Full Tide Chapter Twenty-Two The flood of immigration to Holt County was at full tide during the 1880’s. The incoming settlers still came first to O’Neill, hoping to locate as near the county seat as possible. From there they fanned out to find the nearest unoccupied lands, or to take claims near to friends or relatives who had already located. There were some, too, who came to go into business in the town, or to practice medicine or law, or to teach in the schools. By the end of 1881 two railroads had reached O’Neill, a bank had been established and a physician (a Dr. Benner) was living in the town. Among the early comers in 1880 was Edwin Hershiser, who opened a 196 drug store in O’Neill. Ed, Holt County’s fifth sheriff, was in office during the blizzard of ’88 and at the time Kid Wade was lynched by the Vigilantes in ’84. He later joined the gold rush to Alaska, then moved his family to Oregon. His parents and five of his nine brothers and sisters followed him to O’Neill in 1890.
Ed’s brother, Elias J. Hershiser, married Jennie Storts, became the father of two sons and lived out his life in O’Neill. Another brother, Levi, married Lily Axelson, who died at the birth of their son, Clyde. After serving in the Spanish American War, Levi homesteaded twenty miles southwest of O’Neill. Clyde, raised by his Hershiser grandparents, went off to war in 1918, returned and married Jennie Wayman and ranched in the area until his death in 1941.
Jennie Hershiser remained on the ranch with her two sons. When Floyd joined the Navy in World War II she and Francis ran the ranch until he, too, was drafted for war (the Korean), which forced her to sell out.
To O’Neill in 1882 came Owen Evans Davidson, his wife Rebecca and their eight children. Mr. Davidson, born and raised in Coshocton County, Ohio, married Rebecca Hilligas in 1861. Shortly afterward they moved to Indiana, where he joined the Indian Volunteer Infantry and served through the war between the states. In 1875 the family moved to Hamilton County, Nebraska, and then on to O’Neill where two more children were born. The original Davidson home, with its many additions, still stands between the C. and N.W. and the Burlington railroad tracks. Mrs. Davidson and her daughters ran a boarding house in the home, with a bunk house at the rear of the lot for the accommodation of train crews, ranchers shipping livestock and farmers hauling hay to O’Neill for the market. Rebecca Davidson’s seven daughters and three sons grew up in the big house and, one by one, married and set up homes of their own. Rebecca was to know much sorrow during her long and busy life in O’Neill. Mary Elizabeth, the eldest daughter, married Alonzo Bice and had two children before she was killed by lightning in 1891 at her home in O’Neill. Grandma Davidson at once took the two litle ones into her home. The little girl died and the father later came for the boy. Sarah, the second daughter, married Emil Sniggs, the town’s young blacksmith, and died in 1888, leaving a baby girl. Grandma Davidson took her in, too.
A third daughter died of cancer while still a young woman. Rose Ellen, another daughter, also died of cancer. Daisy Jane, the sixth daughter, died during the flu epidemic of 1918, leaving her daughter to Grandma Davidson’s care. Dorothy, youngest of the Davidson girls, died in childbirth, leaving a small son and daughter. Mrs. Davidson took them in, too. Helping her care for the motherless children through the years, and caring for her mother in her old age, was Dora, the fourth Davidson daughter, who never married. Of the three Davidson sons only James Edgar, born in 1871, remained in O’Neill. After serving an apprenticeship as a sheet metal worker and pipe fitter under John J. McCaf-ferty, James married Anna Hansen in 1892. His mother gave the newly weds two lots just west of the big house, and there they set up housekeeping in a two-room house. In 1901 Jim opened his own shop in a small frame building located on the lot where the Royal Theater now stands— and so began the first plumbing business in the city of O’Neill. Jim and Anna became the parents of eleven children, eight sons and three daughters, all delivered in the home by Grandma Davidson. Money was scarce, those first years, but a big garden and a milk cow supplied the table, not only for the family but for many visitors. As in most big families, clothing was handed down to the next younger. As the family increased the boys moved into a tent in the yard in the spring but, of necessity, back into the house in the fall— until later additions to the original two rooms expanded the house to fit the family. Jim Davidson was an avid sportsman and fishing was his favorite hobby. But then all of the family enjoyed sports and many a lively neighborhood ball game went on in the vacant lots between the depots. Original Plumbing Shop, James Davidson and Sons, O’Neill. James Davidson, Sr. in doorway, John and James Davidson, Jr., on right Eber Leek, helper. Picture taken in 1910. Courtesy Edith Davidson. To further his love of fishing, Jim bought one of the first cars in O’Neill, a vehicle with a one and a half horsepower motor and bicycle type wheels. When it didn’t prove out on the sandhill roads around town, he worked the motor over, “souping” up the horsepower to make a rig that would transport him on his fishing trips.
Three of Jim and Anna’s sons, John, Ralph and Clyde, served their country in World War I. Two other sons, Frank and Owen, and three grandsons served in World War II. In 1951 Anna was honored as the Auxiliary Mother of Nebraska for having the largest number of descendants (31) in American Legion and Auxiliary chapters in the United States.
All of Jim’s sons and one grandson were trained in the Davidson shop in plumbing, heating and sheet metal work. Seven of them followed the trade. Mr. Davidson died in 1942, leaving his oldest son, John, as active manager of the James Davidson and Sons firm. In 1953 John became sole owner. With his wife, the former Edith J. Sexsmith, he operated the firm until his death in 1971.
