← Before Today: A History of Holt County, Nebraska
went along. The first trip included dropping off “refreshed” ‘dozer operators several miles away and delivering three sacks of mail to the Star post office, which serves 40 patrons and is a back entry room on a handsome farmhouse on a hill. Charles Cole’s wife had been postmaster until she died a year ago. There are four children.
“A tiny stream normally flows through the Cole farm. At the point nearest the house it was under 30 feet of snow, which had leveled off a small gully. Cole’s feedlot full of Gene Clark, as close as he could get his car to a patron’s mailbox during a delivery trip in the winter of 48- 49. Courtesy Myrtie McGraw. \ Relief vehicles on the way to the Gibson school. February 1949. Courtesy Bob Tomlinson.
Blizzard scene near Ewing. This rancher lost 150 head of cattle out of a herd of bzoo head. February, 1949. Courtesy Bob Tomlinson. 473 what he would do to that ‘booze hound/ Jack Tracy never rested until he had the fellow in court, along with the still and the evidence.
“Jack carried a .38 Colt automatic and a Twenty-five-Twenty rifle in his old Model T roadster and was a dead shot with either, although I don’t believe he ever fired at anyone he arrested. Within a radius of ten miles there were at least five stills running at one time. Jack put all but one out of business in a short time. He knew where the liquor from the other one was going but could not find the still. “One enterprising operator set his wife’s new gasoline stove up in a tent under a big cottonwood beside Cache Creek and was turning out some very good stuff when Jack interrupted his project. He got the still, tent and stove— but the tall cottonwood proved too good a lookout and the operators got away, although they were later caught and fined.
“At another place Jack couldn’t find the still outside, so he got a search warrant and took it to the house. The lady met him at the door with a butcher knife, yelling ‘You can’t come in here,’ but when Jack reached for his Colt she dropped the knife. It remained standing up, stuck in the kitchen floor. He got the still, a small unit the family ran between midnight and morning on the kitchen range.
“A few miles away a farmer dug a hole in the back yard and made a cave. Then he leveled the ground and covered the plant with a few inches of sand. With a flock of chickens running over it, the agent never would have discovered the plant if the poor fellow hadn’t panicked and led him to it. From the corner of the house he stepped off so many steps west, so many north, scratched away the sand and lifted up the door. “When I bought my place on Eagle Creek in 1942 I found two old abandoned dugouts on the place, about a quarter mile apart and hidden in heavy oak timber. A fine live spring ran past the one on the east side of Honey Creek, and the one on the west side was only a stone’s throw from the creek. A customer of cne of the operators told me the two stills operated all one winter without either operator knowing the other one was there.
“And then there was the stranger who wandered into one of our towns and mentioned that he had some high grade tea to sell. A well-known businessman immediately invited him to a back room and sampled his wares. The quality was good and the businessman invited some of his friends in. When the stranger left town he had an order for a barrel of the fine tea— to be delivered just in time for an upcoming celebration. “The businessman, acting as banker, put up $50 to insure delivery of the tea. The salesman delivered the barrel, the buyers tapped it, sampled the contents, pronounced them satisfactory and paid the salesman, who hurriedly left town. A short time later the barrel went “dry.” Upon a closer examination the buyers found a paraffin “baffle” a few inches below the barrel head. Sure enough, below the baffle was a full barrel of just what the buyers ordered— tea.” Mrs. Elmer Devall tells another incident of “bootleg days.” She was about ten at the time and her family lived north of O’Neill. “We were all just living,” she writes, “nothing to splurge on. So our neighbor to the east decided to make ‘moonshine.’ Every day there were cars, cars and more cars going up the lane to this house, then leaving right away. “One day when the husband was gone to town a State man, a Mr. Bay, came to the place to hunt for the still. He was a very heavyset man, and after he had walked all up and down the creek and over the hills he went to the house, played out. The wife, who had been watching him, was pretty well worked up and angry. So she asked him if he wanted her to saddle a horse for him so he could ride— which she knew he couldn’t do. Although he knew there was a still there, in the end he had to give up— and the bootlegging went right on.
