← Before Today: A History of Holt County, Nebraska
Troy— Paddock Chapter Forty-One Great Spirit for compelling them to move.
Mr. Prouty’s dissatisfaction with the O’Neill location was mostly because of the openness of the country. In searching for a place with more protection from the elements he found what he wanted in a wooded area belonging to Harry Spindler and bought a quarter section from him. The Niobrara was a mile to the north and Eagle Creek was on the west. The surrounding hillsides afforded plenty of spring water.
Mr. Spindler, a Pennsylvanian, settled on another location about ten miles to the southwest, the site where he established his Meek store in 1894, so named for a butter maker friend in Norfolk where he sold the cream he bought from his country customers. He employed two men to drive regular routes and pick up cream. The drivers also hauled hundred pound sacks of sugar which they sold to the farmers for $3 each. This trade was the beginningof the store which, in time, came to have well-stocked shelves of goods. This was the store that Spindler sold to Harry Fox of the Redbird community. When the Meek post office was phased out after Mr. Fox’ death in 1941, the store closed its doors at the same time.
Tom Berry, born in Illinois in 1848, and his brother Baxter came to Eagle Creek with a colony of settlers from Iowa and Illinois. Many settled in other areas but Tom took a claim and build a house near Paddock. He was the first to carry mail to the community, riding a horseback route from Paddock to Fort Niobrara, a distance of seventy-five miles. Tom became a family man and the father of fourteen children. In 1882 the family moved “some twenty miles further into the prairie region, where they farmed and lived until 1903.” The Berrys then moved to Canada for eleven years and, although they returned to the states in 1914, never again lived in Holt County.
Redbird, Leonie and Pleasant Valley— and they did eat and were filled. After dinner (there was) singing by the Redbird Glee Club, speaking by Mr. Loyd, George McGowan and James Weeks, declamations by Vic Squires and Ed Norton. In the evening a dance was held at the residence of E. P. Hicks. All in all it was a good sociable time, enjoyed by young and old.” Those early settlers at Troy-Paddock had a rugged time of it. The nearest railroad was eighty-five miles away at Yankton, South Dakota; the nearest grist mill sixty-five miles away at Neligh. Niobrara City, forty miles east, was the closest town. The Whiting bridge, some miles to the west, was the nearest. To avoid going so far out of their way, settlers in the Paddock and Redbird communities forded the river in summer or crossed on the ice in winter. Both could be dangerous. Occasionally teams and rigs broke through the ice, or went down in the quicksand.
In 1902-’03 a bridge was built across the river north of the Redbird store— four wooden spans, an island, then three more spans. Later, after high water changed the course of the river somewhat, a high bridge was constructed over a narrower part of the river. This bridge is still in use. Theodore Wade Crawford, born in Virginia in 1847, and Sarah Williams Berry, his wife, came with that early group of settlers to the mouth of Eagle Creek. It being fall by the time they reached Niobrara City, they spent the winter there— and buried their two- day-old daughter in the little cemetery at that place on October 21, 1874. Sarah’s father, Captain W. P. Berry, was also buried there before the families moved on to Eagle Creek in the spring. David Smith, another member of the party, was later one of the postmasters at Paddock. J. T. Prouty was another. Smith’s son-in- law, Meyer T. Childs was a mail carrier or “Pony Express” rider over the long trail to Niobrara.
Theodore and Sarah took a homestead a mile up the river on what is now the Oscar Witherwax place. Of their eight children seven married and stayed in the neighborhood. William and Lloyd married sisters, Mary and Alice Harvey. William also had eight children, all of whom married in the home community except Doyle who was killed in a car 409 accident on Liddy Hill.
The Crawford children all attended school in District 1 on the east side of the creek. Living on the Eagle as they did, the family became very familiar with floods. Some did great damage to livestock and buildings and it was not unusual to find pigs and calves honing in trees when the water went down.
Floyd Crawford, twin brother to Lloyd married Grace May Haynes, daughter of William and Louisa (Smith) Haynes of Iowa. The Haynes lived on a farm between Paddock and Redbird, raised ten children and lost four others in infancy.
Floyd and Gracie, married in 1904 at the Haynes’ home, had seven children. Both Gracie and her last baby died when the child was born in 1917. Floyd cared for his other children until they were grown, then in 1929 married Thuriza Hull, daughter of Michael and Ann Hull. Thuriza had one child at the time of her marriage to Floyd. The couple became the parents of six more children. One died at the age of five, the rest have moved to other states, except for their youngest son, Ted.
One of Gracie’s brothers, Cecil, married Ester Hull, daughter of William and Ella Hull, and lived on the Billie Hull place. A sister, Edith Haynes, married Claude Hull, son of Elmer and Mary, in the bride’s home which at the time (1920) was the Paddock post office.
Ted Crawford, born in 1909, married Annettia Mae Miller, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Bert Miller, at O’Neill in 1931. Mae was born north of the river in Boyd County but moved with her parents to Holt County at the age of three. In 1944 Ted and Mae bought the Rakowsky place at the mouth of Eagle Creek and live in a house located almost exactly on the original site of old Paddock.
Another name that looms large in pioneer Holt County history is that of Sanford Ryland Parker. Born in Wisconsin in 1851, he came with his parents to the Paddock community in 1876. Almost immediately he caught “gold fever” and set out for the golden mountains of the Black Hills. Even though it was winter he hastened off, on foot, to cover the 450 intervening miles.
For six months he and two friends ate and slept out of doors, except for the times when blizzards drove them to the shelter of a small tent. When asked later if he struck it rich in the hills he replied, “Some friends of mine got in a game at Deadwood and lost all their money and mine, too.” Broke and a stranger, he was rescued by a prospector who tried to drive his wagon across the river on the ice. When the wheels broke through and the fellow was about to lose his whole outfit, Parker, a daring young man, crawled out on the ice and threw the wagonload of priceless provisions to safety, a piece or a bag at a time. The prospector rewarded him with enough gold to buy a crosscut saw and an axe.
With his new tools the lad went into the timber and made a stake. In July, 1878, he returned to his parents’ home near O’Neill, and that fall was elected Clerk of Holt County. In 1880 he married Ida Lamoureaux at Nio-brara. During his third term as County Clerk he was appointed receiver at the U. S. Land Office at Niobrara. From 1886 to 1890 he was in the banking business in Oelrichs, South Dakota, then opened a bank in Spencer. He went into the real estate business in O’Neill in 1902, then resumed his duties in the Land Office, which had been moved to O’Neill. He worked with the Nebraska State Banking Commission from 1921 to 1930, when he retired. He died the next year at the age of eighty. Sanford and Ida had three children: Ethel who married Cam Tinsley and had a daughter, Louise, the first licensed girl pilot in Nebraska; Arthur who married Martha Sommerfield at Spencer in 1906 and had nine children; and Clarence who married Jennie Kane, daughter of Jack Kane, an early marshal of O’Neill.
