← Before Today: A History of Holt County, Nebraska
On the Redbird Chapter Thirty-Nine Redbird was an early post office and village located at the mouth of beautiful Redbird Creek, so named because of the numerous red birds or cardinals that lived in the trees and shrubbery on its banks. The first post office was housed in a dugout in the side of a hill just north of the site of the village that later sprang up on the west bank of the creek. According to Mary Osborn the postmistress in the dugout was either a Mrs. Moore or a Mrs. Cook.
The office was- discontinued in 1887, then reopened in 1900 by Peter 391 Just who maintained it a mile south of the dugout location. When Just decided to leave bondsman, William the office and its the country his Wilson, supplies home, west of Redbird, until postmaster could be found.
moved to his a new In the meantime J. L. Witherwax had settled on the Redbird and built a log house for his family a little way south of the original dugout. He then accepted the post office and was its postmaster for the next thirteen years. John Wrede was appointed postmaster in 1914. A Polly Truax, Pete Mohr and Hall Rosenkrans also main- tained the little office phased out in 1960.
it was Redbird actually had the first school in Holt County, according to Mrs. Mary Osborn, but as the teacher was not fully qualified (probably did not have a legal certificate to teach) the Paddock school to the west became District 1. Redbird was District 3. Melva Hazard taught the school in 1878, Mae McElhaney in 1880, Jennie Shannon in 1883 and Cecil Sproul in 1884.
At the peak of its existance Redbird had two stores, a garage, blacksmith shop and a cream station. There was no cemetery and those who died were buried on their homesteads. By 1965 nothing was left of Redbird except the schoolhouse and a few homes.
Wallace Sprague is the first settler listed in the Redbird settlement. With his w Della, and four children, Henry, et and Clara, he homesteaded five miles south of the future site of the village. He came from Chicago to the Holt County frontier in 1876. After the death of his first wife he and had four more children. All of the family later moved away excepting Henry, who married May Belle Phillips in 1899. May Belle was the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Peter Phillips who came from Iowa in 1883 and settled east of the Redbird. Henry and May Belle homesteaded south of Star, had fifteen children and, about 1920, east of Redbird, another farm south Spragues moved to Both passed away settled four miles then moved to of the village. The Valentine in 1937.
1953 buried at O’Neill. One son, and are Otto, still Joseph Witherwax Michigan homesteaded on the Redbird in the 1870’s. In 1879 the Redbird Justice of the Peace, Melvin D. Hazard, Joseph and Priscilla Enders, parents, Isaac and Martha came from South Dakota to married whose Enders, Redbird country with ox teams in 1876 when Priscilla was fourteen.
After Isaac Enders’ death Martha Enders homesteaded the place now owned by Clifford Wells. Both Isaac and Martha are buried on a hillside overlooking the Niobrara River on the homestead. When the Enders first came they lived in a dugout. The following year they built a log cabin. During that year the Government settled a tribe of Oklahoma Indians on the north bank of the Niobrara, across from the Enders’ cabin. One evening when Priscilla had gone down river to bring in the milk cows a young Indian crossed the river and followed her back to her home. There he offered her father a good price in ponies for her.
Joseph and Priscilla had five children. Priscilla had gone to the Redbird school, a sod building that stood across the road from the present school. Her children attended the same school, as did her grandchildren and some of her great-grandchildren. America with his parents at the age of six. The family settled in Michigan, later moving to Iowa. Times were hard and work was scarce as Charles grew up. He was working for fifty cents a day in a brickyard and boarding himself when a friend told him he had found a place where they could make fifty cents a day AND board.
Charles asked where that might be and was told “the Army.” Both young men enlisted on August 3, 1860. A little over eight months later the Civil War began. Charles took part in eleven major battles, including Bull Run and Gettysburg, he was then captured and spent sixteen months in Andersonville prison. At war’s end he was given an honorable discharge in August of 1865.
In October he married Catherine Both Joseph and Priscilla died Redbird.
Ida Martha Witherwax, born Joseph and Priscilla at Redbird at to in 1894, married Arthur Bessert in 1914. Arthur was the son of John and Augusta Bessert who had come from Germany to Wisconsin in 1883. In 1899 they bought the Andrew Just farm five miles south of Lynch. Art and Ida lived on the Joseph Wither-wax homestead and raised their three children there. At her death in 1970 Ida had lived all her life, seventy-six years, on the farm where she was born.
Arthur Dale Bessert, son of Art and Ida, born on the homestead in 1919, married Eva Mae Truax at Redbird in 1951. They have four children, but whether or not they live on Witherwax homestead, the does not say.
Another early settler in the the old history Redbird Oscar Witherwax (second son of Joseph), his wife Bessie and children: Robert, born in 1915, Clayton, 1918, and Richard, 1920. Picture taken in 1925. Courtesy Bob Tomlinson.
country was Charles Wrede, Sr. Born in Prussia in 1842, he had come to Home of the Arthur Bessert family on the Joseph Witherwax homestead. Part of the house was built from the old Redbird post office. Courtesy Bob Tomlinson. 392 Mentzer in Iowa and became the father of a daughter, Mary Magdalena, a year later. Catherine died the following year and Charles married Mary Nickle in 1868. Charles, Jr., was born in 1869 and two more children before 1874, when the family moved to David City. In 1881, with six children, the Wredes located on Redbird Creek, three miles northeast of the site of Agee post office, which was established the following year. They also took a pre-emption and a timber claim adjoining the homestead, giving them 480 acres of good land. Six more children were born on this homestead.
