← Before Today: A History of Holt County, Nebraska
Page and Pleasant Valley Chapter Thirty-Four It seems that the town of Page began with a schoolhouse. Quite a number of families located five or six miles east and a little north of the village of Inman. By 1883 these families had built homes and raised their first crops. As in all the other communities, a school came next. These early families included the Hunts, Woods, Frenchs, Pages, Hunters, Grays and Wagers. On November 20, 1883, “upon the written petition of a majority of the qualified voters” of the proposed district, a meeting was called at the home of W. W. Page. A school board was elected and a location for the new schoolhouse established— the northwest acre of the farm of R. B. Hunter, Director of the Board, who leased the site to the district for ninety-nine years for one dollar. The acre was a half mile south of the main square of the present town of Page.
Upon circulation of a “subscription paper,” $34 was subscribed, and a committee appointed to build as large a structure as the funds would allow. The schoolhouse that resulted was fourteen by sixteen feet in size, made of wide boards banked with sod. Grandma French donated a stove and other patrons brought hay to burn in it. During intermissions the teacher and pupils “twisted” the hay into ropes— for longer lasting fuel. Mrs. W. W. Page, the first teacher, carried her eight-month-old daughter to school every day and the pupils helped care for her. Both the settlement and the school were known by the name of Pleasant Valley. Mail and provisions came from Inman, the nearest railroad point.
Mrs. Page soon organized a Sunday school in the schoolhouse, with Duran Hunt as superintendent. The Rev. Bartley Blain preached there occasionally. The Pleasant Valley Literary Society came next, thus making the little schoolhouse the social center of the neighborhood. When an organ was needed Mrs. Hunt loaded hers into a wagon or sleigh and hauled it along.
The homesteaders, being highly patriotic, the Pleasant Valley ladies met in the Page soddy and made a flag for the Fourth of July and other celebrations, Decoration Day, Children’s Day, or whatever. By 1890 the Pacific Shortline railroad was building west from Sioux City toward O’Neill. Since it would pass through their settlement, the homesteaders made big plans to celebrate its arrival, supposed to coincide with the Fourth of July. Although the railroad didn’t make it by that date the celebration was held anyway.
The Pages had already established a post office in their home, named for Mrs. Page who was its post mistress. It opened for business on April 12, 1890. With their railroad assured, the settlers went ahead with plans for a town of their own, also to be named Page. The site selected was the present location, the area where the four homesteads of W. W. Page, Robert Gray, R. B. Hunter and George Hunter cornered.
By this time the old Pleasant Valley school house was outgrown and a new building for the new town was in the planning. This time the district bond334 ed itself for $1,500 and built a large two-story frame schoolhouse, with two rooms below and one big one above. A Mr. Perry Chase was hired to teach the first term, which began in January, 1891 and ended in June. There were more than ninety pupils, of all ages and sizes, and Mr. Chase taught them all in the big upstairs room. He also did the janitor work even carrying coal upstairs and the ashes down— all for $60 per month. When the burden proved too much for him another teacher, a woman, was hired to take over the first four grades. A complete list of the names of those first pupils has been preserved by the Holt County Historical Society.
Several families moved into the new town. The Pages built a store, with living quarters and the post office in the back. Then a Mr. and Mrs. Coon came from Illinois. A man of means, Mr. Coon bought land north of the railroad in the budding town and built a hardware store, a general store, a lumber and coal yard and a new home. Mrs. Coon, however, did not take to the frontier life and persuaded her husband to move back east. John Walker bought their home. In 1892 Jim Patterson built the town’s first hotel, left it soon afterward to go back to his homestead, and John Walker took that over, too. By that August, when the town was platted, it was a lively trading center with a population of one hundred, a bank, a church and a Republican newspaper, The Eye. Its blacksmith shop had several owners before Wilton Haynes bought it in 1904. The populations of frontier towns were often in a state of flux for their Early General Merchandise Store in Page. The large round boxes on shelves in back contain hats. Hich _ front. Wheel of coffee grinder can be seen on counter at far left. Topped shoes on table in The beginning of Page. Courtesy C. E. Walker 335 Groceries, yard goods, thread, hats, etc., etc., etc. Wrapping paper on roller at right, string comes down from spindle on ceiling above counter. Courtesy C. E. Walker. The Townsend Brothers Hardware Store. Everything in the hardware line. Courtesy Verna Walker. 336 first decade or so. Page’s first livery stable had several owners; in one year the Page Reporter, which replaced the Eye, changed hands three times. The Atlas Elevator was in operation by 1904.
The town’s cemetery was laid out on a five acre tract purchased from William Ord in 1890. On July 14, 1892, the Charles Woods family, with several others, were picnicking on the Elkhorn when Dora and Meta, twelve- and thirteen-year-old daughters of the Woods, were drowned. Their graves were the first in the new cemetery. A visitor to the cemetery today would find the headstones of twenty- five veterans of the Civil War there. James Stevens, known as “Uncle Matt,” lies there and the Malone brothers, Thomas and Joseph, and James Cronk, one of the earliest settlers. John Braddock, too, and John Wilson, Robert Gallagher, John Darr, Pulaski Reed, John Smith, Alfred Snell, Jonathan and Waldron Townsend, Eli Hoshaw, Will Brown, Albert Reynolds, Jacob Waltz, Isaac Smith, Rheuban Sizer, Nelson Van Avery, Greenbury Haynes, James Clark, Thomas Brown, John Lamason and George Haynes complete the roll. Soon after the new school was built a group of young people prepared and presented a three-act comedy, “Ticket of Leave.” The proceeds were used toward buying a bell for the school. The same bell still calls Page students to their classes in a newer, more modern school.
In August, 1905, an effort was made to incorporate the village. The meeting ended in the resignation of several members of the board, due to a disagreement over the licensing of a saloon. Seven years passed before a new board was formed and the task finished.
Charles Leland Wood, born in New York State in 1853, and Melissa Ann Lines, born in Indiana in 1856, were married in Lincoln, Nebraska,.in 1875. Seven years later they came by covered wagon to a homestead a mile east of Page. They brought four children with them, lost the two little girls in the Elkhorn River drowning, and had ten more children born on the homestead.