Sanford had one brother, Byron Parker, who married Julia McEvony. Their sons, Joel and Ryland, are still residents of O’Neill. A sister, Adeline, became Mrs. James Jacobs. Her daughter, Jennie, married J. C. Harnish, another early Holt County pioneer.
Charles Bigler was born in Michigan in 1852, Emma Perry in Iowa in 1854.They were married in Iowa in 1872, lived in Michigan for four years, then came to the Eagle in 1876. The Ray post office was later established a half-mile west of their homestead. Charles and Emma had seven children. Their school was in District 33. District 42, known as the “Vequist school,’ was also near the Bigler homestead. It was in this schoolhouse that the teacher, Anna Tesch, found the body of the man named Jonas, who had hanged himself in the entryway on July 4, 1911. One of the Bigler sons, Joseph, died in World War I at Newport News in 1917. The youngest daughter, Ruth, graduated from O’Neill High, attended Wayne State College, taught school for seven years, then married William Claussen, the son of another pioneer Holt County family, in 1919. William and Ruth ran a grocery store, farmed, ranched and sold insurance. They celebrated their Golden Wedding Anniversary in 1969. Ruth and William still own the original Bigler homestead.
John Donlin and Margaret Reynolds were born in County Longford, Ireland, and came to Pennsylvania shortly after their marriage and during the potato famine. For the next thirty years John worked in the Wilkes-Barre coal mines. In 1877, hearing of the O’Neill settlement in Holt County, he decided to bring his wife and four children to that land of promise. In company with the Dono-hue family, they traveled to West Point by train, then on to O’Neill by stage.
The two families homesteaded about ten miles north of town, on land still owned by the Donohues. Mr. Donlin, unsatisfied by the dry and treeless area, kept looking for land more to his liking. After about a year he came home in excitement one day The old barn at Paddock. The deep old wagon ruts of the trails that ran from Paddock to Redbird, O’Neill, Page and Dorsey can still be seen. Picture taken in 1964. Clay Johnson Collection.
Three of the Floyd Crawford children. Courtesy Mrs. Ted Crawford.
410 to tell the family he had found just what they wanted, a beautiful valley with timber and springs and a falls of clear, cold water.
The Donlins moved immediately to this new place on Eagle Creek, about nineteen miles northwest of O’Neill. They spent their first winter in a dugout, then built a log house. A few years later they built a comfortable frame home, which stood until 1915. The four Donlin children were Stephen, Mary, Thomas and John. Stephen Donlin married Catherine Mullen and became the father of two sons, John Joseph and Edward.
Catherine died when Edward was five days old and “Grandma Donlin,” then sixty-four years old, took the two little boys to raise.
Margaret Donlin was a remarkable person who lived a remarkale life. Arthur Mullen,’ on his first visit to the Donlin home on Eagle Creek, noticed an especially fine picture of Abraham Lincoln hanging on the wall and asked about it. Mrs. Donlin replied, “He was the greatest man who ever lived in this country, and the kindest.” She then told him the following story: The Donlins had not been long in this country when John and hundreds of other Irish, who had joined the “Molly Maguires” to oppose the labor invasion of the coal fields by the Cornish miners, were arrested. Some of them had also resisted the draft for the Union Army when the Civil War began. All of the “Mollies” were held in jail without a trial or bail for more than a year.
Even when her baby was born, Margaret could not win her husband’s release. Desperate, she wrapped the baby in an old shawl and set out on foot for Washington. With hostile armies on either side of her, she walked, carrying her child. At night they slept beside haystacks. She had used all her little store of money for food by the time she reached Washington.
There, she tried in vain to see the President. Everyone she asked said he was too busy, but she kept trying. One morning, before seven o’clock, she went to the White House. She was standing inside the gates when a man came alone from the front door of the Mansion. He stopped to speak to her, and when she told him he looked like pictures she had seen of the President, he said, “I am Mr. Lincoln.” She told him her story, and then he asked her if she had had breakfast. When she said she had had nothing to eat for two days he took her into the White House and into its great dining room. There they had breakfast together. Afterward he gave her money to take her home to Pennsylvania on the train and promised to return her husband to her. Not only John Donlin but all the other prisoners were shortly released.
“Do you wonder,” she said simply, “that I loved him.” Edward Donlin writes that his life with his grandparents was a happy one. He and his brother John went to the school near the Nollkamper mill and store. The Austin Hynes children were their schoolmates. The boys rode horses, herded cattle and helped with the chores.
One of Edward’s most vivid memories is his grandmother’s love and respect for Father Cassidy, the O’Neill priest who drove the twenty miles to the Donlin home on Saturdays, now and then, stayed overnight and said Mass on Sunday when the Hynes, Rohdes and Langans joined the Donlins in their home for the service. “Grandma kept special bedding and dishes for Father Cassidy,” Edward wrote, “which was never used by anyone but him.” Although the family never knew in advance when the priest was coming, they were always ready for him. When they saw him coming down the hill they all ran out to meet him and the boys would take his horses and care for them. Father Cassidy was a hard driver and they often had to let the team cool off before leading them to the spring to drink.
Their grandmother’s death in 1904 was a severe blow to John and Edward who then went to live with their father’s sister Mary. Mary had married John McCaffrey, brother of Joe McCaffrey, and lived with her husband and children on a homestead north of Emmet. After proving up on his claim, John moved his family of six children and the Donlin boys back to Pennsylvania.
In 1915 Stephen Donlin, who had married Mary Gregory of Pittsburgh, moved his new wife and his sons to O’Neill. Stephen and Mary adopted two children, James and Kathleen Donlin, both of whom are still living in O’Neill. Thomas Donlin married and worked for the Army at Fort Randall in South Dakota. After the fort was abandoned he homesteaded there until his wife died in 1910, after which he moved his family to O’Neill. His eight children are still living. John Donlin remained a bachelor and stayed on the original home place. His father, John, Sr., who lived to be ninety-five, spent part of his declining years with John on the homestead and part with Thomas in O’Neill. He died on the homestead, which John had built into a sizable and successful ranch. John Joseph went to live with his uncle on the ranch, gradually taking over the harder work.
In 1915 heavy rains to the west flooded the Eagle, washing away most of the old ranch house and doing severe damage to the home site. John and John Joseph then built a small house farther from the creek on higher ground and moved all the other buildings up beside them. What was left of the old house stood for many years as a grim reminder of the flood. The older John Donlin died in 1940, the younger in 1970.
Edward served in the first world war, then went into the Railway Mail Service until his retirement in 1955. With his wife he now lives in Harlan, Iowa, near their son, Dr. Robert Donlin. Stephen Donlin’s Holt County land is now owned by John Stor- johann of O’Neill.
