Chapter 36: A Well Watered Land

← Before Today: A History of Holt County, Nebraska

A Well Watered Land Chapter Thirty-Six The southeast corner of Holt County is traversed by two goodly streams, the South Fork of the Elkhorn and Cache Creek. Here, too, flowing wells became numerous, making it a well watered country. Early post offices in this seciton were Little, Martha, Goose Lake, Bliss, Tonic and Deloit, all located east of Chambers and south of Ewing.

John Henry Dierks, born in Germany in 1852, was the youngest of four sons who, with their father, emigrated to the United States shortly after the Civil War. At the age of eighteen John Henry married Laura White, a widow with four children. At this time he lived in Joliet, Illinois. With a small son and two little daughters of their own, Mr. Dierks moved his family to a homestead close to big Goose Lake in 1875 less than two miles from the southern border of Holt County. Here, in time, John Henry established a ranch that almost surrounded the lake. Quite a number of Negro families homesteaded in this same area, although the year is not given. At any rate they came early enough that Mr. Dierks was able to employ a number of the men on his ranch. In 1897 John Henry’s son, Merton, married Letha Glassburn and took over the management of the ranch and his father moved to Ewing and opened a saloon. From then on John Henry is chiefly remembered for his pet pig, “Liza” that followed him like a dog and daily tagged him to the saloon. Mr. Dierks also bought a merry-go-round from a carnival that went broke in the area and delighted in giving all the kids in the community free rides.

Merton Dierks ran the ranch until 1937, when his son, Lyle, in turn took it over. Merton and Letha had three sons and four daughters. The nearest post office was Bliss, about two miles west of the ranch, located in a home where the family stocked and sold staple groceries. All the children of the district, including the Dierks and those of the Negro families, attended a one-room school about a mile from the ranch. This was later, however, as during one of the very early years the only children in the district were those of John Henry and school that year was held in an upstairs bedroom at the ranch house. During the early years also, a small community church was maintained at the southeast corner of the ranch and served by a circuit minister who rode the wide region. In 1910 the big horse barn on the ranch was struck by lightning. It burned down, destroying twenty-one horses. In 1914 Merton moved his family into Ewing so his children could go to high school there. He died in 1959 at the age of eighty-six. His father, old John Henry, died in California when in his nineties.

Lyle Dierks married Alys G. Sanders in 1924. The couple had a son, Merton, and two daughters. Lyle operated the family ranch from 1937 until his death in 1968, when his son, Dr. Merton Dierks, a veterinarian, took over and is still running the ranch. William Edmund Bailey was another of the very early settlers in this section of Holt County. Born in Iowa in 1851, he first came to Antelope County in 1872 and married Phoebe Stolph in 1874, one of the first marriages in that county. He had homesteaded at Neligh but, in 1875, sold the land and went back to Iowa for two years. Coming to Holt in 1877, he preempted a homestead and a timber claim southwest of Ewing. Fourteen years later he had accumulated 1,360 acres of land, which he sold in 1891, taking in payment a stock of mer- chendise, a half section of land in Cherry County and various other properties. This was said to have been the largest transfer of property in one body ever made in the county up to that time.

Mr. Bailey spent much of his time traveling back and forth to the Black Hills on “horse business.” He owned a number of valuable horses in his time, including one by the name of Cricket, which won many races. William Bailey must have been a “Rough Rider” in the Spanish- American war, since he was chosen by President Theodore Roosevelt as one of the forty-eight Rough Riders to ride in his inaugural parade in Washington, D. C. on March 4, 1905. The Baileys were the parents of seven children. After the death of his first wife, Phoebe, in 1909, Mr. Bailey married Laura Langston in 1913. He died in 1925.

The McCarthys, who came to the Deloit neighborhood in 1879, settled in Section 23, Township 25 and Range 9. With several other Irishmen, Justin McCarthy had come to Holt County a year or two earlier to choose homesteads. John Quinn, one of this group, homesteaded the quarter joining the McCarthy’s on the east.

Justin and his wife, Elizabeth, were both born and raised in Ireland. With thousands of other Irish, they left their Emerald Isle and its unbearable hardships in 1864. Two years later Justin had his citizenship papers. They brought two children with them from Ireland and eight more were born to them while they lived in Amsterdam, New York. Mr. McCarthy was a cooper by trade.

The McCarthy’s oldest son, Justin, Jr., was nineteen years old when the family came to the homestead. The post office and a little country store, operated by another easterner, Grover Maben, were known as “Deloit.” The first school in that corner of the county was built on McCarthy land. The older Justin McCarthy was a Justice of the Peace for many years. The McCarthys married in their neighborhood: Lucy to Jim Rother-ham; Kate (born in Ireland) to Mike William E. Bailey. Courtesy Mrs. Lloyd Bearinger.

358 Brady; Justin Jr., (also born in Ireland) to Margaret Heenan. Din and Charlie married Sullivan sisters; Sandy, Jim, Liz and Maryellen never married. One son died in Amsterdam. All the McCarthys came to the parental home for Christmas, most of them arriving on Christmas Eve in time for supper— creamed codfish gravy and boiled potatoes. The dinner the next day, however, was varied and bounteous. Grandma McCarthy always made her own Christmas Candle. Of tallow, it stood about three feet tall and was lighted on Christmas Eve. At midnight all the McCarthys gathered around the big candle and said the Rosary.

Grandpa McCarthy brought his violin with him from Ireland; now 129 years old, this instrument is the treasured possession of the younger Justin’s daughter, Theresa Scheer. Every member of the family played something, violins, bass fiddles, piano, organ or mouth harps. Grandma McCarthy had a beautiful voice and the family made many recordings of her lilting Irish songs. Jim and Din McCarthy played for many a wedding and barn dance in the Deloit community. Just over the line from Holt County, in the northeast corner of Wheeler County (which also adjoins Antelope County) stood an early day blacksmith shop, the only one within a twenty miles wide circle. Operated by Johnny Thiele, it was a favorite gathering place of the early settlers. Mr. Thiele had learned his trade in his native Germany and could do any and all things in the line of smithing. He had made all his own tools, including his forge, except for his hammer and anvil.

