’s thirty-first birthday in the same farm home where he had been born.
316 Fred had visited in O’Neill at the time of the Rosebud Land Registration. Just before the first World War he made a return visit. He especially liked the flat prairie land and the clear streams of Holt Creek and the Elkhorn River. Immediately after the Armistice was signed he had a farm sale and brought his family of three daughters and a son to a new home on the Dishner Ranch, six miles southwest of Emmet. The household goods and the family came by train to Emmet, where they were met by Bob Pease, who was to be their nearest neighbor.
The family drove their spring wagon to the Methodist church in Emmet, and got their mail whenever they went to town, as there was, as yet, no mail route in their area. As the school term in District 59 was of only six months duration, the Sex-smith children did not start to school until the fall term. The schoolhouse was a twelve by sixteen foot frame building two and a half miles from the Sexsmith home. The only other pupils were the four Neal children from the Wilson ranch. The following school term was nine months long. By then the Neal family had moved to Lincoln and a family of six Deeder children had moved to a farm between the Sexsmith and the Pease ranches. With Walter and Ray Pease, there were twelve pupils in the tiny building, which had by then been moved nearer the Sexsmith place. There were not enough desks, so the older children sat around a large homemade table. Miss Minnie Stolte of Atkinson was the teacher, and that year Edith finished the eighth grade. On February 14, 1921, Alice Valentine Sexsmith was born at the ranch with a neighbor, Mrs. Garvin, in attendance. Dr. Gilligan had been called but did not arrive in time. When Edith was ready for high school her father arranged for her to board and room with a Mrs. Morgan in O’Neill, who kept several other out-of-town students as well. Some of the family would take the school girl to Emmet on Sunday afternoon or, sometimes, she rode the saddle pony to the depot, then turned her loose to go home, while she boarded the train for O’Neill. The fare was thirty cents, one way. When she came back again on Friday afternoon if, for some reason, no one was able to meet her, she walked the six miles home. In the winters Mr. Sexsmith used the walnut lumber, sawed on his Iowa farm, to make beautiful pieces of furniture for their home, chests, a bookcase, library table, chifforobe and other fine pieces of cabinet work; furniture that Edith still uses and enjoys in her own attractive home. In haying season Edith and her sister Velma fed and harnessed twelve to sixteen head of horses while their father sharpened sickles on his foot-pedaled grinder every morning. The rest of the day they mowed, raked and helped stack the hay.
Each of the five Sexsmith children graduated from O’Neill High. Velma we.nt on to graduate from the University of Nebraska School of Nursing in Omaha in 1931. In March, 1972, she retired as a Nursing Supervisor at the University Hospital after forty-one years of nursing service.
In 1927 Mr. Sexsmith lost the ranch through foreclosure and moved to a rented farm north of O’Neill, and later to a ranch on Honey Creek. There, on November 20, 1932, he was murdered by two ex-convicts, Frank Mackey and Lloyd Hammond, in a robbery attempt. The pair were caught within a week and both served sentences in the Nebraska Penitentiary.
Mrs. Sexsmith married Rev. Dorsey S. Conrad, a retired Methodist minister in 1948. He died in 1952 and she remained in her home until 1964, when she entered the O’Neill Senior Citizen’s Home for the remaining four years of her life.
Edith Sexsmith and John Davidson were married in 1927. Edith still lives in O’Neill and is the owner and operator of the James Davidson & Sons Plumbing, Heating and Sheet Metal Company.
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