Arthur Mullen, who visited the Donlin neighbors and heard Mrs. Donlin’s remarkable story of her experience with President Lincoln, related some events in the pioneer history of his own family after they settled on the Blackbird in 1882. The James Mullen home was beside the trail from O’Neill to Paddock, and not far from the homestead where Kid Wade and his family lived.
Arthur was nine years old when his family came to the claim in Holt County and some of his most vivid memories of that period are concerned with Indians. The Custer massacre had occurred only six years earlier, so recently that, as Arthur wrote in his book, Western Democrat, to the settlers in northern Nebraska, “it was still living terror.” And Sitting Bull, although a prisoner, was even then at Fort Randall, less than fifty miles away, and the settlers were still fearful of another Indian uprising. When a messenger came riding through the settlement, bringing news that the Indians had risen at Fort Randall and were off the Reservation, the Mullens threw a few things into their wagon and quickly joined other settlers, even then driving by on their way to O’Neill. Over Mr. Mullen’s protests, Mother Mullen put some feather ticks into the wagon with the other hastily gathered provisions. Hers was a wise act, for the town was so full of refugees that it was almost midnight before the Mullens found shelter in the loft above Prucell’s store. There they crowded in with several other families, found space for the ticks and bedded down. There was little sleep that night in the loft.
“A woman moaned,” Mullen wrote, “a child whimpered, a man swore . . . After awhile I heard a low murmur.” It was people praying and to the sound of it the boy finally slept. Throughout most of the next day the people milled about town, but 411 stead and thought it best to stay. Will began teaching the Vequist school but later moved into O’Neill and took the job of city weighmaster. The rest of the family then moved to town where Grace, a cousin who came from Massachusetts with them, worked in Mann’s store until she married J. V. Dwyer of Butte, Montana, and went there to live. Will later became completely paralyzed from the waist down.
Martha, the oldest daughter, married Hiram Sterns, and Lizzie, the youngest daughter, married Wallace Johnson. They were the parents of Ethel and Floyd Johnson. The two children attended the Vequist school, except for one year when Ethel went to the Stern school. Their post office was Ray.
“Our home was a number of old buildings put together,” Ethel Johnson wrote, “a schoolhouse, a granary and I forget what others. Papa just bought the empty buildings and later built on some porches.” Jack, her mother’s brother who never married, lived with the Johnsons the last years of his life. “We just had pieces of furniture .that Papa bought at sales,” Ethel went on. “None of it was a set. Our chairs didn’t match and our kitchen stove was an old one Papa had used when he was batching— until later when he got us a Majestic Range. We were the envy of the neighborhood with our new stove. We had a round wood heating stove for our living room. We put it up every fall and took it down every spring, storing it on the porch until fall again.” Dances were among the entertainments most enjoyed by Ethel and her family. She tells an interesting story of one dance she went to when she was sixteen. The dance was in the Ed Earley barn and Ethel was determined to go. Her brother had to work late in the hayfield and Ethel decided to bring in the cows and do the milking, so they could go when Floyd came in from the field.
“When we wanted a horse to ride, Ethel wrote, “we just waited until the horses came into the corral from the pasture, shut the gate on them and caught the ones we wanted. I had one that didn’t buck very much, or I could not have stayed on it, but she was tough-mouthed and went where she wanted to. But I caught her to ride after the milk cows.
“When I got on her she started to run and there was no stopping her only she ran right down a barbed wire fence and cut my leg clear to the bone. Mama said that finished my plans for the dance that night, for the cut bled and bled. I finally got it stopped, then tore up an old sheet and bandaged it good and Floyd and nothing happened. Then Mr. Mullen and some other men rode out on the prairie to an elevation from which they could see all the way to the Sioux Reservation. There were no Indians off the Reservation anywhere, “so the men came back to town and punctured the scare.” Later they learned that it all started when some soldiers were target shooting on the Reservation and a mail carrier on his route had heard the guns— and dashed off to report the uprising.
Regarding the Vigilantes Mr. Mullen reports that they had been on their ranch only a little while when a group of men came to the house and told his father they were “Vigs” and wanted him to go with them as they were going after “the Dutchers,” who were horse thieves.
Mr. Mullen refused to go and they rode off. A few days later the story came back that the Vigilantes did go to the Dutcher home and take the father away. A little later they called the oldest son out and showed him a body hanging from a tree. “Tell us where the horses are or we’ll do the same to you,” they threatened. The son refused to talk. They called out the second son and showed him two hanging bodies. He also refused to talk. But the third son, at the sight of three hanging bodies, broke down and told them. Then they showed him his father and brothers, tied up as prisoners. The hanging bodies had been dummies.
John Hopkins and John A. Robertson were both said to be Vigilantes, Mullen wrote. Both were honest citizens and leaders in the community, which Robertson later represented in the Nebraska legislature.
Of the blizzard of ’88 he writes that trains did not run for two weeks after the storm.
James Gordon and Elizabeth Mc- Crudden, also born in Ireland, married there and later went to Canada. Four children were born to them there, and two more after they moved to Massachusetts. James, who worked in a dye mill in Lawrence, was poisoned by the dye. The oldest son, Will, developed a form of creeping paralysis and the family doctor advised them all to go west, as none of the family were in very good health.
James and his second son Jack came first, although no dates are given, and took a homestead on Eagle Creek. Elizabeth and the rest of the family came on the train the following year but, upon reaching Hastings, decided they could not face the wilds of Nebraska so turned around and went back. A year later they came again, reached the home-I went to the dance. “When we got there and I started to dance the cut began to bleed again. It bled all over the bandage, into my white slipper and all over the floor and I had to sit there and couldn’t dance at all. I still have a big scar on my leg.” Ethel recalled the misery of going to bed and getting up in the winter time. From the warm kitchen she had to cross the cold, unused dining room and living room, then crawl into her icy bed and try to warm up. They never used the dining room in the winter; and the parlor, with its heating stove, only on special occasions. Then her father ran across a little tin kerosene heater with a bale handle on it at a sale and brought it home. After that they could warm up the dining room enough to use it when they had company.
Ethel married Joe Brown and went to live on his parents’ ranch in Rock County. They had three children, Elizabeth, Louis and Arlene. When Ethel’s Grandfather Gordon died at the age of eighty-six the summer weather was very warm. This was before the days of embalming, she recalled, and the family put his body in the cool cellar and kept him packed in ice until arrangements could be made for his burial. The neighbors came in to help, adding fresh ice as needed and staying with the corpse until the funeral hour. Austin Hynes, born in County Galway, Ireland, in 1850 came to the United States twenty years later. Shortly after arriving he enlisted in the Army at Fort Bayard, New Mexico and served for five years. During this time he and a few others who were crack shots were paid extra for hunting game and keeping the men supplied with fresh meat. With this and his regular Army pay he was able to save $1000, which was quite a sum for an Irish lad from the “Auld Sod.” Upon receiving his discharge in May, 1875, he and two soldier friends rode horseback to Fort Randall in South Dakota, in search of a place to locate. On the way they met a lone traveler who asked to join them. Two days later they awoke to find the man gone— along with their pack horse and supplies. They tracked him, however, caught up with him and recovered their property.