The original shop building was moved to its present location on East Douglas Street in 1914. When the new brick and tile shop was erected the old building was moved to the back of the lot for stprage. The business, begun in 1901, is now, three quarters of a century later, probably the oldest retail firm in O’Neill, and possibly in Holt County. Edith Davidson is the capable operator.
Samuel and Theresa Burge and their five children arrived in O’Neill about 1883, and their two oldest sons, Edgar and Arthur, spent the rest of their lives in or near the town. Ed 197 married Martha Sargent in 1912 and followed the carpenter trade, helping to build the courthouse, post office and the Catholic church, as well as many homes, some still standing and occupied. He was the father of four daughters.
Arthur married Bessie Brittell in 1909 and farmed southwest of town. Of their eight children a son, Floyd, was killed in Germany in 1945 while serving in Patton’s Third Army. Arthur and Bessie started housekeeping with a table, six chairs, a kitchen cabinet, a cupboard, a bed, a dresser and a cook stove, the last a wedding present. The total cost of the other pieces listed was $37.00.
They drove a team and buggy until 1918, when they bought a Dorf car. Soon afterward the Burges and some friends who owned a Studebaker coupe headed for Owanka, South Dakota to visit a former neighbor. Above the border, where the roads were little more than trails and the country was high and dry, the Studebaker ran low on water. They stopped at the first isolated farm house they came to and asked for water, only to learn that the family hauled all their water and had none to spare for a new-fangled pleasure vehicle. They made it only to Rosebud, a hundred and forty miles or so, the first day.
Mrs. Burge recalled, that the favorite entertainment in her youth seemed to be “surprise” parties, held at the homes of people who didn’t know anyone was coming until the “company” drove in. And it was surprising, she said, how many people would come for miles around to such a party.
By the mid-‘eighties O’Neill had a fine new business, a creamery, that needed the milk produced by at least 500 cows. The ubiquitous Patrick Fahy, still very much in business in O’Neill, was its president and one of its directors. A lumber yard had also been established, and two banks and two hotels. There were four doctors, four attorneys and one dentist, and the people were beginning to support a move to build a courthouse. A movement was also under way to effect the removal of the United States land office from distant Nio-brara to the county seat of Holt. As the population burgeoned some of the more prominent townspeople began to insist on “sanitation,” including the removal of hog pens from the downtown area and the abatement of other public nuisances. In September 1885 the county held its first fair at O’Neill and in June, 1886, the new courthouse was finished. The building and its furnishings had cost $18,000. New residents in the city Corner of old First National Bank about 1895. Ed Gallagher at the right on the steps. Jimmie O’Donnell on left. The J. P. Mann clothing store awning shows on the left. Clay Johnson Collection. Interior of the J. P. Mann Mercantile Company. Joe Mann on the left. J. P. behind counter. Clay Johnson Collection. The J. P. Mann Clothing Store about 1900. Clay Johnson Collection. 198 were the Gallagher, Mann, Gatz and McManus families.
Ed F. Gallagher and Mary Mann had known each other in Lafayette County, Wisconsin, before coming to O’Neill. John and Joe Mann, Mary’s brothers, established the J. P. Mann Mercantile Company, a prominent store in the town for the next quarter century and more. Their father, John Mann, opened a harness shop nearby and operated it for years. Ed Gallagher went into the lumber business with his brother-in-law, T. F. Birmingham; the partners later bought the First National Bank of O’Neill. Still later, Gallagher established banks in Atkinson, Emmet and Inman. He also served his town as mayor from May, 1900 through April, 1903, and again from May, 1906 through April, 1909. Ed Gallagher and Mary Mann were married in 1889. Their son Edward, born in 1892, grew up and went to work in his father’s bank. By 1941 he had assumed the presidency, an office he held until his retirement in 1962. He and his wife still own the Picadilly Ranch, south of Page, and Mr. Gallagher remembes life in O’Neill as “very pleasant in the early days.” Fred Gatz, born in Baden, Germany, in 1852, arrived in Baltimore at age seventeen. An uncle there taught him the butcher trade and by 1880 he was operating his own meat market in Columbus, Nebraska, where he married Elizabeth Engel Yonker, a young widow. With her little daughter, Elizabeth had come from Ohio to live with her parents, the Henry Engels, manufacturers in Columbus of Majestic Ranges, for many years the “best seller” in kitchen stoves. Their daughter, Velontean (Tena) Gatz, was born in 1882 and two years later the family came on to O’Neill, where Fred established a meat market and built the Western Hotel next door to it. He then leased the hotel to Wes Evans and loaned him $500 to buy furniture for it.
The Gatz second child, Freddie, as well as several other children in the community, died from the administration of the new diphtheria antitoxin. Another son died in early childhood. A third son, William, did his part in World War I, married, and operated a tavern in O’Neill for many years. His wife, the former Anna Welch, still lives in O’Neill. Edward Gatz, who married Mabel Morton, was employed until his death in 1936 in the Gilligan and Stout drug store. Back in the early days Fred and his sons put up river ice, storing it in a big icehouse back of the meat market and hotel. Beside supplying both those institutions, they sold ice to O’Neill residents in the summers. Clinton “Boy” Gatz continued the ice business after his father retired, carrying on until mechanical refrigeration put him out of business. He then obtained a beer distributorship and was a partner in the Ford garage. “Boy” died in 1972. His widow Marie still lives in the family home in O’Neill.