Mr. Thiele homesteaded the quarter in the corner of Wheeler County and built his home only a few rods from his smithy in 1880. There he and Gertrude Thiele raised eight children, four of them sons, none of whom followed the blacksmith trade. Johnny Thiele, a man of great muscle and strength, was one of the kindest men in the neighborhood. A ten-year-old Van Vleck boy was sent one day to take a wagon bolt to the Thiele shop to be welded. When the work was done the boy, before the smith could stop him, reached to pick up the still white-hot bolt. The burn was deep and painful— and the boy never forgot the tears the big man shed over the mishap.

Later, when Charley Van Vleck was sixteen, he was sent to the shop one crisp morning to have a team shod. Hoping to be the first at the shop, he got up very early and drove the two miles, arriving just as day began to break. But already Scott Bowers, driving four mules from his farm twelve miles away, was there ahead of him, waiting for new shoes for his team.

William Taylor Jordan, Sr., was born in Pennsylvania. There he met and married Hanna Jane Winn. One of Hanna Jane’s forefathers was a son of the Duke of Windsor, and when he came to the United States was not allowed to keep the name of Windsor, so took the name of Winn. William Jordon fought in the Civil War, then returned to his family in Pennsylvania. With six children, they headed for Nebraska in a covered wagon in 1871. They came through Chicago so soon after the great fire that the town was still smoldering. One of the boys got his leg in the wagon wheel, breaking the bones, before they reached Sarpy County, where they lived for a few years. In Nebraska they became the parents of four more children.

The family came on to Bliss, on the west side of Goose Lake, in 1880. Their son Harry had married in Sarpy County, as had their daughter Susan. However Susan and her husband, Frank Overton, a farmer and well driller, soon followed the Jordons to Bliss. There Frank and Susan’s brother, William Jordan, began putting down flowing wells. Their first one “came in” on the Norton place.

William Jordan— always drove a handsome team of horses to a good looking buggy. In spite of the hardships common to most of the early settlers, the Jordans were among those who prospered and built up a good farmstead. Both William and his wife are buried on the old Trussell ranch, not far from their home near Bliss.

Gerty Jordan married Henry Frady, a young man who came to teach the nearby Norton school. Henry was the baseball coach in the early 1900s when Bliss had the champion ball team in that part of the country. The second Jordan daughter, Dessie, married Frank Wheatland who carried the mail from Ewing to Bliss. Vern Hayes was postmaster at that time, also the operator of a small store. Dessie often carried the mail for her husband, staying overnight in Ewing and making the return trip the next day, as her motive power was a team of horses.

Martin Walter, born in Switzerland in 1849, was only a few days old when his mother died. His grandmother cared for him until she died, after which he was put in an orphanage where he was taught the cobbler’s trade.

With his father, sister, stepmother and stepsister, he came to Wisconsin at the age of twenty. Martin worked at the cobbler’s trade in various Wisconsin towns and then in Columbus, Nebraska, where he also worked in a store and in the harvest fields. In this latter city he met Mary May- berger, and married her in 1876. Mary had come from Austria when a young girl.

In 1882 Martin Walter came from Columbus to the Deloit community to work for his brother-in-law, Martin Savidge, father of the “flying Savidge brothers.” He was soon able to buy the homestead rights from a Negro settler who lived about eight miles south of Ewing. Mrs. Walter and the children came on the train to Clear-water a little later. They lived in a sod house at first, and had to haul water from a neighbor’s well.

As soon as they could they dug a well, with the help of a neighbor, John Holz, but it was awhile before they managed a platform over the top of the well, with a pump on it. When cash was scarce Martin walked to O’Neill and set up his cobbler’s bench, working at the trade for a couple of months or so, then returning to the farm to help out there. He also worked on the railroad as it built west from Clearwater. The older boys made a little money market hunting. Two of the Walter sons, Frank and Edward, served in World War I. In 1931 Martin and Mary observed their fifty-fifth wedding anniversary, with fourteen of their fifteen children present for the occasion. Both are buried in St. John’s cemetery. Of their children now living, Anna Dewey, ninety-five, makes her home in Chambers; William, ninety-four, in Ewing and George, ninety-one, in Clearwater. Another son, Edward, also lives in Clearwater. Four others live outside Holt County.

Another early Deloit settler was John N. Funk. Both he and his wife came from Germany in 1881, spent a year with the Frank Bauer family at Scribner, Nebraska, where their oldest son John was born. Both families came on to Holt County in 1882. John took a homestead and a timber claim in Section 14, now owned by their son Joseph. John and Theresa were the parents of nine children. Devout Catholics, they donated the land where St. John the Baptist Catholic Church now stands and helped to build it. Both are buried in the St. Patrick Cemetery near the church. Their children married in the home neighborhood. John’s wife is Minnie Klein, Melchoir’s Matilda Hofer, Paul’s Rose Burk. Rose married Carl Thiele, Anna married Ferdinand Hupp, Rudolph married Margaret McCarthy, Louis married Mary Weibel and Leo married Margaret Sehi. Joseph never married.

359 attended the District 210 school nearby, and all later graduated from Atkinson High School.

In 1913 Mr. Davis sold the farm to E. A. Waters and bought the Earnest Fullerton farm a mile and a half north of Atkinson, where they lived until they retired in 1944. They lived in Atkinson for nearly twenty more years, their deaths occurring in 1962 and 1963.

Well Watered Land Chapter Thirty-Six The southeast corner of Holt County is traversed by two goodly streams, the South Fork of the Elkhorn and Cache Creek. Here, too, flowing wells became numerous, making it a well watered country. Early post offices in this seciton were Little, Martha, Goose Lake, Bliss, Tonic and Deloit, all located east of Chambers and south of Ewing.

358 Brady; Justin Jr., (also born in Ireland) to Margaret Heenan. Din and Charlie married Sullivan sisters; Sandy, Jim, Liz and Maryellen never married. One son died in Amsterdam. All the McCarthys came to the parental home for Christmas, most of them arriving on Christmas Eve in time for supper— creamed codfish gravy and boiled potatoes. The dinner the next day, however, was varied and bounteous. Grandma McCarthy always made her own Christmas Candle. Of talow, it stood about three feet tall and was lighted on Christmas Eve. At midnight all the McCarthys gathered around the big candle and said the Rosary.

