← Before Today: A History of Holt County, Nebraska
the river on the ferry just beyond. After the move Sanders used a new trademark on his flour— a picture of a big badger on every sack and the legend “Badger Roller Mills” underneath. In 1903 C. A. Johnson bought the mill, extended the mill race and replaced the over-shot with a turbine type wheel. This enabled him to generate electricity, which he carried across the river to the town of Butte. While the mill was still at its first location Syrenus Deming, a new settler on the Sandy, on December 23 rode over to the new store that had just been opened beside the mill by a man named Belknap. A post office had been established there and 16 Syrenus not only wanted to get his mail but planned to pick up some fresh cornmeal for Christmas, ground for him from some grain he had left there a few weeks earlier.
After going to the store he was crossing the dam on the way to the mill when his horse slipped and fell into the millpond with him. It was a cold day and as soon as Syrenus and his horse were on land again they headed for home, straight across country. By the time they reached home there was a coating of ice all over the blue, caped army coat Syrenus wore.
Apparently Ross still had an interest in the Sanders Mill, for when Deming had the old carpenter help him build a new house some time later, the price of the cornmeal was figured into the settlement for labor.
The three branches of the Verdigre head on the far east side of Holt County. They are known, of course, as the North, the Middle and the South Branches of the river. On Middle Branch, just inside the Holt-Knox county line, Moses L. Bright in the winter of 1879-80 built a burr mill. The Middle Branch post office was soon afterward established in the mill. In 1881 Charles Finney opened a store nearby, and thereafter the little town of Middle Branch was tucked in around the mill at the foot of the hill, with the creek winding around its eastern edge. The mill, through many improvements, came to be one of the best in the area, where it served its community well until sometime after 1915.
James Ross, the mill builder, built still another mill above the Sanders mill on the Sandy, a little way above his home on the Eagle where he kept the Ray post office. This mill he later moved to the mouth of Beaver Creek, a few miles to the west. The mill seems to have been a slow grinder, slower than most, that is, for the settlers told how Al Willerling, Ross’ brother-in-law, kept a pack of hounds that used to stand around the mill, eating the grain as it trickled from the mill stones. When they got too hungry they went out and killed rabbits while the mill caught up.
Another man later bought the mill, moved it over between the Keya Paha and Fairfax and rigged it to run from a windmill. Whether it ground any faster is not reported.
There may have been other flour mills at O’Neill but the one which left a record behind it was built and operated by the Gabriel Bazelman family. The Bazelmans came to O’Neill in 1882 and settled on a farm near Atkinson. After they gave up farming they built the mill just south of O’Neill on the Elkhorn, a pictur- George Blake, carpenter, helped build the Atkinson mill. Mr. Blake was also a fine ball player, a member of the town band and an early city councilman. esque and beautiful setting for a pond, mill race and water wheel. The Bazelmans turned out a product so fine that when people wanted to compliment something they said, “This is as good as flour from Bazelman’s mill.” When fire destroyed the entire mill, Grandma Bazel-man sold the family jewels she had brought with her from Belgium and purchased enough lumber to start a lumber business. This grew into a large and profitable business— until it, too, fell victim to a devastating fire. There was also an important mill at Atkinson, on the Elkhorn. It was built by a Frenchman, James Dequasie, in The Little House On The Chapter Four 1884. His natural earth dam, three hundred feet long with a seven foot head, was located at the end of Main Street. Ed Simmons, George Blake and Danford Taylor were the carpenters who put up the mill house. Taylor, Atkinson’s first mayor and a miller by trade, ran the mill.
The Atkinson area was soon producing so much wheat that the old- fashioned millstones could no longer keep up with the trade. Improved machinery was installed but the dam still presented a problem as it too often broke in the wintertime. This was overcome by moving the dam upstream about a mile and digging a millrace from the pond to the mill. Dan Murphy and Frank Rhubey then bought the mill and used it to furnish electricity to the town, as well as to grind its grain. In December, 1908, Joseph Skrdla and his sons bought the old mill and continued to enlarge and improve it during the next twelve years. In 1920 they sold it to three young men, Fillmore, Richardson and Williams, who installed a new 150 horsepower Diesel light plant across the mill stream and used the old mill only for milling on a large scale. In the early thirties the light plant was sold to the Interstate Power Company and the mill to Jack McAl-lister, who tore it down and sold the parts for junk. A home was built on the site and the old mill, which had stood as a landmark for nearly fifty years, was no more.