The Wredes continued to buy land until 1913, when Charles, Sr., and Mary retired to O’Neill. After Mary passed on in 1926 the eldest daughter, Mary Magdalena (Lena) came to stay with her father who, before his death in 1928, was the last Civil War veteran left in O’Neill. At the age of eighty- four he was still proudly bearing the colors at the funerals of other old soldiers.
After the older Wredes moved to O’Neill their son George and his family lived on the ranch until George’s wife died. He then moved away and Ear! Wrede, son of Charles, Jr., lived on the old home place until it was sold to Dr. H. L. Bennett in 1943. Charles Wrede, Jr., twelve when the family moved to the Redbird, during the next fifty-eight years saw Holt grow to be one of the leading counties in northeastern Nebraska and had a substantial part in that growth; for he was an honest, hardworking man of strong convictions. A game warden in his district, it was said of him that, had he caught one of his own sons hunting or fishing out of season, he would have turned him in just as quickly as he would anyone else.
In 1898 Charles married Addie Lans- worth, daughter of another pioneer family. They were the parents of four children, Vivian, Clarence, Gertrude and Earl. After Charles’ death in 1936, Addie lived on the ranch for two more years, then moved to O’Neill and lived on for nearly twenty years more. The four Wrede children grew up on the ranch and earned their elementary education in the Eden Valley school and went to high school in O’Neill. Vivian married Henry Martin, son of a neighboring pioneer family, and lived on the Martin homestead until 1950 when Henry died of a heart attack.
Clarence Wrede, born in 1901, married Mabel Boshart in 1923 and lived on the Hubbard place, just west of his parents’ home. Later they purchased a place of their own, then added to it until they owned more than 1500 acres. A Hereford cattle rancher, in 1938 Clarence bought his first buffalo— and has raised buffalo ever since. The couple had three children, all of whom live in the area north of O’Neill. Clarence, too, died of a heart attack in 1950. Mabel still lives on the ranch and tends her big garden and beautiful yard.
Gertrude taught Holt County rural schools for several years, then became a registered nurse. She married Wesley Easton, had one son and was widowed in 1942. She now lives in Colorado. Earl Wrede married Martha Lawrence and lived on the home ranch for some years, then moved to O’Neill and went into the trucking business. With his wife and three children he moved to Missouri in 1942, where he is still trucking. Family of Ellsworth Witherwax, eldest son of Joseph. Wife Ida and children Mabel, Jane, Cecil, Quentin, Leonard, Marjorie and Lyle. These are given in the order of their ages, not as they appear in the picture. Courtesy Bob Tomlinson. Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Bessert and family, Letha, Arthur Dale and Beryle. Courtesy Bob Tomlinson.
Dell Akin, son of Ben Akin, was born in 1860 in Pennsylvania. The family came to the Redbird in 1882 and the father filed on a homestead on the creek, where he opened a store and traded with the Indians who crossed the Niobrara from their reservation to deal with him. Twenty-year-old Dell lived in Niobrara at the time of the memorable flood of 1881. Asleep in his cabin, he was awakened by the roar of the flood and sprang out of bed into ankle deep water. By the time he could snatch his soaked trousers off the floor and get into them the water was knee deep.
Dell and a Mr. Moore found a boat and helped rescue the residents caught in the flood. At one house he found a woman, her child and her dog sitting on top of a table above the 393 water. The woman would not let him take her to the boat first, leaving the child and dog for the second trip, neither would she wait while he took the child and dog first. So he took all three of them on his back and headed for the boat waiting at the door. He slipped just as he reached it, dumping his whole load into the boat with such force as nearly to capsize it. In 1882 Dell Akin married Fannie Scott, a native of Missouri. Three children were born to them. He first perfected his title to a homestead and timber claim five miles east of O’Neill, then traded the land for a ranch southwest of Atkinson, straddling the Rock-Holt County line. While still running the ranch, in 1900 he bought the Atkinson Graphic from Lee Henry and was appointed postmaster there in 1902. At this time he sold the ranch to J. E. Schindler and bought a home a half mile east of Atkinson. Mr. Akin’s second marriage was to Miss Luella Boehme, whose father, Conrad Boehme, was one of the early railroad men in Hol County. By this marriage Dell Akin became the father of two children, Erma and Dell, Jr. Dell was still living on his ranch when the Woodmen of the World built their big Lodge Hall on his property and used it for community dances and other neighborhood gatherings. After Mr. Schindler bought the ranch he remodeled the hall into a fine home.
When Dell Akin first came to the western part of Holt County deer, antelope and elk grazed on the hills and he once saw a lone buffalo cow making her way through the county. Another pioneer settler was Thomas Dennimore Astleford, better known as “T. D.” Born in New York in 1860, his mother died when he was eight and his father brought his large family to Niobrara on the train. T. D. was probably still in his teens when his father was killed while working in the timber.