359 Louis Funk, born on the family farm in 1898, worked on the place after his father’s death in 1912. In 1942, when the farm was sold at an estate auction, he was the purchaser. He and Mary (Weibel) raised seven children on the old home place. William Lell, born in Germany in 1842, with an older sister and two brothers came to America shortly before the Civil War. For some reason William and his sister went north and the other two brothers went to South Carolina. The boys all served through the Civil War, William with the northern cavalry, the brothers in the Confederate Army, although they never met while the war was on. In 1870 William married Mary Inscho in Iowa. They came to a homestead near Martha Post Office in 1882. They lost their seventeen-year- old son William there and their other child, Nellie, later married Robert Starrat Martha in 1898. Soon after the family came to their claim Nellie got a little cottonwood tree from the South Fork of the Elkhorn, carried it to her home and set it out. Today it is the big cottonwood tree across the road from the Bethany Presbyterian church at Martha. William and Mary later moved to Chambers, where they died some years afterward.

Frank Smith lived in a sod house five miles west of the Little post office in 1883. Two years later the people of his community circulated a petition and had the mail route extended to the Smith house. The new post office, called Harold, was kept and tended by the Smiths. Frank’s brother, Cord Smith, had a homestead near him. An aunt of the Smiths, Mrs. Amanda Leonard who lived near them, wrote a graphic account of the 1888 blizzard to her son in Pennsylvanis, just after it was over. She mentioned the pleasant morning of that January day, then wrote, “At eleven o’clock it was so still, then in one moment a roar from the north and, quick as a flash, you could not see your hand before your face.” She and her husband were in the house but their three young boys, Dell, Harry and Delos, had gone a short way south to look at a trap. They were halfway to the house, facing the storm, when it struck. “We were frightened,” wrote the mother, “and I got the horn and blew it. They heard it but could not see a thing. If it had not been for the horn they would probably not have reached the house. “Then Dad and Dell tried to go to the barn. The corn crib is halfway to the barn and they found it only by running against it. They could not see it, nor even open their eyes. They threw some corn to the hogs and came back to the house. Their faces were completely covered with ice and they did not look human.” She went on to relate that her nephews Frank and Cord Smith had started for Ewing, twenty miles distant, that morning to deliver a hog they had sold. Cord’s wife, Maggie, left alone with three little children, heard an unseen herd of cattle, one of them wearing a bell, go rushing by her house in the storm. The Smith boys got home the next afternoon, both pretty badly frozen. With their team and wagon they had wandered for several miles in the storm, finally coming against an old shed.

The shed doorway was too low for them to get the horses in, so they took turns digging with a spade they had along until they could get the horses through the doorway. With the horses and the pig inside with them, they managed to keep from freezing to death. At daylight they found they were no more than five rods from a house, where they found food and warmth. They had been twenty-four hours without food. On the way home they saw many dead cattle, and three miles from their own home found a frozen man and horse. He lay with scarf, cap and mittens on and his mouth open and filled with ice. This was the Swiss emmigrant, Kohler, who had no known relatives in the region.

“If we are here another winter, wrote Mrs. Leonard, we will get a coil of rope and keep it stretched from the house to the barn. We write about the blizzard but we cannot make you understand. The snow was just like flour and went through clothes until, in two minutes, you are full of ice. At Prothero’s the sheds fell in (with the weight of the snow on top) and killed a horse and nine cows. Mr. Prothero has frozen both legs and is helpless. The new doctor at Chambers, his brother and Lee Baker, the druggist, started to get their dinner, a few rods away, and were not heard from until the next day. They had drifted five miles south and finally found shelter in a hog pen.” Henry F. Reimer, Sr., came to America about 1873, first to Wisconsin, where he cut trees for many days and still could not see the sun. He then came to Iowa and worked as a hired man and also as a barrel maker. Paid largely in gold pieces, he saved the coins until he had enough to come to Nebraska. He and his wife came by stagecoach to Wisner, then on to the place where Neligh was later located.

Mr. Reimer took a homestead northeast of Martha. A family named Maben lived west of their claim. Three of their children died of diphtheria and were buried in the yard, after which the discouraged family sold out to Mr. Reimer and left the country. A little farther west was the Grover Maben ranch of several thousand acres. North of it was another large ranch owned by Charles and George Roberts. South of the Reimers was the big Trussell ranch. To the southwest were thousands of acres of open prairie, running on to the Beaver River.

Henry’s father, John Reimer, left Germany in 1883 to join his son in Nebraska. He homesteaded just over the line in Wheeler County, then sent for his wife Anna and three unmarried children, Maria, Doris and Hanes. About the same time Hans and Bill Wulf, brothers of Henry’s wife, Minnie, took claims near the Reimers. A Grandfather Broer planted trees on the Wulf farm at the site where he wanted to be buried. The present “Wulf-Reimer” cemetery is now located at that place. The farm, later owned by Bill Wulf, Jr., and still later by his son, Carl Wulf, now belongs to Jack Funk. While the Wulfs owned the land four generations of the family were buried in the little country graveyard.

As other settlers proved up and moved away, Henry Reimer, Sr., bought a farm for each of his ten children, except Sammy who was killed at the age of twelve while helping move the old house to a new location. The original Reimer homestead now belongs to Henry Reimer, Jr., its second owner since it was government land.

The Reimer school, opened in the spring of 1889, was a mile east of the Reimer home. Some of the pupils, besides the Reimers, were the Ehlerts, Hupps, Wordens, Mouldings, Hays and Harrises. At this time there was a creamery at Deloit, in addition to the store and post office. Another history calls the facility a cheese factory, so perhaps it made both butter and cheese. Grover Maben ran both the store and the factory.

Louis, one of the sons of Henry Reimer, Sr., was a Holt County judge for a number of years; another, Otto, was the Clerk of Wheeler County before becoming Assistant Director of the Nebraska Motor Vehicle Department. Henry, Sr., probably planted the first true shelter belts in the county some eighty years ago. The editor of the Neligh paper featured the long shelter belts in an illustrated article in his paper more than forty years ago. It grieves the older generation to see the fine trees being destroyed at present to further plans for leveling and irrigating the land.