“Another time when Mr. Bay was going to a place where he knew there was a still he got stuck in the mud with his car. He got a farmer nearby to pull him out, but the farmer had sent word to the moonshiner that Bay was on the way, and by the time he got there the jugs had all been broken.
“But Mr. Bay was a booze hound all the way and located many stills in northern Holt County. And in O’Neill there was a bootlegger’s wife who poured the booze down the toilet whenever she suspected Mr. Bay was coming to her house. It was said that she wasted a lot of it on several occasions.
One slaying resulted from the bootlegging business, according to the Chambers paper of September 8, 1932. Paul Lowery of Chambers, popular young coach at Long Pine, was visiting a friend, Allen Stedry of Pierce, when the killing occurred. The Stedrys had had some chickens stolen and when the young men saw a car being driven in a strange manner near the farm they got in their car and went after it. The strange car turned into a driveway, then fired a revolver at the Stedry car.
The boys then called Sheriff Schwartz of Pierce County. When he arrived they got in with him and went back to the driveway, where they found and searched the strange car, uncovering about 250 gallons of alcohol. The sheriff then tied the bootlegger’s car onto his own and started to tow it away. As they came out onto the road a shot, fired from a nearby cornfield, struck and killed Paul Lowery.
The following day several men and a woman were arrested. The couple proved to be from Milwaukee and had been transporting liquor into Pierce County, where they turned it over to local bootleggers.
Another killing that schocked Holt County to its very roots was that of Chet Calkins, who was murdered on the night of March 7, 1952, in the performance of his duty. The murderer, a transient who had apparently broken into a business place and a car that night, was caught in South Dakota eighteen months later. After confessing to the murder he was given a life sentence.
Chet, born northeast of O’Neill in 1900, had been Chief of Police of O’Neill for seventeen years and was a highly popular man and officer. His brother Walter, also a police officer, discovered the slain Chief’s body slumped over the steering wheel in his car, where he had evidently stopped to investigate a car stopped in an alley.
A large sum of money, raised by the people he had served, was given to Mr. Calkins’ widow and family. His body lay in state at Biglin’s Mortuary while more than one thousand people passed by to pay their last respects. His funeral was one of the largest ever held in O’Neill and all business houses closed from 1:45 until 4 p.m. in his honor. Six Nebraska Safety Patrolmen in dress blues were honorary pall bearers and eight of his best friends carried his body to its grave. It’s a long way from northwest Kansas to northeast Nebraska, but that was the path taken by the Kansas- Nebraka Natural Gas Company in bringing natural gas service to Holt County. The K-N was founded in 1936 when a man named Louis Fischer and some associates bought the Kansas Pipeline and Gas Company. Fischer believed that a successful business could be built by serving the small rural communities in Kansas and Nebraska. “Fischer’s Folly,” his skeptical friends called his idea. In the years that have passed Fischer was proven right and K-N has grown from 6,050 customers in 37 towns at the end of 1936 to 213,983 customers in 305 communities at the 476 end of 1973. Among the communities served are the towns of O’Neill, Ewing, Inman, Stuart, Emmet and Atkinson.
When the pipeline was extended from Neligh to O’Neill in 1953 a “flare-lighting” ceremony was held on August 13 in front of the Holt County Courthouse. In addition to the county towns served, K-N also provides natural gas service to 255 customers in the rural areas in between.
At the end of the second world war Holt County also looked ahead to rural electrification, another project interrupted by the war. In 1940 John T. Murry, Spencer attorney, and Willis Thurber, County Agent for Boyd County, had started a campaign to bring electric power to that county by attempting to organize a district. Two years later Mr. Thurber was transferred to Garfield County and A. Neil Dawes took his place. But by then the war had stopped all efforts in that direction.
In 1945 the organization of a district was completed and Holt County was included. Once more Mr. Murry and the agents of the two counties undertook to implement the plan, but resistance had developed— most of it leveled against John Murry, who then admitted defeat and dropped out. The work then fell to the agents, Dawes of Holt and Sire of Boyd. Eventually they were successful and enough people were signed up to form a corporation.