T. D. then carried mail from Niobrara to Yankton. Later he came to Holt County. In 1888 he married Caroline Reynolds, an orphan. They had three children, Icie, Olive and Walter. When Olive (who tells the story) was three the drouth drove them to Iowa. Three years later they came back and rented a farm two miles from Niobrara, near the far northeast corner of Holt County. Olive taught school for awhile, at $20 per month, then in 1911 married George Francis. They made their home in the same area, far from town or a doctor. They had a daughter, Sylvia, then two pairs of twins, all boys, and another single son. When the first twins were to be born a neighbor rode horseback across the river to get the. doctor, who came by team and buggy. The snow was deep and he did not arrive until the first twin was several hours old.
The oldest twin, Caspar, was killed in action in the European Theatre in 1944. His brother spent twenty years in the Army, then retired to a farm near Spencer. Robert spent six years in the Navy and is now a diesel engineer in Cincinnati. His twin, George, is a Wesleyan minister at Wayne and Milton, the youngest, lives in Grand Island. T. D. who lived alone on his farm for many years, milked his cows and kept his home neat and tidy to the end. On Sundays his team and buggy was a familiar sight as the old man drove to church. He died in 1945.
Emma Weekes states that she was born at Redbird. Her parents, Mr. and Mrs. James Weekes, had come from Sioux Falls where Mr. Weekes had operated a butcher shop. Emma was five years old when the family proved up on the homestead and moved to O’Neill. She went through all the twelve grades there while her father ran a livery stable.
After teaching for two years Emma married Frank Martin in 1902. Upon passage of the Kinkaid Act Frank and Emma filed on a section in Loup County, which corners the far southwest corner of Holt County. They built a sod house on their claim, and sheds of hay and chicken wire. “It wasn’t so bad,” Emma explained, “because everyone else had the same kind of improvements.” When they went to a dance, ten or so miles away, they put the sideboards on the wagon box, filled it half-full of hay, put in some blankets, hitched two teams to the wagon and picked up all the neighbors along the way. It was often daylight by the time they made the return trip. “As a rule,” wrote Emma, “the first place we stopped on the way home, everyone got out and pitched in to get breakfast— bacon and eggs, hotcakes and coffee.” About a year after proving up on their claim they sold out to a neighbor and moved to South Dakota.
Swan John Peterson was born in Sweden in 1861. The oldest of eleven children, he worked for two years on neighboring farms to save the $125 he needed for his ticket to America. Then he said goodbye to his mother at the kitchen door and, with another twenty-year-old friend, set off for the new land. Landing in Boone County, Iowa, in 1881, he worked three years in the coal mines at $2.50 per day for a stake to start a farm of his own. In 1884 he came to Holt County on the train with his team and wagon and what was left of his savings. He settled first on a relinquished homestead about four miles south of the Niobrara. To the sod house there came his younger brothers and sisters, as fast as money could be raised for their passage. All worked out in the community and Swan John carried the mail from O’Neill for a time. Later Swan John sold the first place and bought a better one, nearer the river. They had little to do with for awhile, not even fencing for pastures or corrals. This made weaning the calves from the cows difficult. After separating the cows and calves he and his brother attempted to herd each bunch in separate places. The job kept them very busy for a few days.
Swan John’s mother had died of cancer in Sweden when the youngest, Gust, was five years old. He then came to Omaha to live with some of his sisters, but when he was twelve bought an old horse for ten dollars and rode it all the way to the homestead on the Niobrara. When he arrived it was the first time he and Swan John had seen each other since Gust was two. The family ate a lot of cornbread, those first years, while they were getting a start.
Swan John married Lottie May Ellis in 1909. She was the daughter of Frank and Emma Ellis who had come to Holt County from Iowa and Indiana. They had three children. One of the younger Peterson girls went back to Sweden twice. Swan John talked about going back to see the green hills and timber and lakes of the old country, but after his sister told him that all was changed and “no one there cares about us any more,” he quit talking about it. Charles Ladely was born in Zanes-ville, Ohio in 1853 but came with his family to Iowa when he was ten. He married Aceanith Wilson in 1877 and five children were born to their union. In 1884 he moved his family to Holt County. Mrs. Ladely’s brother, William Wilson, met them in Verdigre and took them to his home in a spring wagon.
Charles later bought a farm near Redbird, where the children went to school. In 1902 Mrs. Ladely and her two younger sons, Henry and Albert, moved to Valentine where they homesteaded. She lived there until her death in 1943 at the age of eighty-five. The oldest son, William, had also homesteaded in Cherry County, where he worked on various ranches.
Henry had married Iretta Spindler at Meek in 1909. Albert married Etta Green in 1931, had one son and moved his family into Gordon in 1947. Anna lived with an aunt and uncle in Valentine while going to high school. 394 She taught school until her marriage to John Carson of Redbird in 1905. John and Anna had a set of twins, Irai and Iris, and three singles, Albert, Duane and Ronald. After John’s death in 1943 she again taught school. In 1936 Charles Ladely also went to Cherry County to live with Henry and Albert. He died there in 1949 at the age of ninety-six.