Another Wulf brother, Fred, who homesteaded a little way northeast of Deloit, in 1893 left the following will, 360 made out before County Judge G. A. McCutcheon on November 15 at Deloit: “I, Frederick Wulf, being of sound mind, do hereby give to my two sons, Gustave and William and my two daughters, Lizzie and Bertha, all my property, real and personal, of which I am possessed to equally and alike.” On February 9, 1899, County Judge, Clarence Selah, “finds that the Administrator with the Will annexed has paid all debts of the estate and has in his possession for distribution $115.73 in cash, 1 churn, 1 garden drill, 1 wire stretcher, 1 watering trough, 1 8 in. plow, 1 seed drill, 1 corn sheller, 1 work bench, 1 kit of carpenter tools, 1 share of stock in Deloit Creamery Co., 1200 bushels of corn, 125 bushels wheat and 250 bushels oats and the following described real estate: S.E. Section 26, Twp. 25, N. Range 9 in Holt County. The administrator is ordered to divide the personal property equally between the heirs and to turn said real estate over to them undivided.” John Burk came from the little country of Lithuania, where the heavy yoke of serfdom enslaved the peasantry for centuries and flogging was an everyday occurrence for most of its people. Frequent wars further harass- ed the suffering Lithuanians end, in 1874, the Russion overlords possed a new conscription law requiring every young men to spend six years in regular militcry service end nine in the reserves.

John, born in 1847, os a youth knew the hardships of the peasant class and their hopeless lot. By 1848 tales of the freedom enjoyed by Americans, and of homes to be had for the taking there, began to seep back to the Burks and their neighbors. Even though serfdom had been abolished in all Russian held lands, the people, taxed almost to extinction and still subject to corporal punishment, were no better off.

And so it was that young John made his way out of the country, traveling by night and hiding by day, until he crossed the border and reached the sea. He reached America in 1878 but, unable to speak English and surrounded by hordes of penniless emmigrants like himself, the future did not look too bright. Then he met Mr. Savidge and had a friend. The two men went to work in a Pennsylvania coal mine for twenty- five cents per day.

As soon as he had saved enough money, John sent for his sisters, Eva and Victoria. All of these young people were filled with plans for going on west to the land of golden oportunity but the reality was slow in coming. After five years in the mines the two men had saved enough to pay their fare and that of the two Burk girls to Columbus. There they met Rafael Schmiser of Austria who, with his wife Annie, his sons John and Frank and his only daughter, Mary, had arrived in America somewhat earlier.

Mr. Savidge soon went on to Holt County and settled in the Deloit community. The Burks tarried in Columbus where Eva married Dominic Galeski and Victoria married Jacob Sullivan. John, not to be outdone, took as his bride the pretty sixteen- year-old Mary Schmiser. They were married in May, 1883.

By the summer of 1885 Martin Savidge had persuaded the three young couples to join him in the Deloit neighborhood. John took land a little way east of the Deloit post office and built a large one-room sod house thereon. Their first child, a son, was born there in June, 1887, and a few weeks later, while Mary was hanging her wash on the line, a pig pushed the soddy door open, saw the baby on his blanket on the floor and took a bite out of his ear. He is still minus quite a piece of one ear. Three more children were born to the Burks by the summer of 1894, when most of the settlers were destitute because of the prolonged drouth. The government and people in eastern states shipped in food supplies for free distribution to the hard pressed homesteaders, but some of the agents in charge of portioning out the supplies took advantage of the situation and sold the commodities instead. The Burk, Schmiser and Galeski families were again fortunate in having the loyal friendship of the Savidge family, for Martin had kinfolk in Wayne who brought a wagon load of food supplies and divided them among the four families. The Burks had built a five-room frame house before the onset of the drouth, so were in comfortable circumstances when the rains came again.

That the Burks loved their home and their neighborhood is evident in the history of this family; for there was “a great warmth of good feeling and the people were nearly equal in riches and poverty. Rarely did any misfortune come to one that was not shared by all.” As the children, six in all, grew old enough they went to school at Deloit, grew up and chose their own vocations. Rose taught school, then married Paul Funk and became the mother of seven children. Mary, now Mrs. Charles McDonald, still lives in the Deloit community. George, now dead, lived all his life in the Ewing vicinity. Anna, Mrs. Bill Schindler, lives in Omaha. Frank and the youngest daughter, Katherine, live in other states.

John Burk seldom spoke of his life before coming to America, but all his adult life he was grateful to God for allowing him to live in freedom and to make a good life for his children. John died in 1926, Mary in 1941. Carrie Monroe was born in Canada and came as a child of eleven to Goose Lake with her parents in 1880. She had a brother and two sisters; one, Cora, died as a child and was buried on the place at Goose Lake. Several years later Carrie dreamed that a part of her sister’s casket was uncovered. She insisted that the family go and see— and they found it true. The wind had eroded the sand until the little coffin was exposed. It was reburied in the Neligh cemetery. Just how or when Carrie met Jud Robinson of Iowa is not given, but they were married in Neligh in 1889. Jud owned a saddle and Carrie a cow and they had fifteen cents between them. They spent this wealth on a Sears Roebuck catalog, (they no doubt bought it from another settler, for the mail order company always sent its catalogs free to would-be customers) as they were moving onto an isolated homestead and wanted something to look at through the winter months— and there was an immense amount of reading and information in the old catalogs. There was a little one-story frame house on the place where Jud and Carrie first lived. Their two older children were small when the chimney caught fire one day. Carrie climbed up on the roof and the two children pumped and carried water fast enough that she was able to put the fire out.

The neighborhood got quite upset one season when settlers found dead cattle in their pastures, each with only one hind quarter eaten. The men, on horseback, joined forces and made a big roundup. At sundown they sighted an animal on a hilltop and gave chase. Jud roped it and they found it to be a timber wolf, long after such predators were supposed to have been gone from the country.

Although they killed the wolf, a Mr. Ford who lived in the area would no longer let his children herd hogs on the prairie.