Melissa Wood’s brother, Adlaska Lines, came to Page with them and the following year married Minnie Smith, a neighbor’s daughter. These people helped organize the Presbyterian church three miles on east of their claim. Known as the Lambert church, it was moved to Page and remodeled in 1909. A Mr. McStay, a still earlier settler, brought a suitcase full of cottonwood cuttings from Iowa and planted them on his homestead across the road north of the Woods. The grove of huge trees still stands. As the Woods prospered and improved their farm, Charles installed a sixteen battery type electric light plant in his home, the first in the Page community.
Another very early settler was George W. Jones who came from Minnesota about 1879 and homesteaded fifteen miles east of O’Neill in the Lambert area. Hurley Jones, a son, writes that he heard his mother tell that the first election in that township (Antelope) was held in their house on a Tuesday, the first dance on Friday (their house was the first to have a wooden floor) and the first church service on Sunday, with Missionary Blain officiating.
In the fall of 1882 W. W. Page had gone from Polk County to Holt to file on a homestead joining the Robert Gray claim on the south. R. B. Hunter and his son George had also taken land next to Gray’s. Early the next May the Grays and the Pages set out from Polk County for their homesteads. Each had a wagon load of household goods; Mr. Page had his blacksmith tools in his wagon and fifteen head of cattle and horses to drive. Their team was a three-year- old bronc and a balky old mare. Numerous hard rains and muddy roads slowed their rate of travel, as did the balky mare. Both Mrs. Page and Mrs. Gray had babes in arms and, many times on the trip, they walked and carried the babies and still made better time than the teams and wagons. On one occasion they attempted to cross a swampy place. Mrs. Gray made it across, but Selinda Page, “being heavier,” sank into the mud to her knees. By the time she had struggled to firm ground, both she and the baby were covered with mud. At a house farther on she and her baby were cleaned up, warmed and fed.
The next day they reached the home of W. C. Townsend, an old Wisconsin friend of Mr. Gray’s, five Activity at the J. B. Ryan Hay Company during shipping season. Courtesy Hurley Jones.
miles south of the future town of Page. That evening they arrived at their own homestead, but stayed that night with R. B. Hunter, Mrs. Gray’s father.
Their new neighbors were kind and helpful, lending them such things as they needed to help them get settled. Mr. Page got a job driving the cream wagon, gathering cream for delivery in Inman. His route was long and his trips often took from six in the morning to eleven or twelve at night. Selinda cared for her baby, did the chores (keeping their cows on picket ropes) and tended her garden.
Their soddy had neither doors, windows nor a floor, that first summer, “just places for them.” Often, as she rocked her baby, the little ground squirrels came in and played under her rocker. One rainy Hurley Jones, son of George Jones, at eighteen. In uniform in First World War. Courtesy Hurley Jones.
337 morning she had to make three trips to re-stake “Old Rose,” who kept pulling her picket pin. Each time she came in she had to change to dry clothes.
The third time she made the trip barefooted and in “very scanty attire.” When she returned to the house a carriage full of old friends from Polk County were waiting for her. “I made the best of it,” Selinda wrote, “and we had a lovely day, with hot biscuits, new potatoes and peas for dinner, for I had a wonderful garden.” It was that summer that the plans were made for the Pleasant Valley schoolhouse, which was built that fall, only a little way from the Page home. Mr. Page built a little shop on the corner northwest of the schoolhouse and did blacksmithing for his neighbors. Mrs. Page continued to teach. One term when she taught the Stafford school it was necessary for her to “camp” for awhile in the schoolhouse and keep the fire going all night; for the temperature stayed down around sixteen degrees below zero from December 9 to February 1. Several of the children came to school with frosted toes and fingers and a warm room in the morning was a necessity.
While Selinda was at Stafford Mrs. George Hunter taught at Pleasant Valley. The next year Selinda taught the Wood’s school for three months, then in Pleasant Valley for the spring term.
One winter a friend gave her a turkey for Christmas dinner. But Selinda saved the gobbler, bought a hen and raised forty turkeys that rustled almost their entire living on the prairie. The price was so low that fall that they dressed only one barrel full of the turkeys and shipped them to Omaha, but the rats destroyed them while they were in storage over Sunday in a depot. The railroad paid only a nominal sum for the ruined birds, so the family ate the rest of the flock.
Of her years in Pleasant Valley Selinda Page wrote, “Those were the happy days. There were no better people anywhere then those I was privileged to live among in the Valley when it first settled up.” Robert Gray and Orilla Jane Hunter were married in 1868. His birth state was New Jersey, hers New York. With two children, Lydia and John, they left Genoa, Wisconsin, in 1875 to take a homestead in Polk County, Nebraska. Other families made the wagon caravan trip from Wisconsin with them, covering the distance of 519 miles in twenty-two days. Dora and Robert (Bert) were born to the Grays in Polk County, and Nellie and Elsie after they moved to Holt County with the Pages.
In 1892 Robert Gray and George Hunter bought the Coon store, which was known as Hunter and Gray until Robert’s oldest son, John, bought the Hunter interest in 1899. John later became sole owner and the store remained in the Gray family until 1942, when Willard Gray, John’s son, sold it. The timber claim was farmed for many years by Bert Gray, and is now owned and lived on by Robert G. Gray, another son of John.
The Pulaski Reed family came by train to O’Neill in 1883. Pulaski, born in Ohio, and Elizabeth Ann Williams, born in Virginia, were married in 3 Robert Gray Homestead. Courtesy Verna and Cordes Walker. 338 Illinois in 1874. Their first four children were born there. With them to O’Neill came Pulaski’s sister, Martha, and her husband, Benjamin Nichelson.
While Pulaski built a two-room home and dug a well, the mother and children stayed in O’Neill, where another daughter was born two weeks before they moved out to the homestead in August. Three more children were born on the homestead. The older children went to school in the Pleasant Valley soddy.