In pioneer times, when day to day survival was a struggle for most settlers, mothers made use of nearly everything that came to hand. Consequently in many households the family underwear had originally been fifty pound white muslin flour sacks. Most housewives tried to wash or bleach out the designs and printing on the sacks— often with a noted lack of success. On a windy day it was not unusual for a child at school to have her skirts blown high enough to expose the lifelike badger or other pictured trademark emblazoned across the seat of her modest “drawers.” Prairie Although the Indians had been moved onto reservations north of the Niobrara by the time settlers began coming into Holt County in goodly numbers, they still came frequently to the land that had so lately been theirs to roam at will. Roy Waring remembered that, when he was a boy in the mid-eighties, Indians still passed his home on the Middle Branch in the fall, going south to visit other Indians, and north again in the spring, returning home. One fall, after the band had passed, the Warings saw what appeared to be a body wrapped in buckskin and tied to the top of the tallest tree on the stream. After the Indians passed by on their return trip, Roy went to look, and sure enough the bundle was gone. “We figured they had left the body in the tree for the winter,” Roy said, “then picked it up on their way back to take it home for burial.” 17 Numerous earth burials have also been found on the Nebraska prairies. The Demings, up in the northern part of the county, found two such graves on their homestead. Each held two bodies and in both cases the smaller of the two skeletons had a crushed skull, leading to the conclusion that, after the death of the male, his wife was killed and buried with him. The skull of one of the men showed knife marks left at his scalping. The other had a lead ball in his abdomen. One grave contained five magnificent catlinite pip * es.
Early homesteaders found a wealth of Indian artifacts in the county: trader beads, mostly blue and white; arrow heads, spear points, pipes, awls, gravers, hide scrapers; bone, flint and agate knives. Children brought these mementos home by the boxfull and nearly every soddy and shack had a fine collection.
When the John Connelly family settled on the Niobrara below the Red Bird they found themselves in the midst of the Indians’ favorite kin- nikinic patch. Every fall for several years the former owners came back, to camp for a few weeks near the Connelly home while they gathered the leaves and bark of the sumac-like shrub, which they powdered and smoked in their stone pipes.
During these visits the white children learned quite a few Indian words from the Indian children they played with. One day, while the squaws were at the house, visiting and trading with Mrs. Connelly, the Connelly pigs got into the pile of kinnikinic the Indian women had collected. Little Carl then came running in to report “The ku-kush (pigs) are in the kinnikinic.” The squaws rushed out to drive the pigs away, then came back smiling broadly and pointing to Carl, letting his mother know what a smart boy he was.
There were a few Indian scares during that early period but most were false alarms; for the Indians, although they frequently visited the homes of the whites, were usually friendly and, in most cases, only wanted food. This didn’t keep the settlers, many of them lately come from eastern states, from being uneasy, as indicated by the following story: “One day when Mrs. Leopold Elrich, her two children and a neighbor woman were alone a band of Indians came to the house to ask for something to eat. Mrs. Elrich gave them all the bread she had, and when they wanted more she and her neighbor baked pancakes for them until they were full. But all the while the two women wore their sunbonnets so the Indians would not see their lovely long hair and scalp them.
For newcomers to the Nebraska prairie, shelter was the first consideration. On the few wooded streams in the county they found timber for log cabins, but sod houses and dugouts were the customary housing for most of the rest. For added warmth in winter log and frame shacks were well banked. “Banking” was done by stacking a few layers of sod against the base of the house, or throwing dirt up against the walls to a height of two or three feet. Sven Lofquist, who built a dugout, was told by earlier settlers that such dwellings did not need banking. Later he built a frame lean-to onto the front of the dugout for a kitchen. When winter came the wind whistled through the boards of the lean-to and it was a frigid place. By then the ground was frozen, so the Lofquist boys hauled manure from the barn and banked the house in good shape. The lean-to was cozy warm after that but the smell inside was terrible, especially on warm winter days.