Tena, now past ninety years of age and the only living member of Fred Gotz’ family, remembers the blizzard of ’88. The family lived upstairs over the meat market at the time and quite a number of country people, stranded in town by the storm, slept on the floor at their place.
When T. V. Golden built his new Golden Hotel, Wes Evans took it over and the Gatz family moved into the Western and ran it until the Behas bought it. They then moved into a new home of their own, a big two-story house on Fremont Street. There, in December 1904, Tena married Fred G. Clift. Fred ran a clothing and dry goods store just across the street from the Western Hotel and their wedding in the new house was one of the main social events of the year. There was a mighty abundance of food and a dance at the old Opera House that lasted until the bride and groom boarded the train for Omaha at three o’clock in the morning.
On the same train that night was Mr. Pat Hagerty of the Elkhorn Valley Bank. The next morning at breakfast in their hotel the newly weds read an account in the paper of the closing of the bank and the absconding of the bankers, Hagerty and Bernard Mc- Greevy. All of Fred Clift’s money had been in the bank. Except for his store they were penniless.
The World-Herald of December 17, 1904, stated that “After years of hard and honest labor, two respected Holt County men are fugitives from justice. Reckless banking methods are alleged to be the cause of their downfall and a reward of $800 is offered for their capture . . . Depositors have been ruined and homes wrecked . . . The Elkhorn Valley Bank is ruined beyond repair.” Hagerty was seventy at the time and had spent thirty of those years in O’Neill. His name had long been a synonym for honesty and square dealing and citizens of the county were astounded when the vault was opened and a cash balance of ten cents, one lone dime, was all that remained. Mr. McGreevy had been treasurer of the school district and of the city of O’Neill. To protect those funds he had left a mortgage on his property worth $1,300.
There are differences of opinion as to the real causes of the bank’s failure. Perhaps it was due in part, as some thought, to the fact that too many of the 183 depositors would not, or could not, pay off their loans. Of a certainty its closing left many of them in a “piteous condition.” Chief among these was the aged Mary Sullivan. Years before, when the Holt County bank failed, she had lost all her savings. Pluckily she had begun all over again, washing and scrubbing, principally in the McGreevy home, to save for her old age. Dollar by dollar, while living on a mere pittance, she deposited the money she earned in the Elkhorn Valley Bank. No doubt the bank’s failure was far more disastrous for her than for Mrs. Corrigan, who lost over $4000.
Many lodges and churches, as well as the Golden Irrigation District, lost their funds in the crash. The bank examiners report read as follows: Assets – Bills Receivable $32,147.12 Overdrafts 1,598.83 Due from other banks 12,102.76 Cash .10 Checks 21.16 Banking house and furniture 5,000.00 Total 40,377.43 Liabilities and Deposits 53,781.28 Bills Payable 2,500.00 Unpaid drafts 206.67 Total 56,481.95 Of the $45,000 in notes the books showed should be on hand, only $25,000 were found, and many of those were valueless. In the end the depositors received about forty cents on the dollar for the money they lost. Hardest for O’Neillites to understand was how Mr. Hagerty, knowing that he was leaving forever within a few hours, could let Joe Horisky, grocery-man, in after the bank closed and take his deposit. Robbery at the point of a gun could have been no worse. Rumor said that the two men had fled to South America. George Jones recorded that he, while waiting in Seattle during World War I for a boat to take him to Fort Worden, visited a former O’Neill business man, Albert Newell, who told him that while walking in the suburbs of Seattle he passed a fine home on the corner of a block. A man, hoeing in his garden there, looked familiar to him, but the man, looking up, turned at once and went into the house. Newell walked on around the corner and Mrs.
Hagerty came out, he said, and begged him not to tell that he had seen her husband. At any rate neither man was ever tried or convicted although, according to Jones, Mc-Greevy’s body was eventually brought 199 back to O’Neill for burial.
Twenty-six-year-old Patrick J. Mc-Manus came from Wisconsin to O’Neill in 1885. He first worked in the John Mann mercantile store, then established his own general store at the corner of Fourth and Everett Streets. His brother, John P. followed from Wisconsin the next year, and three or four years later the parents, Patrick and Ellen McManus and two daughters, Mayme and Susan, joined them.
Patrick J. never married. Through the years his sister Mayme and a nephew, John McManus, assisted him in his store, one of the finest in the county. In 1887 his brother John married Margaret McKenna, daughter of John and May McKenna, former lowans. In 1907 Susie McManus married the groceryman, Joe Horisky, whose store stood on the corner of Fourth and Douglas until the Golden Hotel was built there in 1910. The store was then moved across the street to the south. Three of John’s nine children, Hugh, Anna and Genevieve, worked in the store until Susie Horisky closed it in the early thirties. All of the early McManus family are buried in old Calvary Cemetery.
Between 1885 and 1887 the town boomed. The O’Neill Roler Mills, started in 1885, were completed and ready for operation by October, 1886, having “been fired up for several days but have done no grinding as yet, owing to a scarcity of water.” The ill-fated Elkhorn Valley Bank was established by O’Neill’s first merchant, Pat Hagerty: and the Frontier for April 12, 1887, rejoiced over the fact that the federal government had decided to move the U. S. Land Office to O’Neill. The same issue, however, deplored the condition of the city’s streets as follows: “Mud yachts have been abandoned, and by carrying a board and a scoop shovel people are enabled to get along the streets with comparative ease.” In 1887 two young attorneys came to O’Neill to practice their professions. Both of these men, James Joseph Harrington and Robert R. Dickson, have been dealt with in a previous chapter. Both added much to the social and business life of the young city in which they spent their lives. As the year of 1887 rounded to a close two new industries came to O’Neill, a Butter and Egg company and a cigar factory. The next year John A. Harmon, a future O’Neill attorney and the father of another one, came to the thriving city on the Elkhorn. John, born in Kent County, Michigan, in 1863, went to high school in Iowa, where one of his teachers was Clarence D. Clark, later a U. S. Senator from Wyoming.