In 1894, when most of his neighbors raised little or nothing, Pulaski harvested eight hundred bushels of corn. he was a hard worker and liked to plant his corn very early. That year he was lucky and his early plants excaped the late frosts that come so often to Nebraska in the spring. Consequently his crop had matured beyond the tassel stage when the hot winds began to blow on July 26. As her neighbors did, Elizabeth administered home remedies when her family ailed, and even set and splinted her daughter Susie’s arm when she broke it while coasting down a snowdrift. Both Elizabeth and Pulaski are buried in the Page cemetery, but through their Holt County grandchildren they continue to influence the community in which they settled and lived out their lives. Another early pioneer in Pleasant Valley was Jacob Harper and his wife, Martha. Former lowans, they homesteaded forty acres and took an adjoining quarter as a timber claim. One son, Charles, died in infancy. Then, in April, 1893, when Harry, the oldest child was nine, their third daughter, Nellie was born. She was one month old when her mother died. Their neighbors, Duran and Clara Hunt, half a mile west of them, also had a new baby near the age of the motherless Nellie, so Clara took the month-old girl and nursed her, too, for several months. But by then the Harper children were full orphans for Jacob died five months after his wife’s death. The cause of their deaths was listed as “stomach disorder,” doubtless appendicitis. Jacob and Martha’s graves were the third and fourth in the Page cemetery. The four Harper children were raised by aunts and uncles, with no two of them in the same home. Harry, raised by an uncle in Iowa, returned to the Page homestead after he turned twenty-one and built a home there. In 1912 he married Maude Reed and raised a son and two daughters. One daughter, Alice, and her husband, Murney Tipton, built improvements on the timber claim and made it their home for many years. Today Mr. and Mrs. Frank Beelaert own and live on the place, the third generation from Jacob and Martha to make their home there. Duran Hunt and his brother-in-law, Thomas McMillin, filed on homesteads in Pleasant Valley in 1882. Duran, the grandson of a Methodist minister and the son of another Duran Hunt, a trapper and hunter in Indiana, was born in 1845. At the age of seventeen he left his Iowa home to drive an ox team, with a caravan, to Salem, Oregon. In 1864 he drove back to Bennet, Nebraska, where his father had homesteaded. In 1871 he married Clara Rutherford in St. Louis. The families of George Hunter and Robert Gray, Sr., June 1908. Back row: Celia Hunter, Mrs. Ed Hunter and baby, Vernie Hunter, Lloyd Hunter, Mrs. George Hunter, Lee Hunter, Hugh Hunter, Mrs. Hugh Hunter, Elsie, Nellie and Dora Gray, Robert Gray, Sr., Mrs. John Gray, Mrs. Bob.Gray. Front row: Merle, Fern and Leia Hunter, Waldo Hunter (small boy) and Ed Hunter, George Hunter and boy. Elsworth, Mr. Mapes (brother of Rachel Hunter), Rachel Hunter, Ransom Hunter, Mrs. Robert Gray, Sr. (Oriila Jane), John Gray and baby, Robert Gray, Zella Gray, Willard Gray, down in front, Bert Gray and baby Verna, Erma Gray, small girl in front. Courtesy Verna and Cordes Walker. 339 Duran, a man who obviously got around a good deal, was a stone cutter by trade. However, after settling on his homestead he seemed content to stay. With his wife and four daughters he left Cloud County, Kansas for Holt County. In crossing the Platte River the wagon box floated off the running gears, but with the help of his mules, Jennie and Jack, Duran got the outfit safely across.
The family stopped at Bloomfield, Nebraska, to visit Clara’s relatives, the Dan McMillin family, and there tragedy overtook them and they lost three of their little girls, doubtless to an epidemic of some kind. All were buried in the old cemetery at Creighton, two in one grave. With their remaining daughter, Dora, they came on to their new home. There three more children were born to them. Duran Hunt served his community as Justice of the Peace for eighteen years and was Moderator of the first school board. Their organ, the first in the Valley, was the one that traveled so often to the schoolhouse and other homes. Clara Hunt was nurse and mid-wife to her neighbors. When the little Woods girls drowned, hers were the tender hands that laid them out for burial. When Nellie Harper’s mother died she nursed the little girl through the hot summer months, doubtless saving her life.
The Hunt’s first home was a frame building set against a hillside. A large cave, dug into the hill, made a most convenient walk-in cooler for keeping butter, milk and even meat. Both Duran and Clara died in Page, Duran in 1929, Clara in 1931.
With her six children, Louisa Parker French, widow of Henry G. French, came to a homestead about two miles southwest of the present town of Page in the fall of 1883. Her children ranged in age from nine to twenty years; her husband had died of typhoid fever in Bath, New York. The family came by train to Gris-wold, Iowa, where the older boys worked on the farms of relatives to earn enough money for livestock and a covered wagon to make the move on to Holt County. It is not known why the family set out so late in the fall, without hay or grain for their stock but, as a result, their cows and two teams of horses died before spring. The older boys returned to Iowa to work until they had earned enough money to buy two teams of oxen, with which they farmed the claim for a number of years.
The French home was most hospitable and the neighborhood children were always welcome there. Rollie Snell, one of the boys who played at Grandma French’s house in pioneer times, at ninety-eight recalled how they played table croquet. They spread Mrs. French’s shawl over the table for a “greens” and used marbles for balls, which they batted with mallets made of spools with sticks for handles.
The family, deeply religious, worked hard in the Methodist Episcopal Church in Page. Some of Louisa French’s grandchildren chose the Methodist Wesleyan University at Lincoln for their alma mater. One of her great-grandsons is now head of the physics department there. A grandson, Dr. Oscar French, was a physician in Page and O’Neill for many years and another great-grandson, Carroll French, and his family are agricultural missionaries under the United Methodist Board in Zairi. Louisa’s sons operated a sorghum mill on the farm for years.
Rufus Pen Wagers, one of the thirteen children of Isaac and Sarah Wagers, was born in Wisconsin in 1857. At the age of twelve he suffered a bone marrow disease that kept him in bed for a year. The entire Isaac Wagers family moved to a Pleasant Valley homestead in 1883. Three years later Rufus married Clara Jane Kendall, whose family had also moved to Nebraska in 1883.
Rufus and Clara lived on a tree claim next to one of his brothers, who had taken a homestead about a mile west of the Door school. They had four children by the time they moved into Page in 1893, where Rufus and one of his brothers ran a general store.
That same year a tornado ripped through Page, tearing down the Griest mill and scattering lumber from the lumberyard all over town. The big wind tipped three boxcars against the depot and destroyed Rufus Wagers’ house. Clara and her daughter, Agurtha, were found unconscious, the child in a mud puddle. Clara did not regain consciousness for twenty-four hours. Her youngest child, Blanche, was ten months old. Later another daughter, Gladys, was born.