Fuel and water came next in importance. Again, except for those along the streams, these commodities were hard to come by. Many a settler hauled water from a stream or a neighbor’s well, sometimes from a distance of several miles. As soon as he could he dug a well of his own. Bored wells came later, but in the beginning they had to be dug by hand, often to a depth of a good many feet. A bucket and windlass furnished the means of hoisting the earth, and later the water, from the pit. Since the earth in that part of the country caved easily, every well shaft had to be curbed as it was dug. Even so, well digging was dangerous and a few settlers lost their lives in “cave-ins,” but eventually most had water in their dooryards. However, since more water was needed at the barns for livestock than at the house, most wells were dug near the barn and the mother and children carried water to the house. In time, as the homesteaders prospered, they erected windmills above their wells, doing away with the hard labor of drawing up heavy water buckets by hand.
Once dug, most wells needed little further attention for long periods, but it was not so with fuel in this treeless land. That was always both a daily and a seasonal problem. Few settlers burned coal, even after the coming of the railroad made it possible, partly because they could not afford it, partly because it was too heavy to haul any distance from town. At first some made the long haul to the Niobrara or one of its tributaries for loads of wood. But most helped themselves to the two kinds of fuel that were most readily available, chips and grass.
The great herds of buffalo that had so lately roamed the country had left an abundance of chips behind them. As cattle came into the area in ever increasing numbers, they, too, provided cheap fuel. Driven by necessity the people, especially the women who had sworn they would never be caught handling such articles, soon came to gather and burn the chips, and to think little of it.
Even though well-dried cowchips were clean, easy to handle and made quick, hot fires, they involved a good deal of work. First, they had to be picked off the prairies where they “grew.” Often whole families rode off in their wagons to gather the chips in sacks or baskets, then carry them to the wagon. When they had a load they hauled them home and stacked them, either inside a shed or in properly built, rainshedding piles near the kitchen door. Last of all they had to be carried into the house, tub after tub of them, for they burned out quickly— and left almost their original bulk in ashes, which in turn had to be carried out. In the average family, one member seemed to be always on the way in with a tub of chips while another was on the way out with a bucket of ashes.
Provident families picked enough chips in the fall to last a year, or at least through the winter. Those who tried picking them as needed, a day’s supply at a time, were apt to go hungry and cold during a rainy spell, or after a heavy snow storm. Wet cowchips will not burn.
Hay or grass seems to have been a popular fuel in Holt County, judging by the many families who gave detailed accounts of the old “hay burners” used in their pioneer homes. The invention of this appliance was also a child of that fertile mother, Necessity. There was more grass than anything else on the endless prairies. Some of it, long, heavy and coarse, twisted into thick rolls or packed into containers, made good fires and left few ashes. To utilize this abundant fuel, someone fashioned a hay burner, a topless container shaped like a washboiler, which fitted over the two front lids of the customary four- or six-lidded iron cookstove. Before long many a hardware merchant or blacksmith in the little frontier towns was making hay burners by the hundreds; for each householder had to have at least two, *The Demings gave the pipes to the Nebraska State Historical Society in Lincoln, where they may be seen. 18 Ninety-Year-Old Fred Dobrovolny demonstrating how to make hay twists like the ones they burned when he was a boy. morning.
Butcher hogs in those days were fat and hefty, three hundred pounds and up. A neighbor or two usually came to help, and by the time they arrived the water was hot and the pig, or pigs, ready for slaughter. By the time the pig had squealed his last the boiling water was in the barrel, below the barn rafter, tripod or upended wagon tongue to which the singletree was fastened. The pig’s hind feet were fastened to the singletree and the carcass hoisted into the hot water and scalded until the hair slipped. The hanging carcass was scraped, opened, cleaned and cut up. The hams and shoulders were trimmed for curing, the ribs cut out and the sides trimmed for bacon, and all the “trimmings” ground up for sausage. The fat, or lard, cut into small cubes, went into the rendering kettle. The feet were cleaned and pickled, the head became “head cheese” or and a half dozen or more was better. After the hay was packed into the three feet deep receptacle as tightly as possible, (a man stomping it down could best pack it in, but children jumping up and down on it could do a fair job) the front lids were removed from the stove and the burner turned upside down over the opening. Once set afire, the hay burned steadily for an hour or so, turning the tin container red-hot. When the glow began to fade it was time to remove the first burner and replace it with another.