John’s uncle, Gus Doyle, had located in O’Neill, so the young man came to visit him— just in time to experience the blizzard of ’88, during which his cousin, Kathleen Doyle, was born. John homesteaded southwest of town, then decided to take up teaching as a way to make a living while proving up on his land. To obtain his teaching certificate he took an oral examination while riding in a buggy with the County Superintendent of Schools. One of his first pupils was Henry Grady, later to be Holt County’s sheriff and postmaster at O’Neill. At a meeting held to name the Township in which O’Neill was located, John spoke up. “Since this is an Irish settlement what name could be more appropriate than that of the great Irish statesman, Henry Grattan?” he asked. While waiting to prove up, he worked for awhile in the County Clerk’s office, then sold his claim and returned to Michigan to obtain his law degree from Ann Arbor University. Grover Cleveland was running for his second term as president at the time and John invited him to speak at P J McManus Store. From left: P. J. McManus, Mary (Mayme) McManus, Susie (McManus) Horisky, Barney Welton, Jake Pfund, Mr. Kline Picture is not dated but there is a drinking fountain and horse trough in right foreground, to the back of the building (right) is the city fire hall, topped by the fire bell. When the hall was later torn down the bell was turned upside- down and used for watering horses. Clay Johnson Collection. 200 Ann Arbor. He did, and as a result offered the young attorney the Territorial Governorship of Alaska. But John preferred the position of Registrar of the U. S. Land Office at O’Neill, where he served until the Republicans took over in 1898. He then took up his private law practice in O’Neill, where he was elected mayor for the 1899-1900 term of office.
In January 1901 he married Margaret C. Mclaughlin and the following November was elected Clerk of the District Court, the first Democrat ever to be elected to that office. He served eight terms— and remained on good terms with all his Republican opponents, John Skirving of O’Neill, J. N. Sturdevant of Atkinson, L. E. Skidmore of Ewing and Charlie Hall (sheriff) of O’Neill. It is even said that he and Lew Skidmore campaigned together, making the rounds of the county in the same buggy and enjoying it.
After leaving office in 1918 John was appointed to serve as sheriff of Holt County during the recount of ballots in the Grady-Duffy election dispute over that office. As an attorney he drew up many wills for Holt County residents— and not one was ever broken by litigation. A popular toastmaster and after dinner speaker, he was often called on to talk at gatherings and Old Settlers picnics. He died in 1929 and is buried in Calvary Cemetery.
John’s wife, Margaret, was the daughter of a Fenian who joined General O’Neill’s “Invasion of Canada,” in 1866, and later joined one of his colonies bound for O’Neill. The family savings of $700 were in a trunk that were lost or stolen on the way. Other Irish folk helped them out and they completed the trip to Wisner, then came on by ox team to the Elkhorn. Margaret never forgot the sight of the wide, high waters of the flooding river, that spring. One of her sisters, Miss Mary, became a type setter for the Holt County Independent and, later, the long time librarian for the Grattan Township Library.
Margaret went to country school, then back to Minneapolis to high school, and finally to Clemmon’s Normal, now Midland College at Fremont, where she earned her teacher’s certificate. Until her marriage she taught school in Holt County and worked in the Photo Shop of O’Neill dentist, Dr. Corbett. Afterward, she raised her two children and served as Deputy Clerk of the District Court of the county.
John and Margaret’s son Emmet was the second Harmon to practice law in O’Neill. Born in 1903, he kept busy during his youthful years as a delivery boy for the Clift and Brennan General Store, the meat market, the Horisky grocery store and Reardon Brothers Drugstore. After highschool he attended Pharmacy School in Des Moines, passed the Nebraska Drug- gist’s Board in 1926 and came back to O’Neill to associate with Reardon Drugs for awhile. He next obtained his law degree from Cumberland University, Tennessee, in 1930 and was admitted to the practice of law in both Tennessee and Nebraska.
Back in O’Neill he joined the L. C. Chapman law firm and was appointed City Attorney under Mayor John Kersenbrock. A fine speaker, he delivered many graduation addresses and dedicated his home town’s first hospital. In the early ‘thirties he built a new law office in the block south of the courthouse, but did not live to occupy it long. His promising career was cut short by cancer in 1939. He left a widow and two children. James E. Davis, a traveling salesman out of Moline, Illinois, also arrived in O’Neill in 1887— just at the threshold of the machine age. He soon began traveling for the Moline Plow Company, selling the huge steam engines just coming into use in place of horses on threshing machines, saw mills and the like. Mr. Davis had to be machinist as well as salesman. Every time he made a sale his next job, on delivery of the engine, was to go to the farm to show the new owner how to operate it. To do this he rode the train to the town nearest the farm, then rented a horse Emmet Harmon. Courtesy Eva Harmon Morton.
and buggy for the rest of the trip. The rentals for this accommodation was usually $2.50 per trip, unless his drive was unusually long. He traveled all the western states, including Oregon, in pursuit of this business.