Special occasions for the Wagers family were one-day trips to Nio-brara, made in a surrey or spring wagon, to visit Clara’s parents, the Kendalls, who ran the hotel there. In 1911 Mr. Kendall was killed in an explosion in the hotel basement. In 1902 the family moved back to the farm and remained there until Rufus’ old bone disease returned and it was necessary to amputate his leg above the knee. In 1923 the Wagers moved back to Page where Rufus repaired shoes for a living for several years. He died in 1939 in Page. James “Bill” Wagers came to Pleasant Valley with his father s family. He and some of his brothers were well drillers, putting down wells for many of his early neighbors. In 1886 he married Alta Mills, daughter of Isaac and Jane Mills. They were married by James’ brother, Sylvester, a Justice of the Peace at Sod Shanty, Nebraska. Of their five children, two married in the neighborhood; Olive to Lee hunter and Ernest to Elsie Gray. After living on a farm for several years the family moved into Page in 1894, where James built an eight-room house on the north edge of town, in addition to drilling wells, James, with Ed Hunter as a partner, opened a real estate office next to the Hunter and Gray store. Wagers took land seekers who came in on the train to his big house for room and meals while they were looking for suitable locations. Business boomed.
Several other members of Isaac Wagers’ large family married in Holt County. Maria became the wife of Judge Roberts; ran a millinery shop in Page for several years and helped fight and defeat the opening of a saloon in the town. Adolphus married Lena Rosenbach; Rhoda married Henry Howard and Mary married George Cherry.
Of Rufus Wagers’ family a daughter, Blanche, married Fred Wood of Page. Their three sons served in World War II. Warren went down in a B29 in Chengtu, China, and is buried in the National Cemetery at Keokuk, Iowa. Their three daughters all married but no other information is given. James Madison Stevens, born in Kentucky in 1840, moved with his parents to Indiana when he was only four. His parents made the move to get away from the practice of slavery. When only ten James hired out to a farmer for two dollars and a half a month. The next year his father died. During the next eight years or so he worked on farms and, by clearing and fencing forty acres of timbered land, earned eighty acres of wooded land for himself.
In 1860 he . married Tempy Boss, enlisted in the Civil War in 1862 and served illustrously until its end. His name is inscribed on the monument to Co. F 42nd Ind. Vol. at Oakland City, Indiana. After his discharge, James cleared forty acres of his land, fenced it and built a cabin, where he lived for nine years. Five of his six children died in infancy and his wife, Tempy, died in 1873.
In 1875 James Stevens married Emeline Grosch, who had been twice widowed and had three children. James had his one daughter, Carrie, by his first marriage. James and Emeline had three children, Logan, Benjamin and Earl. Shortly after Earl’s birth the family boarded a train at Mackey, Indiana, for Inman.. They 340 built a two-room house east of the present site of Page. They witnessed the rapid settlement of Pleasant Valley during the next two years, and often marveled at the mirages on the prairie in the mornings when the grass was wet with dew. Mirages so plain they could see the streets of O’Neill, twelve miles away, and count the cars in the trains on the Elkhorn railroad, five miles distant.
In 1910 James and Emeline moved into Page and lived there the rest of their lives. Part of the homestead is still in the Stevens’ name and most of the house is still as it was when James built it. When James (Uncle Matt as he was known in Page) died in 1934, his death marked the passing of the last of Holt County’s Civil War soldiers.
Jesse (Steve) Walker came to Middlebranch in 1879 or 1880, where he practiced medicine and owned a drug store for awhile. He took a homestead near Middlebranch and also acquired considerable other land. The “Walker Ranch” came to be a well-known early landmark.
In 1885 Jesse’s father, John Walker, sold his farm in Iowa and moved a part of his family of twelve children to Holt County to Jesse’s homestead, which he relinquished to his father, who proved up on it.
For a time Jesse Walker was postmaster in Page. His brother, John Taylor Walker, came to Page in the 1890’s to manage the hotel. He, too, was postmaster in Page for several years. He also ran a livery barn there, dealt in pure bred horses and conducted a real estate and insurance business.
In 1934 Cordes Walker, son of Edwin, another of the Walker brothers, became postmaster at Page, the third Walker to hold that post. In 1941 he gave up the post office and became the mail carrier, carrying the mail from Page on the rural route until his retirement in 1974. Cordes and his wife, the former Verna Gray, now reside in Page where they are both active in community activities. Daniel Kennedy, born in Scotland in 1767, came to America at the age of nine. He married Azsie Kegwin and had seven children. James, the oldest son, married Lucy Rathburn and lived in New York State until he moved to Sarpy County, Nebraska, in the early days. While freighting from Sarpy County to the Black Hills he came to know northeastern Nebraska very well and made up his mind to homestead in the Holt County area. James and Lucy’s oldest son, John Gilmore Kennedy, born in 1861, married Lida Gortner in her parents’ sod home, three miles east of present Page, in 1887. The couple lived on James’ homestead, next to his father’s, about two miles northeast of where Page was to be. James gave land from his homestead and tree claim for Maxfield school and church. The Maxfield district merged with District 2 at Page in 1959; the church, too, later became a part of the Methodist church in Page.
Sunday in the Kennedy household was a day of worship and no work. Food was prepared the day before. The children could read and take walks, but no noisy or active games were permitted. One of the children started to pop some corn one Sunday— but had to throw it out, half popped.
John and Lida had nine children and John was proud of the fact that all six of his daughters taught school. John Ross, the oldest son, died in Camp Charlestown, Virginia, during the first world war. Two other sons, Harley and Ket took turns farming the Mr. and Mrs. Ben Stevens, 1907. homestead with their father. Ket later bought it, keeping it in his name until 1969, when he sold it to his daughter and her husband, Jeane and William Sorensen.
In the early days the family earned cash by gathering wild fruits and berries, which the parents peddled as far away as O’Neill and Inman. The children were left at home, the elder to look after the younger except that the older ones could take turns, one at a time, in going to town, a very special occasion for the one that got to go.