In most families it was the children’s evening chore to carry the burners to the barn or hay pile, pack them full and carry them back to the kitchen, ready for the next day’s use. In homes where hay burners were not used, a pile of hay was carried into the kitchen, where the family spent the hour after supper twisting the long bluestem into tight “figure eights,” which were then burned like wood. After corn fields became extensive enough to produce an abundance of corn, the cobs replaced both chips and hay as fuel, although most housewives who burned them, and the children who picked them, preferred nice, clean cow chips to cobs salvaged from the muck of an old-time pig pen. During the worst years of the hard nineties, when corn barely brought ten cents a bushel on the market, many families burned ear corn.
Although it meant a great deal of hard labor, the first settlers almost literally lived off the land. Game was abundant. Rabbits, both jack and cottontail, were everywhere and they made “good eating.” Prairie chickens, *Mrs. Roger (Marjorie) Rosenkrans, the daughter ducks and geese were plentiful in their seasons. Little patches of corn and wheat provided meal and nearly everyone had a garden. Besides fresh vegetables in the summer, the homesteaders stored potatoes and other root crops, as well as pumpkins, squash and cabbage, in caves and cellars.
Housewives dried sacksfull of sweetcorn, and made hominy from ripened corn by soaking the kernels in lye water until the hulls came off. Most families made a barrel of sauerkraut in the fall, and nearly all the women made their own soap from waste fat, lye and water. In many cases they also made their own lye from ashes. For pies and jams they gathered buffalo berries, choke cherries, wild gooseberries, plums and grapes along the streams and sand-cherries from the hills. There was little left to buy except candles or coaloil, salt, coffee and sugar.
Most families had milk cows and, as soon as they raised some corn to feed them, a few pigs. After the railroad came through, the sale of butter, cream and pigs brought in a little cash. With the disappearance of most of the wild game, each family butchered pigs for meat. Butchering was an all day affair, not counting the time it took to get ready for it. On the preceding day the family pumped water enough to fill a huge outside kettle, or tubs and wash- boilers to put on the kitchen stove. Butcher knives were sharpened on whetstones or a grindstone. A single-tree, rope and pulley were made ready for hoisting the pig in and out of the scalding barrel. Fuel was gathered and fires laid ready for of Fred & Blanche Gannon-Lindberg was reared on the farm 20 miles northeast of O’Neill. scrapple. Most families used the heart, liver, brains and kidneys. The intestines were cleaned and used for “casings” for the sausage. Each neighbor went home with a chunk of liver and some tenderloin. When he butchered he, too, paid his helpers back in kind.
The whole family pitched in and helped on butchering day. The kids fetched and carried, or turned the sausage grinder. It was hard, greasy work— but no meat ever tasted better than that homemade sausage, or those spicy, well-smoked, home cured hams.
When Marjorie Rosenkrans* wrote One type of hay burner, displayed by Frank and Hattie Pierce, with their modern electric range in background. Courtesy Lewine Bligh, Alliance. 19 on the Sire farm about 1915. Courtesy Walter Sire. Home butchering her delightful memories of “Home-life” as she knew it, conditions had improved somewhat. Even so, neither the children nor their elders “had it easy.” Wrote Marjorie: Our earliest memories of home are of a frame iron had been properly cleaned. There was no refrigeration, of course, except for the few families who were fortunate enough to put up ice, which would last most of the summer in an ice house. Where there was no ice folks carried the day’s supply of milk and butter to the cellar, or set it in a pail, tied a rope to the handle and let it down into the well. Margarine was almost unheard of, and if it was mentioned it was in tones which caused us to believe it was hardly fit to eat. It looked like lard, as a state law forbid the manufacturer to color it to look like butter. So we churned our own butter. This had to be done every week in warm weather, as the butter would become rancid without refrigeration. Ours was a dasher churn that held a gallon or more of cream. You guessed it! The kids did the churning.