John Carson’s sister Lizzie, one of the twins, had stayed on the old Carson homestead after her mother’s death. After her twin, Mary Farrand, and her younger sister, Carrie Hunter, had lost their husbands, the three sisters had lived together in the old home, just across the road from their brother Edward and his family. One day Anna Ladely Carson and Miss Lizzie were driving a team and spring wagon to the Ladies Aid meeting at the Oscar Newman home. They had picked up Mrs. Will Pickering, Mrs. James Carson and her daughter Margaret. The latter three were riding in the back seat. While going down a hill near Dorsey the neckyoke broke, frightening the team into a runaway.
Anna and Lizzie both pulled on the lines with all their might while those in the back seat held on for dear life. Then the doubletree broke and Anna and Lizzie were yanked over the dashboard onto the ground. Lizzie still held onto the reins and soon stopped the team, which she drove into a nearby farmyard. They were all a bit ruffled but no one was hurt so, brushing themselves off, they walked on to the Aid meeting— where they provided quite a little excitement. In 1962, because, of Carrie’s failing health, the three Carson sisters moved into Lynch. After Carrie and Lizzie died, Mary moved into a nursing home in Spencer and lived to be ninety-four, passing away in 1969. William Wilson, Acenith Ladely’s brother, had married Sarah France in 1883 in Iowa, then brought her to a farm west of Redbird in 1886. They brought two children with them and had four more, born on the homestead. Sarah died of typhoid fever in 1901. Ray Wilson, only four when his mother died, lived with the Ladelys. The father, Billy, cared for the others himself. The Wilsons were friends of the Indians who camped along the Niobrara every fall, and the children went to school at Redbird, where Clara Lansworth was one of their teachers.
One of Billy’s sons, Earn, was badly burned in a prairie fire, but escaped death by covering his head with a wet gunny sack. His shoes were burned off his feet and Dr. Ira drove his team and buggy out from Lynch during most of the following year to doctor and dress the terrible burns.
Billy Wilson married Mrs. Kate Schulenberg in 1910, and nine years later held a farm sale and moved over the river to Lynch, where he worked with Sid Mannen in the undertaking business. He died in 1939. His son Guy married Elsie Phelps and lived on the home place. Dick and Earn settled in South Dakota. Bess and Fay married Pinkerman brothers, Roy and Ralph, and lived on farms near Scottville.
Ray, the youngest, married Marie Savitts and homesteaded in Cherry County with his Ladely cousins. Later he moved his family back to a Holt County farm near Midway, where Marie was postmistress of the Maple Grove post office in her home. In 1935 the family moved onto the old Wilson place at Redbird. Ray and his wife lived there until 1962, then held a farm sale on January 24, exactly forty-three years after his father William had held his sale on the same place. Ray and Marie then retired in the same house in Lynch in which his father had lived, back in the ‘twenties and ‘thirties. Ray died in 1968 and Marie in 1970. The couple had nine children. Their six sons served in the four branches of the armed services (Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines) between 1941 and 1954. The youngest son, Gerry, with his family, now lives on the home farm. His children go to the same country school their father and grandfather attended.
George Washington Mellor was born in Ohio in 1864 to Bill and Fanny Mellor. George was twenty-one when he got off the train at O’Neill and walked the twenty-five miles to the home of his uncle, Noah Gwinn, in the Redbird neighborhood. He settled there and, two years later, married Rachel Dailey who had come west with a Mormon train, walking and pushing a handcart loaded with all her possessions.
In 1889 George and Rachel moved to a place on the south side of the Niobrara, eastward from Redbird, where their son Jess was born. Later they homesteaded southwest of Lynch on the north side of the river, where a tornado demolished all of their buildings except their house— and blew all the windows out of that. They had seven children but lost a little girl, Stella. In May, 1898, Rachel died, leaving a two-weeks-old daughter, Sylvia.
In the meantime George’s younger brother, J. B. Mellor, had settled in O’Neill where he set up a draying business and later built the Ford Agency building and operated the agency for many years. He had married Mame Burke, who took the baby Sylvia and cared for her until George’s sister Minnie could come out from Ohio and take over the housekeeping duties for her brother. The baby, however, died that October. In 1901 George married Carrie Just, a young lady who was working as a hired girl in the Barret Scott home at the time he was hanged. The young couple moved into O’Neill and George ran a livery stable for a year or so before moving back to Redbird and buying land, where he farmed and fed cattle. Later they ran the Redbird store for several years, then traded it to the Halstead family for a farm near Orchard. Two years later they moved back to Redbird, built a fine modern home, farmed and fed cattle, hogs and horses.
It was on this farm in 1921 that “Lubber,” seven feet tall and weighing 3000 pounds, the biggest horse in the world, was foaled. Of the five Mellor children who lived to grow up, Oscar never married, Laura married Leonard Halstead, Martha married Will Hartland, Jess married Gaynelle Starr and Leon married Edna Hull. Jess, only seven when his mother died, had very little schooling. At sixteen he left home to work for neighbors. At nineteen, after farming for himself for a year, he nearly died of a ruptured appendix. In 1913 he moved by covered wagon to Cherry County and homesteaded seventeen miles north of Merriman. Two years later he married Gaynelle, daughter of an Eli ranchman he had worked for.