Harley Kennedy remembers planting 40 acres of corn with a one-horse walking drill. It held about a gallon of seed, which lasted for half a day’s planting. Now his sons use a twelve- row planter. It holds eighteen bushels and they plant 130 acres a day. Daniel A. Davis was the first of the Davis family to take a claim in Holt County. He left Michigan in 1882 and 341 spent two years around Omaha before going on west with William Kestenholtz. He worked with W. P. Townsend in the Page area. Dan did many things. For a time he ran a Rawliegh route, then a picture show, then his own road show for a few years. His nephew, Fred Voedisch, played the fiddle in the show. Dan also played the violin and gave music lessons.
He was a noted bridge builder in Holt and neighboring counties. In 1892 he was a pile driver around O’Neill. He moved a barn for Abdouch for $3 during the period he was a house and barn mover. He used huge rollers and several head of horses for these jobs. He moved one of the last of the big barns in 1930, rolling it from near Atkinson to the old Keeper place five miles north of Chambers, over hilly country and fording Dry Creek, east of the Schaffer ranch house. He used ten to twelve head of horses to pull it, and a good many men to help move the rollers ahead. The barn is still in use on its last location.
Dan came to own many pieces of land around O’Neill and up in Rock County. He married Anna M. Sanford in O’Neill in 1893. Their only daughter, Elsie, married Donald Collins and had a son who drowned in a freak accident. Dan could still do a lively jig when he was in his eighties. He died in O’Neill in 1939.
Tillie Kestenholtz Ridell’s husband, Bob Ridell, wiped out some of the bridges Dan built in the Long Pine area while he was with the Department of Roads and Irrigation before 1950.
James N. Carson, born in New York State in 1873, was the son of Irish immigrants. In 1888 the family moved to Holt County. James was married to Harriet B. Darr on March 5, 1903 by Rev. D. W. Rosencrans in the minister’s home. The wedding was one week later than planned because the groom had the measles. A few days after the ceremony the bride was ill with measles.
The Carsons lived on their farm, a short distance east of the farm of his father, Newton Carson, for sixteen years. They then moved to Page, where they remained for the rest of their lives. James died in 1950. He and Harriet had three children, Gerald, Melvin and Margaret.
Born in Concordia, Kansas, Joseph Malone moved with his family to Verdigre Township in 1889, where the family became a part of the Pleasant Valley community. The Malones had five children. One died in childhood. Clarence Joseph Malone, eldest of the family, taught school for thirteen years, first near Page, then at Inman and Wausa. In the summers he worked on farms and later went to Fremont College and Wayne State Normal, graduating from the latter with a “life” teaching certificate. Always a student, he read law and was admitted to the Nebraska Bar. He married Robinetta Hancock and became the father of three children. Clarence Joseph Malone served as County Judge of Holt County for more than twenty-eight years— January 1906 through 1911 and January 1917 until his death in 1939.
During his early years as judge he had no typewriter in his office and Mrs. Malone worked at his side, writing all his cases by hand. One large book of case records is written entirely in her neat script. During the period of the Rosebud land opening, which swamped the county office with the registration duties, the Judge and his wife worked far into the nights, by the light of kerosene lamps, keeping up with the filings. There was only one telephone in the courthouse that time— in Sheriff Hall’s office. Again during World War I there was much activity in the judge’s office and Mrs. Malone once more had to work long hours, helping out. Judge Malone enjoyed driving out into the country, for he knew most of its families and called them by their first names. Romaine Saunders said of him: “The pioneer, the splendid citizen, the efficient official, the loyal friend, scholar and gentleman were combined in Clarence Malone.” His wife deserved equally high praise. The other members of the Malone family were Elizabeth, who married Ebben Candee of Page; Flora, who married Edward Green of Inman; and George, who married Nina Falconer Main Street before 1909. Courtesy Bob Tomlinson. of Inman. One child died young. In 1902 George was killed by a gravel plow on which he was working with a train crew near O’Neill.
Edward Adams was born to John and Etha Adams in Ohio in 1862. Twenty years later he went to Uvalde, Texas to work on a ranch. The next year he was ready to set out on the trail north with a large herd of cattle when he caught the measles and had to forego the trip. Soon afterward he went home to Ohio, then came to O’Neill to visit his brothers and cousins in 1884.
For the next five years he worked in an O’Neill bank and in J. J.
McCafferty’s store. In 1889 Edward moved to Page and built its first place of business, the Farmer’s State Bank. The next year he built his house, just east of the bank, where it still stands, little changed since 1890. The next year he married Sarah McMillin at her home near town.
During the hard years of 1893-’94 he kept the bank open only part of the week— the rest of the time he went out north of Page and sheared sheep. In the fall of 1900 he sold the bank to E. H. Smith and Robert Gallagher. Edward and Sarah lived in Page until 1901. They had five children there. A daughter, Jennie, was the missionary nurse who was executed by the Japanese in the Philippines during World War II. In 1901 the Adams family moved to Stuart, where Edward worked in the Krotter Lumber Company for a few months, then moved to Chambers, where he opened the Chambers State Bank in a lean-to on the east side of the Baldwin store. Later he built a bank where the present bank stands today. Six more children were born to 342 the Adams there. Two, Glenn, who married Berniece Huston, and Etha, who married Arthur Walters, still live in Chambers.
By the time he died in 1941, Edward Adams had been active in the banking business for more than fifty years. Two of his sons have carried on as bankers: Leo for fifty years and Glenn for forty. The Chambers State Bank has been mostly owned and managed by three generations of Adams. When Roosevelt declared his bank holiday in 1933 the Chambers State Bank was one of the first to reopen with no restrictions.
On February 1, 1933, a lone gunman attempted to rob the bank. Edward, then past seventy, grabbed the robber’s right wrist with one hand and the gun with the other. The hammer caught in the flesh of his finger, tearing it painfully, but the gun did not discharge. Leo then struck the gunman on the head and his brother John knocked him backward through the glass of the cage door, then ran to the hardware store and got a length of rope to tie him up while they waited for the Deputy Sheriff to come from O’Neill.
In 1966, however, a nighttime robbery netted the thief about $2,000, mostly silver, which must have weighed more than eighty pounds. The time-lock on the safe protected its more valuable contents.