At Fort Randall they learned of the gold discovery in the Black Hills and, with one pony and a rifle apiece, made all haste to the Hills to seek their fortune. They were too early, of course, and were turned back by soldiers guarding the golden gates. They then returned to their first objective and rode down into the Eagle Creek country, where Austin 412 selected his homestead, twenty-one miles northwest of O’Neill.
For several years he rode horseback every month or six weeks to Fort Randall to get his mail and supplies, all brought by boat up the Missouri. While there he attended Mass whenever a priest was available. Catherine Kelly, meanwhile, had come to O’Neill with her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Denis Patrick Kelly in 1878. Six years old at the time, she had been born in New Jersey. In 1880 her father opened a small grocery store about eleven miles west and a little north of O’Neill. Six years later he applied for a post office which he named Slocum. Until the railroad came through he hauled his store goods from Wisner.
No doubt Austin Hynes met Catherine Kelly at the Slocum store, for they were married in O’Neill in 1886. Nine children were born to their union. Austin died in 1904, leaving Catherine the children, most of them quite young, to rear by herself. A kind, hardworking mother, she stayed on the farm and the children helped as they grew old enough.
Two of the Hynes boys, John and Matthew spent nearly two years overseas in World War I. While stationed in France they obtained a three weeks furlough and visited their father’s home in Ireland. Both boys returned to Holt County, John to the homestead, where he died in 1945 as the result of a bus accident. Matthew died in 1970. Austin and Bernard also lived out their lives in Holt County. The girls, Mary, Cecelia and Kathleen, and their brother Dennis all went to the west coast. Only Cecelia is still living. The mother, Catherine, died in 1940 and rests in Calvary cemetery beside her husband in O’Neill. Bennett Martin, born in 1849, and his wife Augusta, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. William Aley, came with their two little sons (the youngest six months old) by covered wagon from Ulster County, New York to a homestead called Pleasant Valley in Paddock Precinct. The year was 1878. Their home was a dugout until Bennett could cut and haul logs from Eagle Creek and build a cabin. Three more babies, including a set of twins, were born on the homestead.
The Martins donated an acreage from their land on which to build the Pleasant Valley Presbyterian Church, an institution that was of great importance to the pioneer community. While the family was proving up on the claim Mrs. Martin’s parents, the William Aleys, joined them in the Valley and took a homestead nearby. In 1886 the Martins and the Aleys moved into O’Neill where Bennett built a small house for the older couple and followed the carpenter trade for a time. Another son and a daughter, Goldie, were born to Bennett and Augusta in O’Neill. Mr. Martin served the town as city engineer, water commissioner and marshal until his death in 1907. All of the Martin children attended the O’Neill schools where the oldest son, Merritt, was a member of the first graduating class of the high school. He then taught twelve consecutive terms in the Joy school. Belle, one of the twins, was also a school teacher before she married O. P. Chambers. Only Goldie remained continuously in O’Neill. In 1917 she married Hawley (Pete) Heriford, a young baker who had come to O’Neill from Iowa in 1911 to work in the McMillan and Markey bakery. Pete served in the Army during World War I, then The front of the old ice house at Eagle Mills, or the Nollkamper place. Hurley Jones on the left. Picture taken in 1964. Clay Johnson Collection. Austin and Catherine Hynes and five oldest children. Courtesy Dorris Hynes. 413 returned to O’Neill. Pete and Goldie’s son, Bennett Thomas, was born in 1918.
In 1947 the Herifords bought the M & M Bakery and Cafe at the same location where Pete had worked for thirty-six years. When his health failed in 1951, Pete and Goldie turned the management of the business over to their son, who had learned the baker’s trade from his father. Pete died in 1966.
Young Bennett, too, served his country in the second world war, came home and married Irene Her-shiser, daughter of Clyde and Jennie (Wayman) Hershiser, two other pioneer Holt County families. Bennett and Irene have one daughter, Mary Ellen, who since her graduation from O’Neill High has assisted her parents in the bakery-cafe, one of the oldest continuing business firms in O’Neill. George H. Spindler (probably no relation to Harry Spindler) was eight years old when he came with his parents from West Virginia to Eagle Creek in 1879. His father’s name was Andrew Jackson Spindler. He had three younger brothers, Frank, Jake and Will. Their first home was a rudely furnished frame shack. The boys went to school in a log building three miles from their home. In the coldest weather they wrapped their boots in gunnysacks or rags, as none of them had overshoes. Their lunches, carried in tin buckets, were made up of “Johnny cake,” (cornbread) and sorghum. There was seldom a change in the menu, and when there was it was to leave off the sorghum.
Young George began working out for other farmers when only fourteen— usually for ten dollars a month, most of which his parents drew to help support the rest of the family. The Bartels family came from Illinois in 1880, eventually settling near Turkey Creek, a few miles northwest of the Spindlers and nearer the Niobrara. By the time George Spindler and Margaret Bartels were in their ‘teens or early twenties, William Nollkamper was operating his flour mill and general store on Eagle Creek. For awhile both George and Margaret worked at the mill.
In 1895 the young couple were married and, a few years later, able to buy the Frank Coon quarter, six miles northwest of the Eagle Mill and four miles south of the Niobrara. A few years later they bought the Shay quarter. Here they lived for some thirty years, moving to Atkinson in 1928, where Margaret died in 1931 and was laid to rest in the Pleasant Valley cemetery.
The Spindler’s son, Will, became a teacher in the Potato Creek School on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. George Spindler spent the last few years of his life with his son there, then passed away in 1952 at the age of eighty-one.
John Crandall, a man long prominent in Holt County, was born in Iowa in 1869 and came with his parents to a ranch on Eagle Creek while a small child. A man who remained a bachelor all his life, he continued to farm and ranch after his parents’ death. He also conducted a successful well-digging business for forty-five years and had many other interests, making him one of the best known men in northeastern Nebraska.
At the time of his death in 1937 he owned two large ranches, one on Eagle Creek and one on the Niobrara, as well as other real estate in the region. Ever a generous man, he had helped many who were in need, giving of himself and his wealth wherever it would help. He left one nephew, Joe Miller of Spencer, a sister and several nephews and nieces in California. Four brothers and five sisters had preceded him in death, he was buried in the old Paddock cemetery.
The James Harding family homesteaded in the Saratoga community on Eagle Creek in 1880. Charley Harding was sixteen when the blizzard of ’88 destroyed 365 head of sheep and 49 cattle for his family. Shortly afterward their house burned. Times had been hard enough before that, so they gave up and Charley went west. He returned to Holt County in time to enlist in the Spanish American War with the Third Nebraska Infantry Regiment. His outfit spent seven or eight months in Cuba, near Havana, where the heat was so severe that he was overcome during a march and barely made it back to quarters. Upon his return to Holt County after the war he followed several occupations. He was a deputy sheriff under Charles Hall and was one of the men who recovered the body of Barrett Scott from the river. He was also a painter and did a good deal of interior painting for McMillan and Markey in the M & M cafe.