Two daughters were born to Jess and his wife on the Kinkaid. After proving up Jess moved his family to Page, where another daughter was born. One year he lost all of his hogs to cholera there. He then moved to Middle Branch, and then to Kilgore. Five more children were added to the family.
In 1933 the drouth was so bad that even the tumble weeds didn’t grow. The hard-pressed family managed to keep the garden growing by carrying water to it by the bucketful— until the day the big hail storm beat the plants into the ground. They gathered the hailstones, froze ice cream and invited the neighbors in for a feed, then stoically faced the future. Jess and two of the older children went up into South Dakota and put up slough grass and Russian thistles for winter feed, staying with Jess’ sister Laura and her husband, Leonard Halstead. In the fall Jess rented a two-room log cabin nearby and moved his family and livestock there for the winter. Before spring they lost a baby son and Gaynelle was ill for a long while. The whole family was happy to move back to their Kilgore home in the spring.
395 The children never forgot that excursion. Gaynelle and the younger children went ahead in the truck with the furniture. Jess drove the hayrack load of feed, George, the oldest son, drove the supply wagon and hauled the young calves when they played out on the drive. Laura and Maude rode horseback and drove the cattle herd. The trip took three days but each night they found friendly farmers who corraled their stock and invited the girls into the house to sleep.
In 1936 Jess sold the Kilgore farm and moved to a place north of Stuart on Big Sandy Creek. His son James was born there. Eight years later he bought a farm north of O’Neill, where most of his machinery was swept away in a flood. In the spring of 1948 the Mellors moved to a farm north of Atkinson, where they lived until they retired and moved into Atkinson. Wherever they lived, Jess and his family worked hard to improve and beautify each place, planting trees and landscaping the yards. They were active in church, 4-H and other community activities and Jess was among the pioneers of irrigation in the region. Theirs was a happy family. Even the hard times did not spoil the father’s sense of humor nor the mother’s sweet disposition. They spent the evenings gathered around the organ, singing; or around the old wood stove, reading aloud; or even around a big tub, shelling corn for cornmeal or for seed. The singing, jokes and story-telling made the chore fun— in spite of the sore fingers.
Gaynelle, an artist with a needle, made the handsome clothes her daughters wore, often from “hand- me-downs,” clothes the girls wore with pride, conscious of the envy of their friends who wore “store bought” dresses. Both Jess and Gaynelle, who died within a month of each other, are buried in the Atkinson Woodlawn Cemetery.
When his mother died, six-year-old Leon Mellor went to O’Neill to live with his uncle, J. B. Mellor. As a young man he helped his uncle in the Ford garage and also in the draying business. In the later capacity he hauled lumber from O’Neill to Red-bird and helped his father, George, build his large and unique house there— one of the first homes on the Redbird to have indoor plumbing. In 1910 Leon married Edna Hull, youngest daughter of William and Sarah Hull. Sarah being the lady who acquired fame by living to the age of one hundred and eight. Leon and Edna operated the garage at Redbird for the next ten years. A few years later they bought Leon’s father’s farm on the Redbird and moved into the big house.
Leon and Edna had five children: Opal, who married Harold Halstead and lives in Lynch; Ardis, who married and lived in Iowa; Carrie, deceased; Betty, who married Lucian Loock and lives in Spencer and Delores, who married Eldon Sedivy and lives in Lynch. Leon and Edna retired in 1960 and moved to O’Neill, where Leon died in 1973.
William Andrew Wells, born in Iowa in 1876, came to Nebraska in 1899 with a saddle horse, a twelve gauge shotgun and five dollars. He homesteaded two miles south of Redbird on land now owned by Albert Family of William A. Wells. Picture taken in 1954. Front row: Icle, Mr. and Mrs. Wells, Vera. Back row: Alice, Lee, Mary, Clifford, Earl, Howard. Courtesy Bob Tomlinson. 396 Carson. In 1902 he married Etta May Witherwax. Five years later he moved his family to South Dakota, then back to Redbird a year later. The couple had ten children but lost two in infancy. The other eight went to school at Redbird in the same schoolhouse their mother had attended. William and his sons hunted, trapped and cut wood and posts to sell. The whole family went to neighborhood dances and other entertainments together. During the terrible ‘thirties the grasshoppers killed the family apple orchard by eating the bark off the trees. The entire family, girls included, loved to fish.
William’s mother and a brother also came to Nebraska and both families lived in log houses, which are still standing on the place now owned by Howard Wells’ widow.
Columbus B. Jackson moved from Oakdale to a small ranch six miles up the Redbird from the store and post office. The year was 1900 and he paid a Mr. Daily $700 for 320 acres of land. The family lived in a log house for four or five years, until they could build a two-story frame house. Mr. and Mrs. Jackson had one daughter and seven sons. The country school was a mile and a half from their home and the children walked to their house of learning. Alberta Spindler was one of their very good teachers.