Charles F. Smith and Florence Oakes were married in Wisconsin in 1878. Eight years later they loaded out for Colorado with their three children and some cattle. They started a ranch at Granada, Colorado and were doing fine until the drouth of 1894 struck the plains. Before mid-summer their crops and pasture were burned up.
At this point Charles’ brother, Gene, wrote from his farm at Page that he had plenty of feed and would help his brother through the emergency. With 125 head of cattle, driven by his seven- and eight-year-old sons, Charles headed back to Page. By this tirrie they had five children.
By the time they reached Gene’s farm the creeping drouth had taken the crops and pastures there, too, and there was nothing to feed the cattle. They sold them for what little they could get and moved to Stafford the next year, living on the place now owned by Dr. Sutcliffe. There another son was born.
Times were very hard and it was difficult even to keep food on the table. One can understand why, one evening while Mrs. Smith was getting supper, she was dismayed to see several buggies and wagon loads of Page friends drive into their yard. “Oh my goodness,” she exclaimed, “I won’t have enough food for my family.” Imagine her joy when she found that the visitors had come, with well-filled baskets, to help the family celebrate Charles’ birthday.
While he lived at Stafford Mr. Smith had the post office in his home for awhile. After two or three more moves the family came to Inman in 1903, where they stayed for thirteen years. From 1912 to 1916 Charles was postmaster there. In 1918 he built a set of buildings six miles southwest of Inman, where he died in 1922. The building site is now pasture land, owned by Ernest Brunckhorst.
That fall Elwin, the youngest of the family, and his mother moved into Inman, where Elwin was the town photographer for awhile, until he took over the telephone office, where his mother helped him at the switchboard. Elwin is now the only member of his family still living.
Nelson Van Every, born in Canada, was living in Michigan when he enlisted in the Union Army and served until the war was over. In 1876 he moved to Plattsmouth, Nebraska, where he married Mary Alberta Rose in 1879. In 1895 they came to Page. Seven of their ten children grew to maturity. Three married and remained in Holt County. These were Rhoda, who married Heber Asher and lived at Page; Georgia, who married Roy Delong and had seven children. (A son, John Leo, gave his life for his country); and George, who married Matilda Bradley.
George went to work for the State Department of Roads and Irrigation in 1927, at the beginning of the better roads movement in the county. He opened the first grade in the Meek vicinity, north of O’Neill, and was foreman of a crew of ninety-two men who, with teams and fresnos, built the five miles of Highway 95 that connects Chambers with Highway 281. Later he directed road construction in five neighboring counties. George Van Every, in 1957, was the first Holt County resident to retire in O’Neill after thirty years of continuous service to the state. He was presented a Certificate of Appreciation signed by Governor Anderson and several other state dignitaries. George and Matilda celebrated their Golden Wedding in 1961. George died in 1969, Matilda in 1970.
Elias Luther Clark, born in Bath, New York, was the son of a Union soldier who took a bullet in his leg and died of blood poisoning. Elias, three years old at the time, was the youngest of eleven children. He married Eva May Wheeler and, in 1905, moved to West Virginia. With their young daughter they came on to Holt County a short time later and settled on the “Old Red Barn Eighty,” west of Elias’ uncle, D. D. Smith. In 1913 Elias homesteaded forty acres north of Page, which he later sold to Bob Tomlinson, son of his old friend, George Tomlinson. Mr. Smith had a well digging business and had sent for Elias to help him. Mr. Clark later took over the well business and worked at it for many years. His tin covered wagon was a familiar sight in the region, with its sliding doors and neat compartments for tools.
Later on Elias Clark was the man who built the telephone line that connected Mineola, Walnut, Dorsey, O’Neill, Page and other settlements. Mrs. Clark and her five daughters ran the switchboard. Elias was noted for the unusual “improvements” he made on various ordinary objects. His tin wagon was the first. Later he equipped a car to serve the same purpose. After he and Mrs. Clark retired to O’Neill he fastened two bicycles together with iron bars. He and his wife traveled many miles on the side-by-side wheels. Then he put large wheels on their bed so it could be moved easily.
His most startling project was the coffin he built for himself from an old organ. It was beautiful wood and well made. He stood it in the corner of the room and newspaper reporters took his picture in it. When he died Biglins of O’Neill came and took him and his coffin away together.
William West, born on an Ohio farm in 1865, was one of a family of thirteen children. In his early twenties he decided to go west to make his fortune. With his teenage brother James he came to Otoe County in the early ‘nineties. There the boys worked on farms until they were able to buy equipment, rent land and farm for themselves. They also bought a corn sheller and a threshing machine which they operated in partnership. James married an Otoe County girl in 1894 and spent the rest of his life there. In the same year William returned to Ohio to marry a girl he had known there before he came west. That spring he brought his bride, Mary Ann (Brooks) West to Otoe County, where they lived until 1902. That year William and the family dog Rover came on the train with all their property in emigrant cars, unloading at Ewing. Mrs. West and their two young sons came by passenger train a little later.
Mr. West had established the family home near the Lambert church, but the dog, missing the little boys, had taken off in search of them. The youngsters, Ernest and Forrest, were sorely disappointed when their friend was not at the new home to meet them. As soon as they were settled, the family went to services at the 343 Lambert church, four miles southwest of their farm, on Sunday. The whole family was delighted when Rover came bounding to meet the boys. He had been living with another family that had small boys, but after being reunited with his own boys he gladly went home from church with them. The Lynn Baxter family moved onto the quarter south of the Wests that same year, and everybody went to the nearby Venus store and post office for mail and groceries. They were hailed out, their first year on the new farm— by hail stones so large all the windows on the west side of the house were broken out.
In 1907 Mr. West experimented with winter farrowing of sows by making a hog cave, with an arched cement roof, in a hillside near his buildings. The temperature stayed so even and comfortable in the cave that he successfully farrowed pigs in January. The cave is still in good shape at the farm. In 1919 he built a large barn. This barn, with other farm buildings, was destroyed by a tornado that touched down in the area in 1950. The Wests lived nearly in the center of a circle of four churches: The Lambert Presbyterian church, the Max-field Methodist church, the Middle-branch Baptist church and the Venus Methodist church. The last named is the only one still serving as a church and still at its original location. The Lambert church was moved to Page and occupied as a church for a time, then sold to the American Legion and used for a hall. Later it was torn down and the lumber used to build a Recreational Hall at the “Five Mile Corner” west of Orchard. In 1950 Ernest West bought the building, moved it onto the north end of his property in Orchard and converted it into a ranch type home for his daughter and her family. Thus the old Lambert church where Ernest went when a boy, and where Rover found him, now serves as a home for his descendants.