As a bee keeper he produced a great deal of honey and amazed his neighbors by the fact that he could be covered by bees but was never stung. He loved animals and fishing. He married Anna Sanford Davis in 1921 and, after her death in 1946, although confined to a wheelchair due to a broken hip, lived alone. He died in 1959.
John and Eliza Moler homesteaded seventeen miles northwest of O’Neill in 1880, or possibly earlier. They were married in Marshalltown, Iowa in 1874 and had two sons, Russell and John, when they came to their three-quarters of land: the homestead, the pre-emption and the timber claim. Their first home was a dugout, then a sod house, with a stone barn nearby, the stone hauled from across the Eagle a few miles to the northwest. The Molers had six children besides two who died in infancy. In 1894 Russell, the oldest, was shot and killed in a hunting accident. John married Min Hubby, Electa married Charles Bigler, Pearle married John Grutsch, David married Ann Langan and Allen married Clara Rohde, all Holt County young people. Electa was born in the dugout, Pearle and David in the sod house and Allen in a new frame house where the farm buildings are now located. The history of the Grutsch and Molar families was written by Elwin Grutsch, a quiet, almost shy, ranch-man who wrote in an unexpected musically prose style. The tale of the Moler side of his family goes back to Philadelphia in 1730, then follows them through Virginia, Ohio and Indiana.
Grandfather was a hard working man, a good provider and highly respected by all,” wrote Elwin. “However he was set in his ways and sometimes cross and strict with the family. Grandmother was a kind and gentle person, loved by all who knew her. What I would give to sit at her table, and once again hear her say ‘Now help yourself and help each other.’” Of the sod house in which she was born, Pearle, Elwin’s mother, said it was large, a kitchen, living room and three bedrooms. “Grandmother put curtains on the windows and braided rugs on the floors and made a home of the soddy,” Elwin related, “and they lived in it for ten years or longer.” Then he adds, “Those wonderful pioneer women. They would have followed their men to Hell, no doubt, heeding the Old Testament ‘Whither thou goest I will go;’ and when they got to Holt County they doubtless thought it was Hell.” “One time a little twister came through, lifted up the roof of the sod house and whipped out Granddad Moler’s vest, which was hanging on the wall. Then the roof settled back in place on the vest, leaving it half in and half out. In 1893 Grandfather bought a house and moved it from north of Eagle Creek. Then one of the teams ran away just as they had it unloaded— and tore out a corner of the sod house with the running gears. “After the blizzard of ’88 the family was worried about Russell, who had gone to stay with his Grandmother Young and go to the Mineola school, 414 thirteen or fourteen miles to the southeast. So Granddad walked all the way over there, found that Russell was safe as he had not gone to school that day, and walked back again. It was a hard trip, some twenty-six miles over snowdrifts, with the temperature ‘way below zero. There was a man! My Grandfather!
“The year of 1894 was remembered by the Moler family as being a time of great personal tragedy. Russell was killed in August, at the age of seventeen, and buried in the peaceful little Pleasant Valley cemetery three miles to the east, where so many of the Moler family are now at rest. My mother was nine years old at the time and for all her lifetime she would remember her mother crying softly in the night.
“It was a time of testing: no rain had fallen, no lark sang in the meadows that year. No crops, only the bone-crushing work, the blizzards, the drouth, the tragedy— but they did not think of quitting. They had their graves, their good neighbors. Their roots were down and they would pray for a good winter and see it through.
“Mother (Pearle Moler) attended the country school until the eighth grade, which she took in O’Neill. Then she went to Wayne State College and taught school from age 16 to 21. She taught the home school, Meek school and south of O’Neill and in the Hugh O’Neill district on the Niobrara. John Grutsch and Pearle Moler were married in March, 1907. That year my father had 80 acres of corn and 80 acres of oats completely hailed out.” Elwin relates that the Grutsch families came from Ontario, Canada, to Holt County in 1883. “Among those who came were my great-grandmother, Anne Grutsch, my grand- parents, John and Bridget Grutsch and their children, Margaret, Eliza, John and William. John, my father, was about three years old. They settled 11 miles north of O’Neill. Some of the close neighbors were the Dillon, Gerber, McMillan, Hagensick, Newman and Schweitzer families. “Great-grandmother took a homestead two miles west and Granddad bought an adjoining 40 acres from the Government. In March, 1905, Great-grandmother Grutsch passed away. Her land passed to Grandfather Grutsch, who sold it to my parents in 1918. This particular tract of land has now been in the family since Homestead Days, or around 90 years. “in August, 1889, my Grandmother Grutsch, whose maiden name had been Bridget Morris, passed away at the age of 41. Grandfather then decided to return to Canada with the four children, John 9, William 4, Eliza 14 and Margaret 16. Grandfather, sorrowing for Bridget, resting in O’Neill’s Calvary Cemetery, had taken a financial beating, too, and had to mortgage his homestead for $500. “In Canada he went to work for the railroad and the remarkable Morris family (Bridget’s people) helped care for the children. Of Norman origin, they had come to Ireland in 1485, where they became one of the 14 tribes of Galway. With their help things gradually improved. Three years later the prairies of Holt County were calling and Granddad brought his boys, John and Will, back, this time to stay. The girls remained in Canada. The year was 1892 and Granddad acquired land again and lived to be 80 years old.
“My great-grandmother’s name was Lemmel. She had come from the Province of Alsace-Lorraine and could speak both French and German fluently. She had had a team of oxen with rings in their noses. Some of the other members of the family who came from Canada were Granddad’s three sisters and a brother. The sisters were Mrs. Neil McMillan, Mrs. Catherine Smith and Mrs. Margaret Allen. The brother, George, died quite young. I recall the time our neighbor to the west, Mrs. Wallace Johnson, and her brother, Robert Gordon, visited in Europe and brought Granddad Grutsch back a souvenir from Strassburg, a deck of playing cards. “Two of the early day school teachers who taught my dad, John Grutsch, were Mary Horiskey and Arthur Mullen, whose parents lived just a few miles to the east.” Here, in writing of Arthur Mullen, Elwin Grutsch mentions Mullen’s love for Nebraska and quotes from a passage in his “Western Democrat” which describes the country around his beloved O’Neill. “Sometimes in May the ranch was a miracle of beauty. On every side the land glowed deeply green. Wild plum trees waved feathery dusters of white in soft breezes. The blackbirds sang between willows and elders. Mists softened the look of the country until my grandfather said it looked like Ireland, and my grandmother sang: ‘There is not in the whole world a valley so sweet.’ “Then, day after day, the sun shone relentlessly. By day and by night the south wind blew. Before July the green was gone. Even in the years that were not drouth years we ached under the terrible dryness of the summer. From the sandhills the dust drifted endlessly on us. More than discomfort assailed us, defeat and discouragement rose on those long, hot, warping days. Crops died, cattle sickened. No one reaped his sowing. Another year was lost.” “If anyone has better described a green Nebraska spring and a brown Nebraska summer, I have yet to read it,” Elwin commented.