In the fall of the year butter was always hard to churn. Our mother said it was because we hadn’t had a fresh cow in awhile, and that as soon as we did it would churn faster. We kept the cream in the cellar until time to churn, but on hot summer days it soon got too warm to churn well. The remedy was to carry cold water from the well and set the churn in it to cool the cream, and finally the butter would house without electricity or water, and almost completely lacking in closets and cupboards. The well was a considerable distance from the house and all the water had to be hand pumped and carried in— and also carried out because there were no drains.
We well remember carrying water in gallon syrup pails when we were too small to carry a larger pail. We children of yesteryear had our fill of carrying. We carried in wood or cobs and carried out the slops and ashes. All the cooking was done with fire wood. On hot summer days the heat in the kitchen was almost unbearable because of the fire in the stove for cooking and canning— and there was a lot of that with large families. On wash day the boiler went on the stove early in the morning to heat the water, and our mother worked long hours over the scrub board. Later there was the hand- or foot-powered machines for washing clothes and, as you might well guess, the children worked these machines.
If wood was in short supply we burned cobs from the hog pen. The day we ironed we started firing the kitchen range early in the morning, and fired it every few minutes until we were done. How well we remember the many trips from the stove to the ironing board, and back again, for a hot iron. Most homes had a set of three irons to use in rotation. If we covered the irons on the stove with an upside down iron skillet, they heated faster. We always ran the iron over a newspaper to remove any soot from the fire, and a white shirt or tablecloth would tell us whether the Cutting Ice at Inman on Judd Lake. Left to right: Jim Hopkins, Art Goree, Cleve Roe, Bob Conard and unknown. Courtesy Elwin Smith. Elevating Ice into Ice House. Courtesy Elwin Smith. 20 “come.” When the buttermilk was drained off the family would come with their glasses to get a drink of this good beverage. That took care of the buttermilk, but Mother still had to wash the butter until all the milk was out, then work in salt and rush the finished product to the coolest spot in the cellar. But sometimes we ran into trouble there, too— tiny little brown ants that could ruin the butter, or a can of cream unless special precautions were taken. Nearly all bread was home-baked, so it was a rare treat when someone bought a loaf of bakery bread. The kitchen got so hot on the afternoons we baked, which was usually twice a week. We stored the loaves under clean dish towels or in a bread drawer, but by the time we got to the last loaf it was dry enough to last much longer than a freshly baked loaf. Having fresh baked bread and new churned butter on the same day was a real treat. And if we ran out of bread before we could bake again it was common to substitute biscuits, muffins or cornbread, and pancakes for breakfast.
The cows had to be milked by hand, and the more family members there were to help, the faster it went. We carried the milk from the barn to the hand operated cream separator at the house, then we carried the skim milk back to the barn to feed the pigs and calves. We handled the cream tenderly because that filled can, along with the extra eggs, had to buy the groceries and help meet other living expenses. Washing the cream separator was an everyday job, the same as doing the family dishes. The only baths we ever really enjoyed were the ones taken in a swimming hole somewhere. For all the others we had to carry all the water to the house, and carry all the fuel to heat it. We used a round laundry tub for the baths and I still marvel at how we managed to wind ourselves small enough to sit in that tub, which was located close beside the kitchen stove.
It took quite a while to process all the members of the family through that tub on Saturday nights. Naturally, this was the time when visitors were least welcome, because most callers came to the kitchen door. We put on our pajamas or nighties when we got out of the tub— and then, of course, no one wanted to carry the dirty bath water back outside. So we usually left it for morning, and we have a few memories of disasters when some one of us forgot about that tub of water waiting beside the stove and accidentally took the second plunge. As I remember it, that extra bath was very cold, and besides, I had my clean clothes on— and they were meant to be worn for most of the following week.
Flies were another plague of the early days. The warmth of the house and the smell of food attracted them. We hung fly ribbons from the ceiling and even used the Daisy Fly Killers that poisoned the varmints. Later we bought fly sprays and sprayed them early in the mornings. But, in spite of all that, before the day was over we usually had to arm ourselves with towels and drive them out of the house, everyone swishing and flapping his towel as we converged on the door. And even then it seemed that the flies gained on us until the first hard freeze put an end to them.
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