The Robinsons had four children by the time they bought the Hart farm a half mile south of Deloit, where their children could go to school. Some of their schoolmates were the McDonald, Savidge, Burk and Maben children. The school burned in 1904 and was replaced with the brick building that is still in use.

Jud was one of the first of the Deloit community to own a car, a red 361 Rambler. The first social event that Laura Robinson (the writer of the family history) remembers was the wedding of Earl Housh of Neligh and Audrey Maben at the Maben home. All the neighbors were invited and Laura was there— only she had to have finished cultivating ten half-mile d long rows of corn before she could go. She was twelve at the time. The wedding was at noon and everyone stayed for dinner afterward.

In 1910 the Robinsons moved to Ewing and ran a cafe. Each morning they bought a dollar beef roast and a dollar pork roast, enough meat to serve fifty to seventy-five meals at twenty-five cents each. The menu included a vegetable, pie and coffee. A piece of pie was five cents. People coming in from the country by team and wagon for supplies ate at the cafe before starting home.

Charlie Robinson worked as a mechanic for Spittier Brothers of Ewing and lived at home. He died in 1934. Laura worked at the telphone office for nine years, then married Leo Spittier in 1922.

The Henry Perkins family came to Martha soon after the blizzard of ’88. Henry and Hattie were married in New York in 1882. They moved to Madison County, Nebraska, in 1885 with their year-old son, Howard, then on to Martha where they lived in a sod house for awhile. Howard married a neighbor girl, Myrtle Ruby, in 1904. Myrtle and her brother George were raised by their grandparents, George and Catherine Eftleman, on a farm about ten miles from the Perkins place.

Howard and Myrtle had two sons and a daughter and lived most of the forty-five years of their marriage in Holt County— on the farm at Martha until 1936, and then in Chambers until Myrtle’s death in 1949. Howard was handy at resoling shoes, using the ironlasts his father had used and given to him. He was also -a good barber, cutting his childrens’ hair and that of his friends.

The family moved to O’Neill during the depression and Howard became a WPA timekeeper for awhile and then the “Raleigh man” in and around O’Neill. He made a good salesman for he loved meeting and talking to people. He spent the last two years of his life running a little roadside drive-in on Highway 20 at Valentine, selling sandwiches and soft drinks. He died in 1951 of a heart attack. DeWight Perkins, the youngest son, went to school at Martha until he finished the eleventh grade, and that year was the only one in his class. His favorite teacher, Frances Tomjack, was his instructor through grades nine, ten and eleven. Martha then consolidated with the Chambers school and DeWight drove the ten miles there and back every day of his senior year, making the trip in a Model T through mud, snow and sand— and was never absent nor tardy during that time.

DeWight was still a very small boy when his father built a platform around the seat of a mowing machine to keep him from falling onto a wheel or the sickle if he should lose his seat on the machine. With his father following just behind him on another mower, the lad mowed many an acre of hay.

DeWight graduated from high school in the early years of the depression, and worked a year and a half to save $125 to go to Grand Island Business College. He broke out fifty acres of sod with a walking plow, planted, cultivated and picked the corn crop, then sold his one-third share for fifteen cents a bushel. He picked corn for the neighbors, often in cold and snowy weather, for two cents a bushel and raised and sold hogs for the same price, two cents a pound.

At last he had the money and on January 1, 1933, at the age of nineteen he went off to college. Then two months later, in March, the banks closed. His money was in the Chambers bank, which later paid off in full. But in order to stay in school the lad had to hold down three part-time jobs, which meant that he practically gave up sleeping for the duration. After a year as Registrar and Commercial teacher in the Hastings College of Business he accepted his first Government position in Washington, D. C., in the field of Management and Administration, a career he followed until his retirement in 1970. His wife was the former Helen Dey Ermand of Grand Island.

Neither Earl nor Hazel Perkins remained in Holt County, where their grandparents, Henry and Hattie, lived for fifty-six years and their parents, Howard and Myrtle for even longer. Joseph Schober, with his wife Josepha and their five children left Austria in 1886 and spent three years in Kansas. Columbus was their destination when they left Kansas for Nebraska, but when he could find no work there, he brought his family on to a farm on upper Cache Creek in the southwest part of Deloit Township. A carpenter as well as a farmer, Joseph, with Josepha, eventually retired from the farm and moved into Ewing.

Joseph, Jr., also a carpenter, farmed until 1917, then loaded his wagon with pots, pans, bedding and feed for his four horses and himself and set out for the West, homestead- ing at Rocky Point, Wyoming. Almost fifty when he made the move, he soon decided that the snow and cold of the mountains was too much for a man of his age, so repacked his wagon and came back to Ewing, where he lived with his brother Lewis until his death in 1933.

Frank, the second son, married Laura Downey at Neligh in 1897. The couple lived on the Thompson Ranch at Goose Lake for a few years, then bought a farm four miles north of Ewing. Later they ran a cafe in the town, then retired there. They were the parents of seven children. Joseph and Josepha, their son Joseph, Jr., their second son Frank and his wife, Laura, are all buried in the Ewing cemetery.

Lewis Schober, only nine years old when the family left Austria, went to school in Austria, Kansas and Holt County. In 1904 he married Bertha Lorenz. They, too, lived on the Billy Thompson ranch for awhile, then farmed north of Ewing for another period, finally returning to the Cache Creek Valley to live out their lives. They are both buried in St. Anthony’s Cemetery, southwest of Ewing. They were the parents of three daughters. Austrian born Frank Urban served with the Illinois Volunteer Infantry in the Civil War, then lived in Missouri and in Saunders County, Nebraska, before coming to the Martha community in 1890. His wife, Magdalena, and his son, Frank C., farmed the place while Frank, a tinsmith, stayed in O’Neill to work. His $12 a month Civil War pension and his earnings at the tin shop saw them through the bad times of the ‘nineties. He died at the end of that decade.