Josiah Noble, born in Missouri Valley, Iowa, in 1887 married Ada Jones, born in Ohio. A son, Guy, was born in 1888 and Glen in 1894. The boys rode horseback to school until 1898, when both became very ill. Glen died but Guy survived, though crippled in his legs and left arm. The family had lived on a lake resort named for Josiah’s father – “Nobles Lake.” Josiah sold the resort in 1901 and moved to the area between Redbird, Star and Opportunity. Ray finished the eighth grade in a rural school a mile east of his home, then went down to Peru Normal and became a teacher. The Maxwell car he bought in 1911 was one of the first automobiles in Holt County. He first taught the Roach school, four miles south of his parents’ home, and then the school two miles north, where the four Alder boys were his pupils.
Following his teaching career Ray moved up near Gregory, South Dakota, took a homestead and managed an Auto Livery and a drugstore. He returned home to help his parents, married Hazel Belle Sprague, a daughter of Henry Sprague, in 1922 and brought her to his home place to live. Ray and Hazel had six children. Ray bought a truck and hauled goods and livestock for his neighbors. He also owned and operated a threshing machine, sold insurance and hybrid seed corn. From 1936 to 1939 he planted so many shelter belts that he was presented a “Tree Farm Award” in 1964 in recognition of his tree planting. Josiah died in 1946, Ida in 1956, Hazel in 1951 and Ray in 1973. Three of Ray’s children still live in Holt County.
Edwin Huber, born in Kansas in 1879, married Estella Peterson, a young widow with one child, in Iowa in 1901. Estella was born in Hatch Hollow, Pennsylvania in 1880. Her family home was broken up while she was still a little girl and her uncle, Nathan Peterson of Orchard, Nebraska brought her and her brother there to live. Estella had two sisters but never knew what happened to them.
Edwin and Estella’s first home at Redbird was a tarpaper shack. Later they built a two-room frame house and lived in it with their eight children. Some of the early wintes were so severe that the draws drifted full of snow which became so impacted that Mr. Huber could walk right across them on his five-mile trek to the store for a sack of flour, which he carried home on his back. Their schoolhouse was four miles away from their home.
One winter Estella took the children to her Uncle Nathan’s home for a two-weeks visit. Edwin got up one cold morning, started a fire in the old pot bellied stove and went out to do his chores. The stove overheated and set the house on fire. Estella and the children had to extend their visit until Edwin and his neighbors, Alf and Merle Burbank, could build another house.
Estella and the children all helped in the fields. When putting up their hay the mother took the baby to the field with her, put him on a blanket and left the family dog on guard while she worked. Three’more children were born to the Hubers while they lived near Monowi in Boyd County from 1927 to 1930. Due to drouth and grasshoppers they gave up farming and moved into town, after which Mr. Huber worked for other farmers until 1936 when he moved to Washington State. Most of the children grew up and married in Holt County.
Charles Warren Henry and Rosa Bell Dugan were married at Ken-nebec, South Dakota, in 1906. They were living on a small acreage on which the sod had not been broken when the first of their seven children was born in 1907. Then his mother, Anna Matilda Henry, wrote him that if he would move to Holt County he could still stake a claim. With his wife, baby and his hounds, he joined his mother, her son Edwin and her five daughters there and each family built a sod house.
Not long afterward Charles was mowing when a double-barreled shotgun accidentally went off, severely wounding him in the side. A doctor sewed him up and saved his life. The family then moved to a farm south of Redbird. With the onset of the first World War they moved up to Lynch where Charles was a drayman. Still a farmer at heart, he moved back to Redbird, farmed and helped his brother Edwin in a blacksmith shop in the village.
When the old gun wounds made it necessary for him to quit farming altogether, he and Edwin moved to Gross, Nebraska, and continued with the blacksmithing.
John Wrede, son of Charles and Mary Ann Wrede, was born in Iowa in 1871; his wife Jeannette, daughter of Byron and Nora Hodge, in South Dakota. Her parents later moved to Lynch where, in 1892 when she was four years old, an Indian scare sent them fleeing from their home one night. Her father loaded their one pig into the wagon and put their furniture in around the pig. With their only cow tied on behind, Mr. Hodge walked ahead of the wagon, carrying a lantern. They forded the river and spent the night with the Witherwax family at Redbird.
The next morning Mr. Hodge and Mr. Witherwax went across the river to see what damage had been done. Everything was just as they had left it, so the Hodge’s went home again. John and Jeannette were married in 1914, after Jeannette had completed her education and taught in the Lynch primary room for three years. John took over the Redbird store and postoffice that July. He was postmaster for twenty-seven years, giving up the office when he moved to Washington in 1941. The Wrede’s had three sons and a daughter. Lila Pinkerman was the daughter of Maude and Roy Pinkerman and the granddaughter of William and Sarah Wilson. Born near Dixon, South Dakota, she came with her parents to a farm near Scottville when four years old. “The first car I ever saw,” she wrote, “belonged to my grandfather, James Pinkerman. It was a Hupmobile he drove back from Indiana. My dad’s first car was a Maxwell and he couldn’t keep brakes on it. When it stopped going up a hill, Mom and I jumped out and put blocks of stove-wood behind the front and back wheels on the right side. One time Irma (her little sister) got scared and jumped out and rolled down a fifteen foot high bank.” 397 Lila Pinkerman and Guy Hull were married in 1925. Their first son, Guy Lendall, born in 1928, lived four days. Their only daughter was still born in 1929. Guy Ladell was born in 1931 and Wendell Leroy in 1940. In 1932 the Hulls adopted a little girl, Dorothy Lou.