The articles of incorporation were drawn up, signed and filed with the Secretary of State on August 13, 1945. Carroll O’Neill of O’Neill was the signer for Holt County. Numerous meetings followed. In February, 1946, Harry Russell, William Wefso and Vern Sageser were elected to the board of directors. That fall the first government REA loan of $520,000 was approved and contracts let. In 1948 O’Neill was chosen over Spencer as headquarters for the Niobrara Valley Electric Membership Corporation and Ed Wilson of Harlan, Iowa, hired as manager.
Due to the bad winter of 1948-1949 construction was held up until spring, with the first lines energized that August. From 1950 to 1954 additional lines were completed and put in use— and then came the big day, March 17, 1954, when O’Neill began receiving power from the huge Fort Randall dam plant, (which went into operation at 11:30 a.m. on March 15 when President Eisenhower pressed a button in Washington D. C., putting the mighty Missouri to work) piping electric power through the lines built following World War II.
From 1955 until his sudden death in November, 1966, in Albuquerque, on his way home from the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association meeting, Mr. Wilson had supervised the installation of equipment that provided service to approximately 2,500 meters through a 2,000 mile distribution system in Holt, Boyd, Wheeler, Garfield and Knox counties. In March A. L Chantry was installed as the new manager. Since January, 1973, Walter R. Schmidt has been manager.
Since its beginning the Niobrara Valley Corporation has borrowed $4,902,000 to construct 2,173 miles of line to provide service to 3,216 meters. There are 2,402 members as of February 1974 and 25 employees. In spite of the organized resistance brought against J. T. Murry so many years ago, there are many who feel Nebraska p.
Fri-State. Utilities in front of their offices on south side of Douglas Street across the street from present site of c rower. Photo taken about 1927. Courtesy Eileen Donlin – Green. 477 that first honors for the achievement of so tremendous a project should go to him for working so diligently against great odds.
In the summer of 1953 a strange affair called a “wind tunnel” was set up by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on the northeast edge of O’Neill. Used for calibrating instruments, the tunnel accurately gauged the speed of air from 0 to 25 miles per hour. Photographs of the dials on the tunnel’s panel, taken every second, showed the hour, minute and second, as well as the year, month and day, wind was passing through the tunnel. After the tests are completed, said the MIT technician, a study would be made to determine what they mean. Back in 1932 a group of Atkinson businessmen and ranchers raised $610.00 and purchased four acres of land on the edge of town for $200. The remainder of the funds was used for a well and water system. The Electric and Telephone companies built power and communication lines to the site for free. The town’s two lumber yards financed the cost of building materials— new lumber at $33 to $36 per thousand feet totaling $8,000. Construction began in August and the first sale in Atkinson’s new Livestock Auction Market was held on Tuesday,-September 13. E. C. Weller, “unanimously endorsed” to take charge of the facility, had “furnished a prayer and a lot of hard work” to get the barn and yards in operation. But it succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, he was to write later, and rapidly grew into the most prominent sales pavillion in northern Nebraska.
Walter and Carl Grunkermeyer were the auctioneers, Joseph Kokes office manager, Lloyd Parks yard manager and Albert McMindles manager. The lowest prices paid were in 1934, averaging about five cents a pound for calves and yearlings and three cents for butcher cows. The top was reached during the Korean war years when over half a million head were sold annually through the ring for nearly $20,000,000.
A fire in November 1946 burned the original buildings to the ground. Immediately rebuilt, today they are among the finest in the state, seating over 1,000 buyers; while the yards, corrals and sheds will house and care for over 5,000 head of stock. The grounds cover twelve acres. Back in the ‘thirties over 1,100 carloads of cattle, all sandhill raised, were shipped form the yards by rail. Today nearly all go by truck. The largest single week’s sale lasted three days and totaled over 11,000 head of cattle.