Frank C. Urban and Martha Porter, daughter of William and Johanna Porter, were married in 1896. Seven children were born to them on the farm. Frank died in 1936 and Mattie in 1948. Maude, Buster and Wilbur lived on, on the home place, after the others had moved away. Hugh died in a swimming accident in 1935; Buster served in the Army during World War II and died in 1970. Wilbur died the following year. Of all these Urbans only Maude, who still lives on the home place, and Ida Lee of California, still survive. Harry Jordan, eldest son of William Taylor Jordan, who came with his parents from Pennyslvania to Sarpy County in 1871, met and married Laura Frame in 1893 and lived at Ashland until 1897. That year, with his wife and baby son, William, he came by covered wagon to his father’s farm at Bliss. The family lived in a little two-room sod house for the next two years while Harry helped his father with his farming and stock raising. 362 About 1900 Harry moved his family to the “Baker Place,” now owned by Frank (Bud) Tomjack. Three years later Harry homesteaded five and a half miles east of his father’s farm. There he built a three-room sod house and a large hay barn— its walls made of a double row of willow poles set about three feet apart and the space between stuffed tightly with hay. Poles and brush, piled flat, made the roof, with hay on top and anything heavy that was handy laid over the hay to hold it down. The hoops or bows from the covered wagon and all manner of other things helped hold the hay on the roof. The barn was large enough to hold several head of milk cows, with a place for the calves, and stalls for ten head of horses. The sod for their house was of such poor quality that it went to pieces after about two years. Harry then built a frame house of the same size under the shingle roof that had covered the soddy. By farming, putting up hay and taking in cattle to pasture, the jordans made a living, in spite of getting hailed out several times. Their main post office was Bliss, although they got some of their mail at Tonic, to the east of them. The three Jordan children drove a cart to school at first. Later they rode a horse with a quilt thrown over its back to sit on. Their father was afraid to have them ride a saddle— with stirrups they could get their feet caught in. One of the Jordan girls, either Ruth or Elsie, herded cattle on the unfenced land between their place and Goose Lake. A neighbor girl from a half mile to the west also herded there.

The girls, about eight years old, passed some of the tiresome hours away by climbing to the top of a high hill, from which they could watch the cattle, and digging themselves a two- room playhouse. “We tried to dig it big enough so we could at least sit in it comfortably, and got so busy that we forgot to watch the cattle,” wrote the Jordan girl. The cattle got as far as Goose Lake and into the corn field of a Mr. Gallon. After that the girls had to stay between the cattle and the lake, far from the enticing site of their fancy but uncompleted playhouse. Several bad prairie fires burned off the country uncomfortably close to the Jordan place, and to those of his brother Charley and his father William. Once, the Jordan chronicler wrote, a fire burned hay stacks all around us for miles. “I can see those big balls of fire yet.” In the spring of 1900 Richard Burt- wistle with his wife and five children, Mabel, Verna, Maud, Richard and Nellie, were living at Stanton, Nebraska. Mr. Burtwistle had lost a great deal of money during the hard times and had made up his mind to move farther west and start over. The family came by train to Oakdale, then by team and wagon to the west end of the Beaver Valley, where Mr. Burt- whistle had rented a farm for one year. The house was small and there were no other buildings on the place. That winter he bought a relinquishment from a Negro, who was glad to sell his 160 acres for $500. In the spring the family moved across the hills to the house that was to be their home. It had one room downstairs and one upstairs. Mr. Burtwistle added a two-room lean-to with a roof but no ceiling, and only wide boards laid on the ground for a floor. The boards warped and now and then they found a snake curled comfortably under a piece of furniture. Nellie Burtwistle tells the interesting story of their new neighborhood. “There were nine families in that Negro settlement in Wheeler and Holt Counties. After Jerry Freeman sold his relinquishment to father he moved a mile north of us and lived with his father and mother for several years. Jerry’s family were Stella, Irene, Helen, Oscar, Ellsworth and Vernie. “The Blair family lived a mile east of us. They had nine children: Taylor, Bill, Nannie, Gustie, Susie, Nina, Arthur, Grace and Wheeler. The Jones family lived on a homestead a mile and a half west of us. They had two children. The Dixon family lived three and a half miles southwest of us. Mr. and Mrs. Dixon had both been slaves. Their house was very small and partly dug into the ground. They had eight boys and one girl. Mrs. Dixon passed away and Mr. Dixon married again and the boys started leaving home and coming to a little shack about a half-mile west of our place.

“Mr. Freeman carried the mail from Ewing to Bliss and Newboro post offices and back to Ewing, a distance of seventy miles, three days a week. After a few years he bought a Mitchell car, the first auto in our part of the country and quite a curiosity. “The first fall on our own place Mabel (the oldest Burtwistle daughter) taught school in a sod house. There were sixteen Negroes in the school and my brother and me. Some of the Negro pupils were older than she was. She was sixteen and her salary was twenty-five dollars a month.

“Quite often a Negro minister would come (to hold services in the schoolhouse) and they were good, sincere men. We had Sunday school with both Negro teachers and white. After a few years we built a frame schoolhouse, which is still standing. “Oscar (Jerry’s son) started playing ball with the Bliss team and was a very good player. He played until the family moved to Ewing. Then he went to St. Paul, married and, after a few years, developed lung trouble. He came back to see his old friends and neighbors, then passed away soon after he got home. Irene and Helen went to Sioux Falls and worked in a beauty salon.

“Taylor Blair had left the country before we came, but Bill took a homestead three miles southeast of his folks, lived on it quite a few years, then sold it and moved to St. Paul. He never married. Nannie married Jerry Freeman, Gustie married Dan Newman, Susie taught our school several years, then went to Fremont where she married. Nina was very musical. She played the organ, guitar and violin and was a good singer. My sister spent many Sundays down there with her.

“Wheeler was about my age and we went to school together a good many years. He went to Grand Island and took a job with the Bell Telephone Company. He finally retired with a good pension. He married and had one daughter.

“Mr. Dixon’s daughter was cared for by a family named Magnuson until she was ready to go to the Negro college in Kansas City, where she graduated, then came back to Ewing and married Sam Patterson who ran the livery stable there. She died a few years later and was buried in Fremont. The boys in the little shack lived on corn and what wild animals they could catch. They cooked them in the stove on a board. The youngest boy caught a gopher at school one day, cooked it that way and said ‘Just as sweet as a jackrabbit.’ “The oldest boy, Ben, left and went to Omaha. George and Jim worked out wherever they could get jobs. Then Cornelious took quick pneumonia and died in a few days. Hector followed, then Charlie. All three died within a week and are buried in the Trussell cemetery. William and John both went to Grand Island. John, too, got a good job with the telephone company, married and had a daughter. He retired on a good pension, lives with his daughter and comes back about once a year to see his old friends.