Davis quit the plow company in 1914 and came back to O’Neill to sell oil for the Globe Oil Company. His territory extended to the South Dakota line on the north, to Iowa on the east, the Platte River on the south and to Grand Island on the west. He traveled by horse and buggy, selling oil, paint and disinfectant. For selling 2,000 gallons of lubricating oil, 750 gallons of motor oil, 2,500 pounds of grease, 200 gallons of disinfectant (including theater spray), 5,000 pounds of Old Dutch Process white house paint and 500 gallons of other paint he was John A. Harmon. Courtesy Eva Harmon Morton given a $5 bonus. When automobiles began to appear on the scene he asked his company to provide him with one for his route. The company refused on the grounds that it would be too expensive, so he quit— and bought one for himself, a 1910 model with brass trim.
He then associated himself with the Davis Brothers contracting firm of O’Neill and did carpentering and other types of building for awhile. A music lover, he played the violin and was also drummer for the O’Neill Cornet Band, organized by Emil Sniggs in the early days.
James’ brother, Charlie Davis, came to O’Neill about the same time. The lure that drew him to the prairie town was his love of hunting— and his nephew, Arvil Kestenholtz, had promised him plenty of hunting, as well 201 the use of his hunting dogs. Charlie, a skilled carpenter and builder, stayed on and built many of O’Neill’s best homes. His own home, still standing nearly sixty years after his death, was on the southeast edge of town. In 1898-1899 Charlie, who had four sons of his own, was elected mayor of O’Neill. One newspaper credited him with getting all the votes because he had such a firm “stand-in” with the kids. “He fed them candy, gave them the run of the town and settled all juvenile quarrels by taking the combatants to a peanut stand to set ’em up.” The Davis brothers’ sister, Zittella, and her husband, William Kesten- holtz, had arrived in Holt County some three years earlier. William, “bound out” at the age of eight in Ohio, had gone to Michigan when he was eighteen, where he worked for the John Davis family. There he met and married the daughter, Zittella in August, 1880. At the same time Edward Voedisch had married Flora Kestenholtz, Zittella’s older sister. Zittella’s brother Dan had been to Nebraska in 1881 and wanted to go back. In 1884, with William and Zittella Kestenholtz, he sat out again, this time for O’Neill. On the way they made some kind of a soft drink, an early day “pop,” and sold it all along the road. Their list of supplies for this business included: brushes nippers bottle wires corkscrews labells indicator hose shugar collering oils 1600 corks read (red) collering Soap Bark strabery ext (extract) lead funnel rench pitcher marble dust tin funnel graduate 400 wires They reached O’Neill in July, 1884 and, by summer’s end, had worked up a big trade with outlets from Neligh to Stuart and even to Niobrara. Will Kestenholtz took a homestead north of town, also a tree claim, and carried trees on his back from the river, several miles away, to plant the required ten acres.
Zittella Kestenholtz, who was only about four feet tall, lost two babies after moving to Nebraska. Times were hard and they could not afford tombstones for the deceased children, so “Telia” as her friends called her, mixed cement in a tub with a hoe, framed her little headstones in boards and scratched the babies’ names in the wet mixture with a nail and marked her little graves. After all these years they are still readable in Prospect Hill Cemetery.
A mid-wife to her community for many years, Telia delivered babies all over the area. She also removed warts from humans and animals by rubbing them (the warts) with cut potatoes. The secret was hers, for others couldn’t do it. One time she cured a very warty mule for Emmett Stamp, although it took a bushel of potatoes to do it.
Mrs. Kestenholtz loved children and raised a number besides her own. One, a boy she kept for several years, accidentally set fire to a ranchman’s pasture while learning to “light a smoke.” The rancher went to court about it and threatened to send him to jail. A mighty force for her size, little Telia told the boy, “Now when you go up before Judge Malone, tell the truth, that you didn’t do it on purpose, and I will stand by you.” He did as she told him and won his case. The boy, Chet Calkins, later became O’Neill’s most beloved policeman. Will Kestenholz owned the first hay baler in Holt County, probably purchased from the Moline Plow Company through his brother-in-law, Jim Davis. His son, Harry, took over the business. “My dad,” wrote Zittella Kestenholtz-Ridell, “lived to let three hay balers wear him out. The last baler was purchased from Lewis Kopecky at Inman ini 942. He baled many tons of hay for the Watson and the Kopecky hay companies, who sold it to the Army during World War II.” Harry had been called to service during the first World War, but the train that was to take him to camp brought the message that the Armistice had been signed and the war was over. His sweetheart, Dora Engel- haupt, rejoiced over the news and the young couple was married the following January. Dora was the daughter of Mike Engelhaupt, the O’Neill butcher, who had come over from Germany in the pioneer years.
During the lean years of the early ‘thirties a group of dissidents known as “Holidayers,” tried to keep farm-ers’ products off the market, hoping to improve prices. These people took to stopping farmers on their way to town with produce and Harry Kestenholtz took to carrying a .45 in a shoulder holster, in case they attempted to stop him from reaching town with his loads of baled hay. Fortunately, he never had to use the gun “and the shells all went off when the gun burned in a house fire at Inman in 1938.” Harry was also a blacksmith and, when he lived at Chambers, shod most of the area horses. When the McCaffery boy, Johnie, drowned at the Big Holes in Dewey Schaffer’s pasture Harry made a grappling hook from ice tongs and used them to recover the body.