In Atkinson, too, more than half a century ago, four “public minded” citizens, Mrs. Fred Swingley, Mrs. S. W. Kelly, Mrs. T. J. Wilbern and Mrs. I. E. Deck, laid the initial plans for the Atkinson Township Library. The library opened in Mrs. Deck’s home, upstairs over what is now the Midlands Furniture Store, and she was the first librarian.
At the start there were few books, but townspeople donated more and the shelves began to fill. In 1926, only four years after the opening of the little library, the Township levied a tax to support it and in January 1927 the first official Library Board meeting was held.
For about thirty years the library had no permanent home and every few years its contents were gathered and moved to a new location. Finally, determined to give the books proper quarters, the Utile Dulci Club undertook a library building project. In May, 1953, a member, Mrs. E. C. Weller, and her husband offered to match, dollar for dollar, any money others donated. By the end of the year the books were in a 25 by 100 foot brick building. A new addition is now in the planning stage. Mrs. D. R. Davis has been librarian for the past quarter century.
Spearheaded by a group of young ladies in the mid-‘forties, $25,000 was raised for the building of Atkinson’s new hospital, which opened in 1952. The need for a clinic was soon apparent and several citizens then offered to loan the money to build one. The need being urgent, while the new building was in the process of construction, the clinic opened in the only space available, a building with the word HATCHERY painted in large letters across its front. In October 1953 the new clinic was formally opened and the hatchery quarters abandoned. Seven years later the clinic was expanded by a new sctructure, larger than the original building. For years St. Patrick’s Day has been loyally and properly observed in O’Neill, the Irish Capital of Nebraska. Annually the “World’s Biggest Shamrock” has filled the town’s main intersection at Fourth and Douglas streets. A parade, mostly green and very Irish, is one highlight of the day. The Irish Dancers are another, doing their lilting steps on the huge green shamrock painted on the pavement. By 1974, when traffic through the main street had grown so heavy as to present a hazard to the shamrock doings, it was decided to move the shamrock one block north of its former site. The shamrock was duly painted on its new location at Fourth and Clay streets on Friday, but that night, in the true spirit of Revolution, a group of Irish patriots of the Shamrock City swung into action and worked like leprechauns to finish painted their shamrock on the original location by 3:30 a.m. Come daylight, TWO of the world’s largest shamrocks greeted the beholders. On Friday evening, as usual, an Irish queen was selected from candidates from Boyd and Holt counties at a Miss Irish Pageant held at the O’Neill high school. The next day thousands of spectators huddled in winter coats, flinching under the biting winds while scantily clad Irish lads and lassies in gay green outfits danced and twirled on the “north” shamrock. That afternoon the “One hundred years of Green” parade, considerably short on floats due to the high winds, twined through the town. The shortage of floats, however, was made up by the addition of some twenty cars carrying politicians (just like old times), as 1974 was an election year for state and national officials. The traditional “Mulligan Stew,” served at the Knights of Columbus Hall, adequately filled the crowds of hungry patriots and visitors. For about twenty years the Irish Dancers have been the Shamrock City’s best ambassadors. Under the instruction of Mrs. Woody (Vivian) Melena, the youngsters faithfully practice their lively dances, some of them driving long distances to take part. So outstanding are their gay presentations, they are invited to perform at prestigious affairs, such as Governor Exon’s Inaugural Ball in Lincoln on January 9, 1975. A total of thirty-two dancers and fourteen substitutes made the trip, which required an overnight stay in Lincoln.
The fact that most of them, caught in the blizzard of January 10, didn’t get home for two or three days, will not diminish the youngster’s happy memories of the night they danced at their Governor’s ball.
O’Neill was the seventh town in the state to be designated an official bicentennial community by the American Revolution Bicentennial Commission. The ceremony took place in May, 1974. A special Bicentennial flag has flown over the city since, while a replica was to be buried in the city’s Time Capsule during its week-long centennial birthday party later in the month.