“Mr. Dixon was well liked while he was gathering cream for the Amelia Creamery. Both he and Mrs. Dixon are also buried in the Trussell cemetery. “Mr brother Richard still lives on the old homestead my father bought from Jerry Freeman for $500, back in 1900 .” Nellie Burtwistle is Mrs. Charles Fauquier of Chambers.

Mr. E. M. Jarman of Chambers, 363 after corresponding with John Dixon, only living member of that family, names fourteen Negro families who lived in the settlement and adds some other details. In addition to the Free-mans, Dixons, Pattersons, Blairs and Newmans, he lists the Reeves, Lynd-say, Barrett, Jones, Jackson, Trice, Logan, Price and Stewart families. Mr. Trice shot and killed a man named Smith, then married the widow, a white woman. Mr. Stewart died in the ’88 blizzard and his skull decorated the bar in the Dierks saloon in Ewing for years. Mr. Jarman notes there were as many as thirty black children in the Negro school at one time.

These Negroes had all been coal miners in Appalachia and, after the war, had been induced to move to the mines in Illinois and Iowa, where they found the winters cold, the water bad and living conditions very poor. Many died. A team of land sharks found them easy prey when they urged them to move to Nebraska. For a “fee” they told them, they would locate them on free 160 acre homesteads where the digging was easy and coal abundant.

The promoters baited their trap by burying a little coal in very sandy ground along the Wheeler-Holt County line. The wind soon blew away enough sand to expose the coal in a natural looking way, as if there was a good vein below. By the time the Negroes had paid their location fees, filed on the land and discovered the deception, it was too late to do anything about it.

The poor Negroes found work on neighboring ranches and some stayed to prove up, then left the country. The Freemans, Jacksons, Dixons and Pat-tersons stayed a good many years and were among the last to leave.

Mr. Hector Bell Dixon, born a slave at Harpers Ferry in 1842, was house boy and coachman for his master’s family. After the war he went to Ohio, obtained a good education and, in Iowa, met and married Julia Morrison, also a former slave. The family came to Holt County in 1883 and Mr. Dixon taught school for several years and was a Justice of the Peace in his community for twenty-seven years. Lucinda Dixon, Hector’s daughter, had a lovely singing voice and, after completing her education in a finishing school for Negro girls in Kansas City, returned to Holt County and gave voice and piano lessons for years. Mrs. E. M. Jarman received her voice training from her.

George Dixon, one of Hector’s sons, was a cowboy and a few people still living in O’Neill still remember when George was asked to come to town to ride some extra tough bucking horses. These affairs always drew quite a crowd and took place three blocks east and three blocks north of the present stop light in O’Neill. The Dixon boys used to help with the Dierks ranch cattle drives.

Another Negro, a runaway slave at the age of twelve, grew up in the north and became a minister, Rev. Marts. He preached in neighborhood schools and in front of livery barns in the towns. He was well received and at one time the settlers at Amelia considered calling him to preach at the Sunny Side schoolhouse.

Although the cemetery at Goose Lake was known as the “Negro Cemetery,” many whites were also buried there. Twice, due to wind erosion of the sandy soil, bodies were uncovered and moved to the Trussell cemetery. The last time was in 1934 when Mr. Jarman, watering his cattle in the “hatfull” of water left in Goose Lake, discovered bits of clothing, rotting boards and bones scattered about. Carl Lambert then came, gathered the remains and buried them in a common grave in Trussell Cemetery.

Valentine Spes, came to the United States from Germany at the age of seventeen. With his wife Margaret and their seven children, John, Charley, Joe, Elaine, Peter, Frances and Lena, he came to Goose Lake in 1901 . There is scant information on this family. The children attended the Summerer school. The family lived in a frame house, got the mail at the Bliss and Martha post offices and used Watkins liniment as its favorite remedy. The boys worked out, husking corn and baling and hauling hay. Frances married one of the Tomjack boys, Lena married a Lee.

Joseph Kruntorad, born in Bohemia, Hector Bell Dixon, born March 3, 1842 at Harpers Ferry, Virginia.

served his time in the Austrian- Hungarian Army and came to America in 1890. He settled hear Dodge, Nebraska, and fraternized only with people of his.own nationality, as he did not speak English. He married Frances Viasak of Dodge in 1893 and lived on a rented farm until 1901. Frances had a sister, the first Mrs. Charles Bartak, in the Clearwater Valley, just south of Holt County in Wheeler County. From the Bartaks the Kruntorads learned of land for sale in that area and Joseph bought a farm one quarter mile south of the Holt County line, the place now owned by his son Frank. The Kruntorads had seven children; four survive, Bessie and Frank, born in Dodge, and Charles and Anna, born after coming to the new home.

Their schoolhouse burned the year the Kruntorads moved into the district and was rebuilt on the same location, a mile south of the Holt County line, by Charles Bartak. It was later moved to the old Mert Dierks place where, in 1962, a new, modern school was erected when the district consolidated with those east and west of it. In both its locations three generations of the Kruntorad family went to school in that schoolhouse.

Their first post office in the Kruntorad neighborhood was New- boro, a half-mile west of the school in the Joseph Urban home. In 1921 it was moved to another farm, three and a half miles southwest of the school. A Mr. Cobbler delivered the mail three times a week, making the trip from Neligh with a horse and cart and carrying grocery orders for his patrons, as there was no store in the vicinity.

One of the family’s well remembered entertainments was watching the Julia Morrison Dixon, born July 4, 1853. Also a slave in Mississippi. 364 Savidge brothers fly their airplane on Sunday afternoons. In 1917 Mr. Kruntorad bought his first car, a Maxwell, from Dr. Briggs, Frank Kruntorad served in the first World War, came home and married Dorothy Harris in 1921. They had five children, including a son who served in World War II. Four of their grandsons served in the Vietnam conflict.