Guy Hull’s grandfather was William Hull. He married Sarah Ellen Ross in Iowa and homesteaded near Meek in the early days. Elmer, one of their ten children, married Mary Osier at Scott-ville in 1899. Guy was their second son.
Guy and Lila farmed 700 acres near Redbird and raised cattle, hogs and chickens. “I was a 4-H leader for five years and a school teacher for twenty- three,” wrote Lila. “I taught school to keep ahead of expenses. We bought the Ernest Mott place, two and a half miles up the creek from Redbird and stayed there thirty-one years. In 1958 Wendell Leroy was accidentally killed while swimming with Dick Truax in the Niobrara near Redbird. Guy Ladell is now our only living child.” The Hulls sold their farm in 1964 and moved to Inman, where Guy passed away in 1973.
Lila remembers the time when she, as a little girl, accompanied her aunt, Mrs. Amelia Hudson, and her two- year-old daughter, Eva Dale to her Uncle Ray Wilson’s farm home. While there little Eva Dale drank kerosene from a can used to start the cookstove fire. Grandma and Grandpa Pinker-man came in their spring wagon, with their driving team on the run, to take the little girl to Dr. Ira in Lynch. Many years later Lila was present at the Old Settlers Picnic where Sarah Hull, Guy’s grandmother, was being honored on her hundredth birthday. When George Hammond asked the old lady to tell what was the worst thing that had happened to her in her century of life, she replied. “It was when the grasshoppers cleaned us out. They even ate the onions in the ground. They took EVERYTHING, leaving us bare ground.” Sarah lacked one month of being one hundred and nine years old when she died.
The post office and village of Scottville, in Scott Township, was twenty-three miles northeast of O’Neill. Both were named for Barret Scott. The first church was located just south of where Virgil Pinkerman now lives, and the minister was Rev. Postelwait. The church was later moved a short distance north where it served as the Township Hall.
The first Scottville cemetery was a half mile west of the present burial ground. There were only three graves in it when it was moved. Early burials, beginning in 1885, included Adam Koch, Anson Astleford, Rachel Whims and Annie Aliza Berger.
The post office was, for many years, in the Euretta Long home, until Mrs. Long, her daughter Kate and the home, including the post office, burned in 1927. The first school was a sod building, located north of the present Eddie Krugman home. The second, a wooden structure, was built beside the Township Hall. A third school, built on the same site in 1927, was first occupied just after Christmas. In the mid-sixties the district contracted with others, then finally consolidated with the Redbird district, where school is still carried on.
The Scottville store, a two-story building, was south and east of the church. Dances were held on the upper floor. The building was later moved to the Euretta Long place and used as a barn. This item, taken from the Nebraska Gazeteer, Volume 7, 1890-1891, notes that “E. C. Beeman ran the General Merchandise Store. G. Darr and William Furguson were blacksmiths. Jesse Scott was Postmaster. J. Wiley was Justice.” Other typical Frontier items were these: “January 2, 1890. James McWhorter of Scottville was in town with three loads of wood. March 6, 1890, J. L. Biddle of Scottville brought in a load of hogs and got snowed in.” One of the earliest pioneers listed among Scottville residents was James A. Pinkerman, born in Ohio in 1854. His wife, Sarah Jane Roy, was born in Jefferson City, Missouri in 1856 and the couple were married in Winne- gan, Missouri, in 1873. They came to Scottville in 1882 with three children. Eleven more were born on the homestead. Sarah Jane, known to the community as “Granny,” was midwife to the whole area. Mr. Pinker-man was an unlicensed veterinarian. Ralph Pinkerman, one of the eleven born at Scottville, married Fay Wilson of Redbird in 1912. Except for four years spent in the Meek community, they lived at Scottville. They had two sons, Veldon and Guy. Guy now owns and lives on his parents’ place, which was his Grandfather Pinkerman’s homestead. James Pinkerman’s tree claim is now owned by Virgil Pinker-man and lived on by Rick. Veldon Pinkerman’s son, Reggie, spent two years in the U. S. Army, one of them in Alaska. Two other great- grandsons of James Pinkerman, Delmar and Dan Pinkerman, also served in the Army. Both saw active duty in Vietnam.
Joseph Schollmeyer, Sr., grew up in Germany and served for a time in the Army there. In 1863 he married Anna Mae Hinderman. Their first two children, Joseph, Jr., and Christena were born before the parents .left Germany to settle in Wisconsin, where they farmed from 1868 until 1883. Nine more children were born in Wisconsin. Five died as infants. In the spring of 1883 the family, except for Joseph, Jr., came to Scott-ville and filed on a homestead. Their youngest son Henry, two when they came to the homestead, died at the age of thirteen. Meanwhile Joseph, Jr., had followed the family to Scottville in 1884 and filed on a claim a mile north of his parents. While proving up on his homestead Joseph worked for various people: Barrett Scott, Tom Blackberry, the railroad company.