Elwin remembered the story his father told him of the summer of 1894. How, though there had been no rain, the family decided to plant some beans anyway. The garden patch being some distance away and the day very hot, they took along a gallon jug of drinking water. They planted the beans and, having a little water left in the jug, poured it out on the bean row. Only one bean plant grew, on the spot where the jug had been emptied, it flourished until the moisture from the jug was used up, then the hot winds finished it— and that ended the last hope for the year of 1894.
When work was slack on the farm young John Grutsch rambled about the country, working at anything he could find to do. He went back to Canada when he was twenty-one. In 1904 he worked for a season in the Willamette Valley in Oregon. He also worked for awhile in the railroad shops in Alliance, and put in some time freighting from O’Neill up into Boyd County.
At this time John had a team of young, half-broken mules, hard to control and full of the “Old Nick.” When picking corn with them, he said he could always tell when they were planning a run-away, as they would refuse to eat. Then out in the corn field, “as if some signal had passed between them they would take off in unison onthe dead run, circle the field a time or two, then come back almost to the row where their owner was waiting.” The team, however, proved its mettle one bitter cold night when the great-grandmother was taken suddenly ill. It was up to John and the mules to go to O’Neill for medicine. John had to get both the doctor and the druggest out of bed. Even so he made the round trip of twenty-seven miles in just four hours.
“Granddad Grutsch once made a trip by team and wagon to Hyannis, Nebraska to look at some land,” Elwin wrote, “but didn’t find anything to his liking and couldn’t get back to O’Neill fast enough. His horses were about exhausted and so thin that he was ashamed to drive them into town— so he turned them into a pasture on the edge of town and walked on into O’Neill.” “Grandfather Moler had a farm sale about 1911, rented his farm to the Krier family and moved to Wayne. After four years he was so homesick for Holt County that he moved back to his west farm on Eagle Creek, where 415 Kleeb and lives on the old Eric Borg place on Eagle Creek. Their third daughter, Ila Fae, was the little girl who died in the cave-in near the schoolhouse in District 208.
Albert Miller married Leah Cromwell, a teacher from O’Neill. One of their two sons died in infancy, the other married Doris Smith, daughter of Mike Smith, operator of the Spencer Dam power house for many years. Albert and Leah are still ranching near Emmet. Mable married Chester Ross, son of Charley and Mable Ross, and farmed for many years before buying a service station in Spencer.
Wilber Miller married Frances Jareske of O’Neill. Now retired, they still live there. Cecil married Mattie Ross, daughter of Charley and Martha Ross. One of their four children, Larry, was also killed in the cave-in at the District 208 school in 1945. Orville married Ardyce Worth, daughter of Bob and Ina Worth of the Joy community, in 1941. They raised two children, who married and live in O’Neill. Orville died in 1966 while deer hunting.
Edyth married Floyd Vequist of Rural O’Neill in 1939. After his death by pneumonia a few months later she operated a beauty parlor in Atkinson. A few years later she-married Cecil Falter of Creighton, a barber. He operated his shop and she ran hers. Their three children grew up and married in the county. Marie Miller married Alden Briener of O’Neill and had five children, most of whom married and still live in the vicinity. Bernard, youngest of the fifteen Millers, married Opal Johnson, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. John Johnson of the Spencer Dam community. Of their five children, Betty married Larry Dobrovolny of the ranching Dobrovolnys northeast of O’Neill. Two of the others are married, the two youngest are still at home. Bernard operates a service station in Spencer.
Deric Borg, born in Sweden in 1862, came to New York in 1882. As a youth he had worked at logging in Sweden. Therefore, when told of the need for loggers in Michigan, he went there. Most of the men he found in the timber camps were Irishmen and, as a “green Swede,” he was the brunt of many a prank. However he stayed with it and, when he left two years later, he was not only the camp foreman but left many friends behind him there.
His next stop was Holt County where, nine days after his arrival, he went to O’Neill to file his Declaration of Intention to become a United States citizen. In 1884, with Ed Whiting, Martin, Dave and John Langan, he walked from Boyd County to Niobrara to file on homesteads. Working wherever he could, he earned the money to send back to Sweden to pay the passage to America of his brothers Nels and a family friend, Jonas Bergstrom.
In time the three of them sent enough money to Sweden to bring the rest of both families to Holt County. The Bergstroms and Deric Borg’s parents homesteaded near Anoka in Boyd County and in 1892 Deric married Anna Bergstrom, eldest of Jonas Bergstrom’s seven children. Mr. Borg was one of the men who searched for Barrett Scott’s body. He was a good friend of Holt County’s popular sheriff, Pete Duffy, and on occasion traded horses with the notorious Al Heilman. The Borgs got their mail at Saratoga on the Duffy ranch.
Deric and Anna Borg had three children. The first, a son, died at the age of two years. The daughter was still living in 1973 and the youngest, Axel Borg, married Grace Searles of Bristow in 1924. None of Axel’s six children now live in Nebraska. Anna Borg’s youngest sister, Agnes Bergstrom, married William Fritchoff of Sand Creek and Axel writes that he often used to meet Walter O’Malley, a close friend of his father’s, on the streets of O’Neill. One day Mr. O’Malley asked Axel where his Aunt Agnes was now living. She had moved to California long before and Axel, surprised, said, “What do you know about her?” Laughing, O’Malley replied, “Why, I’ve taken her to many a dance in and around Atkinson. She was a fine dancer and the best dressed young lady at any dance. She used to work at the Hart store in Atkinson.” Axel Borg and his wife spent twenty-three years on a rented place in Paddock Township and the following twenty-three on a ranch of their own. From the ranch they retired to a home in O’Neill. His parents are buried in Spencer, hers in O’Neill. Another 1884 settler on the Eagle was John Vequist. Both he and his wife, Betty Johnson, were born in Sweden. They married there and had two little girls before John migrated to Iowa and got a job on a railroad there. Betty and the little girls joined him in 1881 and three years later they moved onto their homestead near the Nollkamper mill, where John worked. One of the two little girls died of diphtheria in Iowa and two sons were born there. Two more sons and a daughter were born in Nebraska. In 1897 John and Betty moved to the Rock Falls place (where the Eagle falls over a series of beautiful rock terraces) and remained there the rest of their lives.
The William Veal mill and the dam were gone by then but the Ray post office had been located there since 1886. In 1902 Mr. Vequist began building another long-time landmark at the falls his huge rock barn. He had tried out a structure built of the native stone, a small milkhouse, and liked the result, so set about building the barn, 160 feet long by 32 feet wide.