About 1920 Dora Kestenholtz discovered a piece of “free” land in the Shamrock district, seven miles north of Chambers and near her old home. These little tracts of land, unclaimed for one reason or another, could still be found in those days, and Dora wanted this one. Her husband filed on it and they made plans to move a vacant house (the one Harry Kesten-holtz was born in) onto the land. Then a bachelor, Shorty Shoe, who lived in a shack near one corner of Dora’s new eighty acres, told her that if they moved onto that land he “would shoot her boot heels off.” But Dora, as spunky as her little mother-in-law, moved anyway— and made it her home until her death in March, 1933. When Dora died she left six children, the youngest ten days old. Grandma Telia, then sixty-seven years old, moved right in and raised the motherless family. Plucky Zittella Kestenholtz died at the age of eighty- three.
Alonzo Derrick Mills came to Boston from England in 1774, went on to Kentucky and married Emily Jane Townsend, the daughter of wealthy slave owners. Because his wife was sickly in the Kentucky climate, Alonzo took her to Wisconsin, where Rufus Henry, eighth child in a family of thirteen, was born. Rufus grew up and married a young teacher, Frances Bunnell, a small Irish lass with dark red hair and grey-green eyes. They lived in Atlantic, Iowa, for awhile, then moved to Chambers in Holt County, when the village was still called Shamrock. There in 1888 they lost their four-year-old daughter and a son, Jesse, was born. Soon afterward they moved to O’Neill. Henry bought a two-room house and went into the well drilling business, a good vocation in those early settlement years— even though, due to the consistent lack of cash, he often had to take his pay in hoy or beef.
When the Sioux City and Pacific laid its tracks into O’Neill in 1890 Henry had to move his house, else the rails would have gone right through his front door. In this house in 1893 another daughter, Elsie May, their fourth child, was born, and there, in 1894 pretty Frances Mills died at thirty-two years of age.
Elsie May, motherless at sixteen months, tells the family story from that point on. “I remember Dad telling me that I was born on ‘Circus Day.’ The family had looked forward to going to the circus, but because I put in my appearence they didn’t get to go. After Mother died a Jennie Fern worked for us and I remember how Mrs. Jones and others babied me. Dad used to ride a bicycle with the high wheel in front after the mail. “I recall the awful smallpox epi- 202 demic. Little houses called ‘pest houses’ were built south of town and Charley Hall, Charlie Harding and Charley Davis were the nurses in them, for they had had the disease already. At one time there were fifty to sixty sick people in the pest houses. Then diphtheria broke out and there were many deaths from that, too. “Every Decoration Day a great number of little girls in white dresses, each carrying a flag and a bouquet of flowers, rode to the cemetery in the parade, all standing on a big hay rack trimmed with red, white and blue bunting. At the cemetery, when we heard the beat of the drums, we were each to lay our flag and bouquet on a soldier’s grave. Two of us stood at each grave. The grave where I stood was not far from where my own mother was laid, so I stood very straight, waiting for the drum beat, then I ran as fast as I could, my long braids flying, to my mother’s grave and laid my flag and bouquet there. Nobody scolded me and I had no remorse. I figured she deserved that show of loyalty from me.
“I well remember the first automobile in O’Neill. Mr. Reka, who operated a cigar store next to Lavollet’s saloon, owned it— a little one-seated car. He guided the wonderful thing with a stick. The wheels were quite large and it would go about five miles an hour. Anyone could hear it coming, three blocks away, and everyone came out to watch it go by. Mr. Reka always wore a little skull cap and Mrs. Reka was a sweet, kind lady, but always pale looking.
“My dad didn’t own a car but he had a good team of horses and a spring wagon. Almost every Sunday afternoon we’d all get in and go for a ride. He’d take us to the Elkhorn River and we’d gather dead limbs for firewood and, in the fall, wild grapes and plums for jelly. Every fall my father made sauerkraut to sell for ten cents a quart. He raised the cabbage and made the kraut in a huge barrel in the cellar under our house. “That cellar door was held open by a wooden knob attached to the house. One evening as we were eating supper we heard the door shut with a bang. We all rushed out to see what had happened and saw Charley Hall, the sheriff, coming from town on the run. He told Dad one of his prisoners had got away from him when he took him his supper. Dad whispered to him that his prisoner was probably in our cellar, so Mr. Hall opened the door and went down to see. We stood around, breathless, watching such a brave man.
“Charley found his poor prisoner, squatting behind the big sauerkraut barrel. Now, whenever I fix kraut, I can still see Charley taking his runaway prisoner back to the jail house.
“Mr. Hall was a good man. One of his daughters, Georgie, such a pretty girl, became an actress. When she was in a stage play, ‘Rain’ in Omaha, a number of O’Neill people went down to see the show. The family moved to Lincoln in 1909 and not long afterward Mr. Hall was killed in a car wreck while pursuing a fugitive. Later Georgia, too, lost her life in a car accident.
“I remember that Joe O’Donnell was shot in 1910, the same year we saw Haley’s comet. Joe and some other boys were down on the Elkhorn hunting and the gun accidentally exploded. People didn’t know what to make of the comet. There were big headlines in the papers and some folks thought the end of the world was coming. People gathered at the churches for prayer. Then the comet came into view. The head looked like a large star, with a long tail of fire behind it. It came from the southwest and went across the western sky. “The only school I ever attended was the O’Neill Public School. Mary Horisky was my eighth grade teacher, and a good one. Cecelia Foster was my ninth and tenth grade teacher. Then there was Tess O’Sullivan and Professor Dwyer, a tall, stately Irishman who married Tess. G. W. Smith was always on the school board. G. W. sold pianos and the day my dad saved enough money to buy a Hamilton piano was a happy one for us.