Bessie Kruntorad married Harvey Yokom in 1914. Of their four children, a son was killed in the Pacific during World War II. Three of their grandsons served in Vietnam and one was killed in action there. Charles married Leona McCloud from east of Deloit in 1926. They had two children. One son spent twenty years in the service of his country and a grandson is in the service at the present time. Anna married Clifford Butler in 1924. Their only son served in World War II and a grandson is presently in the service. The E. J. Bennett family located on a farm near Deloit in 1908. The Bennetts were from Omaha and they bought the farm from Dick Grubbs. It now belongs to Joe Huffman. The land had originally been a tree claim and still had a large orchard, including fifty-five cherry trees, on it. People came from miles around to pick cherries— either for half the fruit or, if they wanted to keep all they picked, for five cents a quart. Apple trees, raspberries, blackberries, gooseberries, currants and strawber- ries were also bearing fruit at that time. Mr. Bennett then added a vineyard and sold three varieties of grapes from it.

That fall E. J. cut some large cottonwood trees from the east boundary of his place and had Billy McDonald saw them into lumber with his steam powered saw mill. With the lumber he built a large barn and a chicken house. He also built a concrete water storage tank on a hill west of his home, thus becoming one of the first in the community to have running water in his house.

When driving to Clearwater, eight miles northeast, water in places was hub-deep on the buggy in the spring of the year. But if driving north and a little west to Ewing, thirteen miles, the road was mostly an attempt to follow ridges that avoided the many blowouts along the way. In 1913 Wilbur and Flora Bennett started to high school in Ewing, the only school in their area that had twelve grades. Of the seven Bennett children, only two, Wilbur and Ina live in Holt County, both in Ewing.

Clemens Muff and his wife Christina were both born near Humphrey, Nebraska. Christina’s parents, the Schueths, were born in Germany, as was Clemens’ mother, Mary Sehi Muff. His father, Frank Muff, was born in Switzerland.

Clemens and Christina lived on a rented farm at Cedar Rapids, Nebraska, until it was sold. Clemens’ uncle, John Sehi, who owned a farm in southwestern Antelope County, persuaded him to come there in 1916 and look over the land for sale. As a result he bought a half section of the Quinn estate in Deloit Township. The family moved out in the spring of 1917. There were five children, including a pair of twins, in the family group that came to Deloit. The sixth, Cletus, was born that July. Two more, Maurice and Mary Magdalen, were born later. Maurice drowned in a stock tank at two years of age.

St. John’s Catholic Church was (and still is) located only a half-mile from the Muff home. Through the years it has been the site of Muff baptisms, first communions, weddings and funerals. At the time Clemens Muff’s children went to school their schoolhouse (District 46) was located on the south bank of the little Clearwater Creek that flows through the southeast corner of Holt County. A new schoolhouse has since been built north of Knievel’s store.

Clemens did most of his farming with horses, although he had an old Fordson tractor that he used for plowing. It was so hard to start that he simply left it running when he came in for his noon meals. In common with most of their neighbors, the Muffs raised large gardens and canned all the vegetables the family used— except for an occasional can of store bought “Pork and Beans,” “and what a treat that was.” In 1941 Cletus (who wrote the Muff family history) married Jean Babcock, at St. Theresa’s Church in Clearwater. Jean had been a teacher in rural Antelope County schools until her marriage. Dr. J. W. Bennie of Clear-water who had attended at the births of both Cletus and Jean, brought five of their six children into the world. Cletus and Jean’s four oldest children went to the same school their father had attended as a child; for Cletus, after the death of his parents, bought the home farm from his brothers and sisters. Neither of his two sons stayed on the farm.

Cletus writes that as far back as he can remember the license plates on his father’s car carried the numbers 36-77. He still uses the same numbers, with the addition of a letter in between, 36 A 77.

In 1917 E. L. Sisson of St. Edward, Nebraska, bought the Grover Maben farm at Deloit. With his wife and their six children, Mr. Sisson moved to the new farm on March 1 of that year. Perry Saiser was the mail carrier at that time and the Sisson’s first mail was delivered with a mule team, due to a heavy snow storm.

E. L. Sisson was the first in his area to use a mechanical cornpicker,. although he pulled it through the fields with horses. He was also the first to truck cattle to Ewing for shipment to Omaha. Until then cattle were driven on foot to the railroad and hogs were hauled in wagons. Mr. Sisson, born in Wisconsin in 1873, died at his home in Deloit in 1962. His wife, Nettie, born in St. Edward, died in 1972 at Neligh. Eli and Belle LaRue homesteaded the farm in the Martha community that is now owned by Martin Schmidt. Eli taught school in the county for several years and was a charter member of the Bethany Presbyterian church of Martha.

No date is given for the year the LaRue’s came to their homestead, nor for the tornado that picked Eli up and carried him for some distance, then dropped him in a freshly plowed field. It was quite likely the same storm that injured Mattie Urban so badly, as described in the chapter on disasters.

Although Eli recovered from his injuries and continued to farm the place for a few more years, his wife Belle was killed by the same destructive force. She had gone to a shed to fill an old wash boiler with cobs for her kitchen stove when the storm struck, collapsing the shed and crushing her against the boiler. Eli later moved to California and married again.

He and Belle had two sons, Howard and Clyde, who grew up on the claim. Howard married Cecil Prothero and bought the farm now owned by Irwin LaRue. In 1919 Howard and Cecil moved to Pasadena, California, but continued to support the Bethany church, which stood quite near their old Holt County home. They were the first to send a contribution to the building fund that resulted in the fine new, air-conditioned church, finished in 1953. Over the years they often returned to the community to visit their many friends.

Clyde married Edith Mielke and stayed around Martha, where they also were active in the church. Clyde being the organist for many years. With their three sons they left the farm in 1921 and went to Arizona, and then to California. None of them ever returned to Holt County to live. A final note on the history of this section of the county comes from “Elsie Getter’s Memories.” She writes that two men from Omaha were drowned in Goose Lake while fishing. Their boat overturned and, since the 365 water was deep in the lake in those days, it was a good many hours before their bodies were recovered.

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