Built into the side of a hill, the lower floor opens on the creek level, the upper floor on the hilltop. This way he could drive loads of hay and feed directly onto the haymow floor for unloading. The lower portion contained stalls for livestock. The construction took two years and was a family project, although not all of the family worked on the barn itself. Louie, aged eighteen, had to herd the cattle while his father hauled materials from town with a team and wagon and sixteen-year-old Henry mixed the mortar for the whole big structure. Charlie Vequist, twenty years old, kept the farm work going and worked on the barn as much as he could.
Reuben Bellinger and Sam Banta, stone masons, laid up the walls and the huge buttresses. Sadly enough, the great barn was put up with lime and is now crumbling somewhat under the onslaughts of time and the elements. Both Sam and Reuben had ridden bicycles all the way from Michigan to Holt County a few years earlier.
Mr. Vequist used dynamite to break the rocks from the hillside some distance away, from which place they were hauled on a sled made from the crotch of a big tree with crosspieces nailed to it. The rocks, pried onto the sled with a crowbar, were dragged by horses to the barn site. Since the mail carrier, a Mr. Howe, refused to haul the dynamite out from town in his mail rig, Mr. Vequist had to freight it from O’Neill. When the walls for the lower story were laid and the The mammoth old stone barn on the Albert Widtfeldt farm at Rock Falls. Picture taken in 1964. Clay Johnson Collection.
418 haymow floor laid on them, the rock for the upper walls could be dragged across the floor to where the masons worked.
Gusteva Peterson Widfeldt who, with her husband, now lives on the Vequist place where the big barn and a portion of the old mill still stand, relates a story about the Wetherill store which operated on Eagle Creek in the early days. The store, the social center of the neighborhood, was a little way northwest of the Gordon place and dances were often held there, with Jack Gordon playing his fiddle for the dancers. One family, Gusteva said, had several daughters but only one pair of slippers— so the girls took turns going to the dance in the slippers.
John Vequist, a strong swimmer, once saved three children from drowning when their boat capsized on the lake behind the mill dam. Ironically, Mr. Vequist himself drowned in 1915 when his ship went down as he was on his way back to Sweden for a visit. Mrs. Vequist lived until September, 1933. The four sons, Henry, Charlie, Louie and David, and the daughter Annie survived.
Mannillious W. Libe, known as “M” Libe, was born in Iowa in 1856. Mary Litle, also born in Iowa, was married to “M” in Earlville, Iowa in 1880. Hearing of the homestead grants in the west, they packed their few belongings into a covered wagon and, with their little daughter Sarah, settled south of the Niobrara in 1884. Their neighbors were few and far apart at first. Then the Bakers, Monahans, Christensens and Snyder families settled fairly near them. Mrs. Baker, the mid-wife, delivered eight more children to “M” and Mary between the years of 1884 and 1896. Ten years passed, more neighbors came, including Dr. Stockwell, before tragedy struck the community in the form of a diphtheria epidemic. Three of the Libe children, one a four weeks old infant, died within five days of each other. The parents always felt that, except for the devoted efforts of Dr. Stockwell, they might have lost all of their desperately ill children. It was the father’s sad task to build with his own hands the little pine caskets in which his children were laid to rest. Two years later another daughter, Charlotte, died of a stomach ailment and was buried beside her brothers and sister. The parents fenced the burial plot and planted cedars there. It remains a well kept burial ground yet today.
When Father Cassidy of O’Neill heard of the triple tragedy at the Libe home he rode the long distance on horseback to comfort the family. Afterward the mother and five remaining children were baptized into the Catholic faith.
The first schools in this community, as in so many others, were held on a rotating basis in the homes and few children received more than a third or fourth grade education. The Libe children grew up and married and “M” and Mary retired in Atkinson, where Mary died in 1926 and “M” in 1932. Sarah, the oldest of their children, married Henry Wabs and lived eighty-five of her eighty-eight years in Holt County. The other four, all past eighty, are still living; Alice Libe Reed in Spencer, Amy Libe Maxwell in Norfolk. Joseph Libe, the only son and last bearer of the name, lives in California, Esther Libe Cutler in Montana.
Charles Uriah Mohr, told by doctors that he did not have long to live, built his own casket and carved his own tombstone, putting thereon the birth dates for himself and his wife, along with their names. Then the family came from Bucks County, Pennsylvania, to West point, Nebraska, in 1869. Mrs. Mohr’s father, Uriah Brun-er, had laid out the town some time earlier and called it New Philadelphia. The name was later changed to West Point.
In 1876 Alvin Mohr, son of Charles Mohr, took his bride, Catherine Street-er, in a covered wagon, with a milk cow trailing behind, to Sterns Prairie in Platte County. Alvin was a tall, broadshouldered, handsome youth, Catherine was a small, pretty Quaker girl. Mary Louise, the first of their fourteen children was born at Sterns Prairie in 1877. Another daughter, Emma, was born there two years later. The third daughter, Ida, was born in Washington County, the fourth, Birdie, in Norfolk.
The first son, John Harr, was born on Sterns Prairie, after which the family moved to Eagle Creek where twins were born in 1886. Only Frank lived. Another daughter, Minnie, was born in the sod home on Eagle Creek. Katherine was born in O’Neill, Archie and Libby at Slocum and Willie Ray in 1897 at Fulton, Arkansas, where the family must have lived for a short time. Billy, a handsome young fellow, small in stature, with short legs, dark hair and sparkling blue eyes, could tickle the toes and bring a beam to tired faces with his violin. Gaiety surrounded him like sunshine and wherever he went there was music. Sam, born in O’Neill in 1899, was also a popular fiddle player in and around O’Neill for many years.
While a small boy Sam jumped from a barn onto a haystack and hurt his spine so badly that he became a hunchback. He never married but worked for the Department of Roads in North Dakota, where he is buried. Andrew Joy Mohr, born in 1900 at O’Neill died of pin worms when a very small child and is buried there. Clarence, youngest of the family, was born in 1902, served in the Navy and is buried at Atkinson.
Catherine Mohr, a sturdy little person, would be carrying water from the creek to do her family washing only three days after the births of her babies. She raised a healthy, well mannered family, taught her older children to help care for the younger and never permitted any of them to be “sassy” to their parents.
Minnie Mohr married Albert Roseler and lived for awhile on the Johring farm north of O’Neill. The couple had five children and later moved into town. One of their daughters, Florence Felts, became a nurse and is the writer of the Mohr family history. Her father’s brother, Henry Roseler, married Mary Kuhns and lived on a beautiful stretch of prairieland north of O’Neill. His mother, who had come from Germany many years earlier, lived in her own little house on the same place.
Grandma Roseler, wrote Florence, wore a little white cap and smoked a corncob pipe. She made little cheese patties that she aged in the sun, stacked wood against the east side of her house for winter use and lived to be past ninety.