“When I used to go out to Mineola to visit my aunt and uncle they would show me the sod house the Vigilantes hid behind when they took Barrett Scott prisoner. After Mrs. Scott and her daughter left O’Neill, Joe Horisky bought their house. Susie Horisky’s sister, Mayme McManus, was a beautiful lady who looked and dressed like a model. Their brother Pat owned a nice drygoods store and my dad would buy shoes there for twenty-five cents a pair— always high-topped button shoes— and bring them home and whoever they fitted had a new pair of shoes. “Pat sold groceries, too, and I can still smell the good Arbuckles coffee he ground for twenty-five cents a pound. He sold crackers by the pound, too, out of a big barrel, and kept a big black and white cat. The cat kept the mice from getting into the barrel. “Another tragedy in our town was the awful fire at Dr. Flynn’s house up on the hill. It happened on a bitter cold night in January. The little Flynn children were rescued but two pretty schoolgirls, Susie Lamb and Lena Daley lost their lives trying to get the children out.” Two years after the death of his first wife, Henry Mills married Clara Jane Sprague of Scottville. Elsie May had a deep and abiding love for her step- mother. “The Odd Fellows’ Hall,” she wrote, ” was up over the post office and Dad enjoyed the meetings a lot. Nearly every month they initiated new members and had lovely suppers. My mother was always asked to make the coffee, and there would be beautiful cakes and I was sometimes on the program, singing a song. “Dad would go to Will Graves jewelry store and pick a song from the sheet music there to teach to me. One song, ‘Just Across the Bridge of Gold,’ was about a little girl whose mother had died, and I could sing that song with meaning. After the program Mr. Arthur Mullen, the lawyer, came to Dad and said, ‘Henry, that girl will surely go places with that voice.’ That pleased my dad, as he was very proud of his children, and it pleased me as I loved to sing.” Music was an important part of Elsie May’s life in O’Neill. For several years she sang soprano in the choir at the Presbyterian church. “Ruth Evans taught music,” she writes on, “and I was always glad to sing at her programs. My sister Ada studied voice under a teacher from Chicago, then taught me what she had learned. My brother Jesse organized a band in town, and there was Eddie Campbell who could sure play the piano. How he could play the ‘Maple Leaf Rag!’ His younger brother, Walter, was the same age as my brother Clyde. They were both in the tenth grade when they died of rheumatic fever in 1908. “In those days the young folks gathered at the homes that had pianos and everyone sang. Some of the new and popular songs then were ‘Red Wing,’ ‘Hiawatha,’ ‘Please Go Away and Let Me Sleep,’ and ‘The Bird in a Gilded Cage.’ After I was out of school and before I married, I was employed by George Miles, Denny Cronin and Pete Sanders in their Frontier printing plant. George Miles was such a fine man to work for, so jolly and happy all the time.
“I met my husband while singing in the silent picture show in O’Neill. Mrs. Viola Brown owned the first permanent picture show in our town and I married her son. The O’Neill theater is still called The Royal, even as it was then.
“My husband and I left O’Neill in 1919, but I well remember the Brennan family and their lovely big home in north O’Neill, known as ‘Brennan’s Park.’ And the surprise birthday parties given for ‘the man of the house.’ Such good times we had, 203 and good food. When my dear second mother died of cancer in 1934 Mr. Odie Biglin, our fine undertaker, arranged to have her buried at the side of my own mother in Prospect Hill Cemetery. The Biglins were a wonderful family.” The Selah saga began in New York city when Isaac Harris Selah, of English ancestry, was born in September 1814. He later moved to Tazewell County, Illinois and there married Eliza Price Dean of New York City in October, 1843. In 1870 Isaac and Eliza came to West Point, Nebraska, where they published the West Point Progress from their home. Of their twelve children, a three-year- old son died of accidental poisoning. Another son died in the battle of Vicksburg and a third drowned at West Point in 1870. A fourth son died there of scarlet fever at the age of seven. The other sons and daughters lived to maturity.
One son, James, was a druggest in Ewing for many years and is buried there. His daughter, Alice, taught in the Ewing schools for twenty-three years. Funeral services for Miss Alice were held in the high school auditorium and she, too, was buried in Ewing. Her sister, Lydia, also a teacher in Ewing schools for many years, died of spinal meningitis in Missouri and was brought home for burial beside Alice and her father.
Clarence William, born in Illinois in 1857, died of typhoid fever in O’Neill in 1901. In the years between he helped his father put out the West Point paper, established the Journal in Norfolk in 1878 and the Item in Ewing in 1883. He moved his paper to O’Neill in 1890, where it was absorbed by the Frontier a short time later.
Clarence then became interested in politics and was appointed Deputy Revenue Collector under President Harrison for four years. He also studied law and opened an office in O’Neill. In 1897 the populist party elected him County Judge, and re-elected him in 1899. He was still in office at the time of his death. Of his marriage to Nellie Kauffman in 1880 two sons were born. One died very young, the other, Dean Kauffman Selah, died of cancer in Omaha in 1964. All are buried in Prospect Hill Cemetery in O’Neill near the grave of Isaac Selah, who died in 1895. Dean had married Ethel Conklin, formerly of Atkinson, in 1913 and their son, born in 1919 and named Clarence William for his grandfather, shined shoes and served as bellhop in the Golden Hotel. While in high school he won the Nebraska speech contest under the able tutilage of Helen Ryan. He has now spent many years as a radio and television newscaster and is at present associated with KDFW-TV of Dallas, Texas. Patrick and Bridget Boyle, with their son Edward and his wife, another Bridget, came from Donnegal, Ireland, to O’Neill in 1885. They stayed for awhile with Edward’s brother, Dan Boyle, near O’Neill. In 1888 Edward homesteaded on Dry Creek, just outside of town, and lived in a house near the log building that was the first Holt County courthouse, probably built in 1876.