William and Mary Ann West are both at rest in the Page cemetery. Two of William West’s brothers also lived in the Page vicinity for quite awhile. Origen West, youngest of the thirteen children, followed his three older brothers to Otoe County, where he married Sarah Garner in 1895. They had made arrangements to follow William to Holt County in March 1903, when Sarah became ill and died in February, leaving three small children.
Since he had already rented a farm six miles southeast of Page, “Orge” arranged with Sarah’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. John Garner, to come with him to keep house and care for his motherless children. The following year the young widower married Cora Dean Coover of Long Pine. They had two children, Nelson who died at the age of thirteen, and Goldie. After some fifteen years Orge and his family moved to Norfolk. Both are now deceased and buried in the Page cemetery beside their young son. Alexander West, the middle child of the thirteen Wests, grew up on the Ohio farm and married Mary Emma- line Naylor in 1884. In 1891, with his wife and three sons, he joined his brothers in Otoe County. In 1904 this West family also moved to Page, locating on a farm west of William. His children attended school with their cousins, Ernest and Forrest. After thirteen years the family moved on west to Fort Collins, Colorado. The Charles Heese family moved from Laurel, Nebraska, to a farm about five miles northeast of Page in 1914. A few months later they moved a little way north into Iowa Township onto an unimproved timber claim. The family lived in a small house while they built a barn and other outbuildings. Lena and her brother August farmed the place for six years after their parents retired and moved into Page. In 1930 August married Louise Lippolt and three years later bought the home farm. After her husband’s death, Louise and their two sons, Wayne and Harold Heese, remained on the farm. Harold married Claryce Doerr of Creighton and bought a farm near Orchard.
Wayne married Helen Musil of O’Neill and stayed on the home farm, which he now operates under irrigation. His mother still lives on the farm. Judson Russell, born in Iowa in 1874, moved with his father, a Civil War veteran, his mother and nine brothers and sisters to Otoe County in 1883, where they lived on a homestead near Unadilla. In 1901 he married Stella Lyon. Jud’s parents retired from the farm about that time and the young couple moved onto the home place.
After his friends, William West and Arnold Weber, bought farms near Page Jud began to talk about moving up there, too. Other neighbors at Unadilla, Simon Rodaway, Charles Peshek, Roy Parker, along with Jud and Arnold, went to Page in the fall of 1918 to buy farms. Jud selected a farm about seven miles northeast of Page.
In February, 1919, Mr. Russell and his oldest son, Willis, loaded their livestock, machinery and household effects into an emigrant car and left for Page. Mrs. Russell and the other six children stayed with Jud’s mother in Unadilla, awaiting word to come on when their new home was ready. Agnes, the oldest daughter, who had completed her first semester at Peru Normal, had come home to go to Page with the rest of the family, planning to make up the credits needed for a teacher’s certificate by taking examinations in O’Neill. The first letter from Mr. Russell informed the family there had been a big blizzard just after they reached the farm. He told them he would let them know as soon as it was safe for them to start. Every day little Alberta Russell kissed her teacher goodbye, saying “I think we are going tomorrow, Miss Doyle.” But more storms followed the first one and it was not until the first week in April that the family finally boarded a train for Page. They reached the little town at midnight and went to the hotel. Agnes never forgot how the big hotel dining room looked, with its long tables and white tablecloths, as they walked down the wide, open stairway to breakfast the next morning.
Willis came in a wagon, pulled by a team of mules, to take them out to the farm. There were still some big drifts but much of the snow had melted and the countryside was a huge, shallow lake with thousands of ducks swimming and flying and making a great racket. The father met them at the door of the little three-room house that had been the home of the former bachelor owner. The walls began to bulge after all eight of the Russells moved in.
Even so, Jud recalled, when interviewed by the Holt County Independent on his Golden Wedding Anniversary, that the “highlight” of his life had been the day he welcomed his family to the little house. “I had my wife, my children and my own farm, which was all paid for,” he explained. A year later they moved into their new home, an eight-room square house with front and back porches, an attic, a furnace, a bathroom and an open stairway. The family subscribed for many magazines and gave each other books for gifts. Mrs. Russell enjoyed poetry and committed much of it to memory.
Mr. Russell had bought a new Hup- mobile before leaving Unadilla, but left it with a neighbor, as there wasn’t room for it in the emigrant car. When the weather and roads were good the neighbor, Tom Lucas, and some of the Russell relatives drove it to the Russell farm. But when the roads were bad the big car was of no use to the family and they used a team and wagon more than they did the Hup. The children had an Indian pony which sometimes bucked them off. This happened to Charles one time 344 when he was riding with some of his friends. He struck his head when he fell and his pals took him home, draped across the saddle in a semiconscious condition, giving his mother a bad fright.
The Russell family went to the Maxfield church and became an important part of the social life of the community. The home was only about a half mile from school and Jud served on the school board for many years, later helping plan and build a model schoolhouse known as a “Standard School.” An event which shocked the neighborhood to its foundations was the murder in Chicago of Felix Sojka, a close neighbor of the Russells. Agnes remembered “Mr. Walter Sojka coming to see Papa one morning. He was crying and waving his arms. ‘My God,’ he said, ‘Felix was murdered in Chicago.’ ” Mr. Russell was a pall bearer at the funeral. Another neighbor, Charles Peshek, met a tragic death when he fell backward off a haystack and broke his neck.