John Mohr, eldest son of Alvin and Catherine, married Ethel Elsbury and had seven children. His son, John, Jr., now ranches near Amelia. John Sr., who prepared his casket and tombstone while yet a young man, lived well into his nineties. The history does not state whether or not he was buried in the casket he made, or under the stone that he carved. In the spring of 1903 Herbert Richardson and his father-in-law, George Warner, bought an 800 acre ranch on Eagle Creek. Herbert, born in 1870 near Benedict, Nebraska in York County, in 1898 married Bertha Warner, eldest of eight children, at her Stromsberg home. Herbert and Mr. Warner built a house and barn on the ranch, known as the “Hunky- dory,” and brought Bertha and the small daughter, Dena, there to live. Bertha taught the Hans Storjohann school, District 84, that winter and her sister Eva minded the little girl. Five more children were born to Bertha and Herbert on the ranch with the help of Grandma Warner, Mrs. Hamilton, the mid-wife, or even Mr. Richardson if Dr. Bradley couldn’t make it through the snow from Spencer.
All the children attended the local school with the Rohde, Wabs, Stor-johann, Hynes, Spindler and Putnam 419 children. They went to highschool in Spencer. Another of Bertha’s sisters, Harriet Warner, as well as Evelyn Storjohann and Mary Rohde, taught the home school. Their first post office was Saratoga at the Duffy ranch. Later the office was moved to Phoenix, where they had to ride six miles on horseback to pick up their mail. The first neighborhood wedding remembered by Dena Richardson, the family writer, was that of Mary Storjohann. It was a festive affair that lasted all day and part of the night and the whole country came, partaking of long tables full of food of all kinds. The first funeral she remembers was that of John Spindler, one of her eighth grade classmates. The lad was buried in the Phoenix cemetery. Many of the settlers on quarter- and half-section homesteads surrounding the much larger Hunkydory ranch resented the fences Mr. Richardson had built around his land, thus cutting off their short-cuts across the country. For awhile they often cut his fences, let his cattle out and threatened lawsuits. Richardson told them firmly that he intended to stay there as long as any of them, and he did. In time others fenced, too, and the trouble died down.
During their first year on the ranch a prairie fire nearly wiped out the Richardson’s six-room new frame home. Mrs. Richardson, rising in the night to tend a croupy baby, saw a wall of fire flaming along the whole western horizon and rapidly bearing down on the buildings. Only a miraculous wind that held the fire back against the hill for the few minutes that it took Mr. Richardson to start a back-fire, saved the home. Eagle Creek floods were other hazards. An unusually heavy snowpack closed all roads in the area for weeks in 1914. The children walked to school over drifts that covered tall cottonwood trees and the drifts in sheltered places lasted into June.
Three of the Richardson girls became teachers. Dena taught seven years in Nebraska and South Dakota and, after her marriage to William Reagan, twenty-six years in California. Esther and Hazel taught many years around Atkinson and Spencer and Evelyn is a nurse in the Omaha Children’s Hospital. Robert and John still run the home ranch. Esther married George Collins of Atkinson. Hazel was Mrs. William Boettcher of Spencer.
A few more details have been furnished on the little hamlet of Eagle Creek, later known as Turner because of the post office located there for a time. The village was located about a mile and a half west of where highway #281 crosses Eagle Creek right north of O’Neill. Mr. Noll- kamper had built a large house there by his mill and used the upper story for a hotel. Besides the store, there was a photo gallery, three blacksmith shops, a sawmill and several small homes.
The Pleasant Valley Cemetery, about a half mile west of where the church used to stand, is well kept and still in use by descendants of the early settlers buried there. About two miles to the east a church still stands. Built by the Methodists in early times, it was later put up for sale. The community then raised the money to buy it, renamed it the Paddock Community Church and maintain Sunday school and special services there to this day. A small country cemetery just behind the church is still maintained and used by members of the area.
Another long standing custom in the neighborhood was the annual observance of the “Old Settlers Picnic.” The first one was held in 1882 and was so much enjoyed by all who took part that it was decided to hold it every year. Each day started with a huge picnic, followed by speeches, music by the Meek band and any other entertainment handy. Next came horse and foot racing and a ball game. Supper and a bowery dance wound up the festivities. Hundreds came each year and it was looked forward to as a reunion day for scattered families and old friends. But time brought inevitable changes. The old settlers passed on and the younger generations had different interests. Attendance began to fall off and in 1963 the eighty- first, and last, Old Settlers Picnic was held at the Elmer Devall grove, once known as the Kennedy place, just a Florence Felts, daughter of Minnie and Albert Roseler. Picture taken in 1956 on the J. O. Ranch.
few miles from where the first picnic took place. Sarah Hull attended her last Old Settlers Picnic when she was one hundred and two years old. Many of the family histories of the Eagle Mills Valley have mentioned the many floods that plagued the settlers along the creek. None, according to Mrs. Ted Crawford, were as severe as the one that occurred on the morning of June 17, 1964. Two days of rain raised the creek to the level of its banks. It continued to rain until five inches had fallen. All of this rainfall, draining into Camp Creek and upper Eagle Creek was more than the creek below the junction could handle. Dams and bridges were washed out. Four spans of bridges came down the creek and two of them lodged in a grove of cedars on the Crawford place, “looking as if they had been dropped there from above.” Trees, rubbish and sand gushed down the stream, sweeping away everything that stood in their path. The flood caved off four acres of newly seeded tame grasses on the east side of the creek. Another acre of native grass and timber belonging to the Crawfords next to the Niobrara was washed away down the river. Only two posts of a small pasture and hay yard on the bottom land were left standing. Five or more acres of bottom pasture were ruined, covered by sand, silt and brush piles, cut through by ravines and ditches. A four foot bar of sand was left where the channel originally ran, with water running on both sides, cutting off still more soil. REA poles were washed away and broken up, water covered the corral and came within fifty feet of the house. Trees, trash and soil shot out into the Niobrara until all the water ran in a 420 narrow strip along the north bank, leaving a three-fourths mile long sandbar covered with trash and cutting the bed three feet deeper than it formally was. Where we had driven across with a car, and cabled hay across, we now could not even get across on horseback. We had to make a new trail for our cattle to get across to their pasture.
In April of 1966 another flood came down, this time on the Niobrara— a wall of ice and water— hitting the Spencer Dam, damaging the power house and tearing out one gate. The ice hit the sandbar thrown up by the other flood, and split it, pushing ice up the mouth of Eagle Creek and completely damming it for an hour or more. The rest of the ice took out part of the sandbar and went on down stream, doing more damage as it crashed along.
Much of this damage may never be repaired. A little grass is gradually working up through the sand on the bottomland, but mostly its just sand burrs, weeds and blow sand. We have changed the creek bed so the water will do no more cutting— until another flood comes along.
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