In 1894 Joseph, Jr., married Edith Richter at Scottville, with the Rev. Postelwait officiating. This couple had sixteen children; four of them were born on August 11 but in different years. There was one pair of twins. Minnie died at three months, Freddy was killed in an automobile accident, going down Liddy Hill on Eagle Creek, in 1927. He was twelve years old. After living on rented farms for four years, Joseph, Jr., and Edith built a large soddy on Joseph’s claim. Twice a year the Schollmeyers took a wagon load of wheat (twenty to thirty bushels) to Pischelville, twenty miles northeast, and had it ground into flour. The trip took two days and the drivers stayed overnight with Mr. Tuck, the miller. The family orchard, garden, pigs, cows and chickens supplied most of the family’s food needs while the children were growing up. For some years the Scottville school was mostly made up of Pinkermans and Schollmeyers, with a Carrill, three Poleys, a Gilligan and Kate Long (who burned to death later) mixed in. The family began building their frame house in 1904 and finished it in 1906. The house is still in use. In 1919, just before Charley left for service in World War I, the family of fifteen children and their parents had their picture taken together.
While the younger Joseph was building a new home for his family the elder Joseph’s health was failing. In 1905 he and Anna sold their homestead and bought a home in O’Neill, where Joseph, Sr., died the next year. Anna died in 1921.
Of the younger Joseph’s family most married neighborhood young people. Charley remained a bachelor. Most of the others are still living. The mother, Edith, died in 1939, the father in 1954.
Frederick and Wilhelma Richter came to Wisconsin in 1882, where their fifth child was born before they moved on to Scott Township in 1886, settling about midway between Opportunity and Scottville. They came by wagon, bringing oxen to work their 398 land. The Richters wore wooden shoes and were a very self-sufficient family. Musically inclined, they had their own band.
Frederick was born in Germany in 1851, Wilhelma Dackhorn in 1856. They were married in 1873 and were the parents of six children. Minnie, the youngest, was born on the homestead in 1893. The oldest, Edith, was the wife of Joseph Schollmeyer, Jr., and the mother of his sixteen children.
Fred Richter married Celia Stein of the Meek community and had no family. Charles married Elizabeth Schmidt of O’Neill and had four children. Rosa married Ralph Chase and left the state. Ernest married Addy Nelson and, after her death, married Barbara Renner. Their son, Marvin Duane, married Betty Lloyd Brady in 1943 and lived on the Richter ranch until they moved to O’Neill where he is engaged in construction work. Minnie, born on the homestead, still lives there. She first married Ray Chase and had four children. After Ray’s death she married Frank McDonald but is now a widow. Frederick died in 1921, Wilhelma in 1936 and both are buried in the Scottville cemetery.
Benjamin Postlewait was born in Pennsylvania, Arminda Ruland in Minnesota. They came to Scottville in the late ‘eighties and lived in a sod house on a homestead. Both were school teachers. Their only child, Harriett, was educated in the Carson school. Mr. Postlewait served as a Sunday school teacher in the Scott-ville Presbyterian church as long as he lived in the community.
Harriett remembers an exciting night in her girlhood when a prairie fire that started near Mineola burned along a ridge back of their home. All the men in the region were out fighting it but it burned almost to the Niobrara before they conquered it. Harriett married Samuel White of Des Moines, Iowa, in 1918.
Harry Hiscocks, born in England in 1871, was eighteen when he and a younger brother came to Iowa. In 1889 he came on to the Scottville community. A bachelor farmer for several years, in 1909 he married Eva May Davis, daughter of Thomas and Martha (Tullis) Davis. The couple had three sons and a daughter.
In 1933 their oldest son, Thomas, married Martha Slack, daughter of John and May Slack. Thomas and Martha still live in the home neighborhood. The rest of the Hiscocks family moved on to Oregon in 1938 and none returned to Holt County to live.
Another family that crossed the Scottville stage in early times, then disappeared, was that of J. L. Plumb. They came from New York to settle on a farm between the Redbird and the Niobrara. Mrs. Plumb was a music teacher. On February 24, 1895, shortly after reaching her new home, the fifteen-year-old daughter Ada died of typhoid fever. A week later her eighteen-year-old brother Carl died of the same disease. Both are buried in the Scottville cemetery. Soon afterward the parents left Holt County, destination unknown.
George Kruse, born in Germany in 1901, came to the United States in 1925. He stopped first at the George Martin home in Winnetoon, Knox County. After about two weeks he Joseph Schollmeyer, Jr. family. This picture was taken in 1918 just before Charley left for service in World War I. Standing: Ernest, Minnie, Hilda, Frances, Rose, Emma, Mary, Dorothy and Ida. Seated: Charley, Henry holding Herman, Mother Edith holding Vera, Father Joe Jr. holding Freddie and Joseph III. Courtesy Mrs. Francis Pribil. 399 hired out to the Tom Crowe ranch. He was a good worker but couldn’t speak English. No one on the ranch could speak German, so things were a bit difficult for awhile.
In 1932 George married Leta Coak-ley. Their four children were born on the Throckmorton place, purchased from T. J. Graham. George and Leto’s oldest son, Albert Lee, enlisted in the Army in 1954 and was later stationed in Germany. There he visited his father’s birthplace, and his German aunts. None of1,.George and Leta’s children now live in Holt County, and George himself rests in the Scottville cemetery.
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