Times were good for awhile— and then came the dreadful years. Jud fell ill during the summer of 1931, the beginning of the hard years summers of wind and heat and no rain, then the dust storms, days when lamps had to be lighted in mid-day because of the dust filled gales that hid the sun. In March, 1937, Stella Russell wrote to Agnes: “We had a terrible dust storm last Wednesday I wish it would snow, if we can’t have rain snow would help, and it is cold and cloudy today.” Farther on in the letter she wrote, “It is snowing now, the ground is getting nice and white.” In the same letter she wrote about the shelter belts going in in their neighborhood. “We will have a half mile of trees north of the house. They are putting them every place they can. If we get rain this spring it will give the trees a good start.” (Today nearly all of Holt County is laced with miles and miles of these thrifty belts of trees. In spite of those that have been bull-dozed out to make room for irrigated fields, from any given point one can see the “belts” in all directions.) When Dr. Oscar French came home to Page to practice, he made his first house call at the Russell farm to see one of the girls. She was very ill with a virus infection and the young doctor “came at all hours” to see her, and the rest of the family as they “came down” with it too. Dr. French also officiated at the birth of Verna in 1923, the last child born to Judson and Stella Russell and the only one born in Holt County.
A conservationist ahead of his time, Mr. Russell practiced fallow farming, also stripping— plowing some rows and skipping others to keep the soil from blowing. Mrs. Russell found time to do Red Cross work, take contributions for the Salvation Army and to lead one of the first 4-H clubs in the county.
In 1946, when their children had all left home, Jud and his wife retired to a home in Page and their son Charles and his family moved onto the farm. The couple celebrated their Golden Wedding in 1951 and the O’Neill Frontier noted that “One hundred fifty friends and relatives called at the Russell home, one of the finest in town, to help the handsome pair celebrate the occasion.” Agnes taught school in her home area in the ‘twenties and continued in the profession for thirty years, fourteen of them in Holt County. After her marriage she taught in Pennsylvania for several years. Following her husband’s death in 1946 she returned to Page to teach. During this time (1947-1949) the old frame school at Page burned down. Classes for the rest of the year were held in the I.O.O.F. Hall. She and her second husband, Elmer Spann, are now retired and living in Atkinson. Willis, who never married, farmed near Page for many years and is now retired. The rest of the Russell sons and daughters have scattered to many states.
Richard L. Buxton, the grandson of a Civil War veteran, Edwin R. Buxton, chose a military career for himself. Entering the service in 1953, he took part in the Korean War, then went to Vietnam. He has also been assigned to various army posts within the states. He had three and one-half years of college while in the service and also attended Command and General Staff College at Leavenworth, Kansas. His awards include the Distinguished Flying Cross, Meritorious “The Page Arithmetic House.” The two-story frame schoolhouse was replaced in 1915 with a new “fireproof” building, the one shown above. It must not have been as fire resistant as its builders hoped, for it burned down in 1949, when the present building was erected.
Service Medal, Bronze Star and twenty-seven Air Medal awards for 950 hours of combat helicopter flying. After twenty years of service, fourteen of them as a helicopter pilot, he retired as a Lt. Colonel and now lives at Page.
Gary R. Bowen of Page went on to college at Wayne State, took his bachelor of Architecture degree at the University of Nebraska in 1964 and his Masters in the same subject in 1974. He has designed and worked on many architectural projects, including the Omaha Douglas Civic Center, the Omaha Central Park Mall and the Northwest Highschool in Omaha. He is presently living in that city. R. Dennis Ickes, formerly of Page, now of Maryland, a Distinguished Military graduate of the University of Utah, R.O.T.C. and a member of the National Guard, has won a number of awards: Minute Man Award from the University of Nebraska; Physical Fitness Award, U. S. Army; U. S. Attorney General’s Special Commendation Award, 1973; was elected to Phi Sigma Alpha Honorary Fraternity; named Deputy Leader of Original Department of Justice, Indian Task Force; first Deputy Director of the Department of Justice’s Office of Indian Rights; Director of Department of Justice Office of Indian Rights; Member of U. S. Supreme Court Bar. A final note on the history of Page has to do with an attempted bank robbery there in 1910. The bank was located where the Page Oil Company now stands and Gene Smith was its president. A loud explosion wakened residents in the middle of the night. Horsemen, firing guns, circled the home of Agnes Palmer, bank cashier and brother-in-law of President Smith, as they galloped out of town.
Other authorities were notified by telegraph. Arriving after a fast trip by team and buggy, they found the bank 345 in shambles, although no money had been taken, due to the fact that the new safe, which had been ordered and was supposed to be in place, had not yet arrived. Therefore a floor board had been taken up, the money placed underneath and the board replaced.
The dial, blown off the old, but empty, safe is used as a paper weight today by Mr. Smith’s daughter, Faye Taylor. It has always been believed that the dynamiting was done by local people.
It should also be recorded that Page’s first doctor, a Dr. Skelton, owned the town’s first drug store but had no office. With the help of Mrs. Clara Hunt, he handled serious cases and delviered babies in his patients’ homes. All other treatment was also administered during house calls. Amelia, in the southwest quarter of Holt County, nestles in the flowing well belt of this section of Nebraska. Rich ranch lands stretch away from the little inland town in every direction.
To I. D. Bliss probably goes the credit for starting the town of Amelia, although several settlers came to the area ahead of I. D. and his family, who came in 1885. Will and Lester Sammons may have been the first, as they filed claims about 1881. On March 23, 1882, just before leaving Guide Rock, Nebraska, for their homesteads, Will wrote the following letter to his father in Illinois: “I have four cows and two calves to take north with me, and two cows that have not come in yet. Cows are very high this spring. They run from $25 to $50, and calves two-days old at $7 each.” On May 27, 1893, he wrote again; “We have had lots of rain this spring and have not gotten much done yet . . . We have lots of grass. I have not fed 300 pounds of hay since I have been here. I got a job moving some cattle. It will take three days. There is between two and three thousand cattle in the valley now, but the big herds are farther West. “If you are coming out to see the country I would say to come about the first of August. It is a good time to come and a man can make up his mind. There is lots of homesteads to take, and some timber claims. If you come, make up your mind to stay a month or so and look around. A man can find most anything he wants in the west, but it takes time. I have a pony and if you have any western sand— that is, take things as they come— you can ride around and see a good deal and it won’t cost much. I have traveled about 2,000 miles since I have been here and I think $15 would pay the bill. This is a healthy climate. I have not had a cold for a year and have slept on the ground in snow and rain in all kinds of shapes and today weigh 142 lbs. I am sitting on the ground while writing this, with a pig chewing my boot and a calf rubbing my back. I have a happy
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