The big birthday party, May 19 – June 2, featured programs, speeches, games, dancing, contests, burial of the Time Capsule and the publication of the city’s history book, “A Piece of Emerald.” Another anniversary celebrated that same year was the Diamond Jubilee of St. Mary’s Academy. Margaret McGreevy (whose fascinating story 478 has already been related in these pages) was one of two surviving members of the class of 1903 who was privileged to be present at the party. The lovely old lady, a retired teacher and nurse, proudly showed the graduation picture of her class of seven girls.
In Chambers in 1973 another era ended when the last of the town’s cream or produce stations closed its doors. At one time as many as five stations had been active in the village buying cream, eggs and chickens. The first was probably that of Albert Miller, opened in 1885. Mr. Miller hauled the produce to O’Neill by team and wagon, shipped it to eastern markets and deposited the returns in the Holt County Bank there. For years a large metal boiler, rusting down on the outskirts of Chambers, was all that was left of this creamery, which burned down.
Over the years at least twenty men and women ran produce stations in the town. During the extra cold winter of ’35-’36, when the thermometer stayed below zero for more than thirty consecutive days and almost no one came to town, operator George Kelly and some of his friends put in their time shooting the crows that flew over Main Street.
“Chick” Hartranft, another buyer, used to buy in the daytime, then load his truck after he closed for the night and be on the road to the nearest Omaha Cold Storage Company plant while others slept. Vernon Harley, now president of Harley Feed and Fertilizer, Inc., bought produce in Chambers for thirty-one years. When he saw the approaching end of the business he changed over to fertilizer, as irrigation came to the farms roundabout.
The owners of the last station were Mr. and Mrs. Clarence Dammes who had bought a station in 1960. They ran a truck route, picking up cream and eggs— but discontinued buying poultry in 1967 when no dealer would take the last seventy hens they bought and Minnie Dammes had to dress them out herself. Six years later Minnie closed the door on an era that had passed when she locked her station for the last time on March 22, 1973.
On December 30, 1974, the Wally Provost column of the Omaha World- Herald carried a vivid reminder of Holt County’s wilder period in a reference to the ranching days of “Big Bill” Thompson. Quoting R. G. Rockey of Ewing, he wrote: “His tracks were still very fresh around here when I arrived in June, 1914. The old Thompson Ranch is still here and still goes by that name. From what the oldtimers told me he was a rough boy, but there were plenty of his kind here to keep him company. “They used to tell about the fight he had with John Carr from Stafford. This fight took place in Jim Sonich- son’s saloon and was a dandy. Each of them was credited with putting a bottle through the back of the bar. No one ever seemed to know which one won the fight, but after they slowed down it seems each one had friends who crowded in and stopped the fight.
“My father-in-law once traded horses with Bill, who was a real horseman and never asked if the horse was gentle. He only asked it it had been ridden. On the way home (after a trade) Bill had to cross the South Fork River. As he did so a pair of ducks flew up and spooked the horse, which threw Bill off. The horse went back to town and Bill walked home, about 17 miles. There were lots of things went on out at that ranch that would have made good reading in any of Zane Grey’s books.” Another newspaper refers to a long time rural mail carrier, C. E. Walker, who logged 750,000 miles on his route out of Page. At his retirement in 1973, after using up twenty-two cars on his job, he received a safe driving award from the Post Office Department for thirty-one years of accident free driving on his route.
It is interesting to note, too, the changes that have come to the county’s topographical features. There have been many, of course, besides the changing of the land from the barren prairie the first settlers saw to the well-timbered, well-grassed land and alfalfa fields of today. Among the most startling is the fact that a well has taken over the job of keeping water in big Goose Lake. Where once springs fed the lake, now a State Recreational Park, a pumping system is attempting to keep the water level high enough to support the lake’s fish population and carry on the water skiing and boating that have become so popular there.
And then there is, or was, old “Malloy’s Peak.” When first discovered, four towns, O’Neill, Emmet, Atkinson and Stuart, were visible from its lofty top. But time has wrought its inevitable changes. Cattle, roaming the hills, loosened the soil on its steep sides, wind and rain did their work. Today there isn’t even a little hill there.
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