Bridget and Ed had eleven children. Their son, Edward Jr., and his wife, Mary (Barrett) Boyle had twelve. Another son, Charles, married Alice Barrett in 1929 and fathered twelve daughters. One died in infancy. Of the twelve sons and daughtes of Edward, six still live in Holt County and Nebraska. Of Charles’ eleven daughters nine live in O’Neill, Holt County or Nebraska. Many of the first Edward’s grandchildren went to 4-H Club meetings in the old log courthouse. The Boyles married into the Cavanaugh, Slattery, Wolfe and Stevens families of Holt County. O’Neill, still expanding in 1890, added a fourth bank to its facilities that year, the State Bank of O’Neill. Organized by W. D. Matthews, city postmaster and editor of the Frontier, the firm’s new building cost $5,000. In that same year Pat Hagerty’s Elkhorn Valley Bank also moved into a new building of its own. Until then it had carried on in the J. C. Hayes store- room. The Catholic people began work on their fine new academy that spring, and the city laid plans for an electric light system and a water plant.
The electricity contract called for seven arc and three hundred incandescent lights, “so that the streets and stores and dwellings can all be lighted.” Soon after the lights were turned on the Frontier informed its readers that the city had decided to keep the lights on all night “so that the hotels who want to catch the morning train and get up before daylight can have the use of the lights.” The Edward Voedisch family, who came to O’Neill that year of 1890, have left an interesting account of their journey and of the town as it was then. Edward and his wife, Flora (Davis) Voedisch, and their two children, Edith and the baby, Fred, made the trip from their home in Omaha to O’Neill in a canvas covered buggy pulled by a mare named “Float,” with her colt “Prince” at side. The mother and children rode in the buggy and Mr. Voedisch walked. They reached the end of the trip a few days before Edith’s ninth birthday and stopped with Mrs. Voedisch’s mother and brothers, Dan and James Davis, the Moline salesmen.
They then drove north of town a little way and spent a few days with Mrs. Voedisch’s sister, Mrs. William Kestenholtz, and family, while Mr. Voedisch bought a home near the Pacific Shortline’s new depot, roundhouse and stockyards. The family moved into their new home and Mr. Voedisch went to work in the roundhouse, loading coal on the tenders, switching, and running the pump that furnished water for the engines. He made $50 a month and the family lived very well on that amount at a time when a fifty pound sack of flour cost only ninety cents at the local mill. Their big garden and the father’s hunting and fishing kept the table well supplied with other necessities. Another daughter, Flora, was born to the Voedischs while they lived in O’Neill.
Young Fred Voedisch, who grew up in O’Neill, remembers one postmaster in the town, Bob Marsh, who took great pride in his work and stayed on the job every night until after the 10 P.M. train came in and he had the View in O’Neill showing Stand-Pipe 100 feet high, in the distance. First National Bank, J. P- Mann store and Corrigan Drug Store on far left.
On 4th Street in O’Neill showing two depots, F.E.&M.V.R.R. and P.S.L.R.R., Water Works and Electric Light Plants, etc. Picture probably taken in late ’80’s.
205 mail distributed. Fred’s cousin, Bill Davis, worked in one of the newspaper plants, where manpower turned the fly wheels. “Before electricity,” he wrote, “one little coaloil light in front of the First National Bank was the only street light in town.” The water system was a steam-powered plant and three or four large windmills in different parts of town. The one-hundred foot standpipe stood on the hill at the end of Main Street, near the schoolhouse, the courthouse and the Catholic church.
Both Edith and Fred loved music. Fred played the violin and slide trombone with several local orchestras— the McGreevy brothers, the Smiths and the LaVolettes. Through high school he had his own orchestra and played for dances. Soon after graduating from high school in 1909 he left O’Neill and traveled with road shows until the war broke out, then ploy-ed in the Army Band from 1917 to 1919. He now lives in Sheridan, Wyoming.
At 20 Worshipers coming from St. Patrick’s church on a Sunday morning. Standpipe in right center and old public school in far right. Clay Johnson Collection. Edith Voedisch Cook playing her piano on her ninetieth birthday, August, 1971. Picture taken after the Chicago and North Western took over the Fremont, Elk-horn and Missouri Valley railroad, but before the depot burned in 1910. Note the covered delivery hack and cream cans in foreground. Railway stations were busy places in those days. Clay Johnson Collection. I j ijW E. – > e …. —— … _ – __ __ O’N ill as it looked about 1890 looking north toward the Courthouse. The three-story Moffat Hotel on the far left burned later Clay Johnson Collection.
206 Edith was twelve when she started taking music lessons on her mother’s pump organ. Since she showed considerable promise as a musician, her father gave her a new piano on her sixteenth birthday, paying for it on time— $25 every three months until the total cost, $325, was paid off. The piano is still used by her great granddaughters. Edith took lessons from private teachers, from the Sisters at St. Mary’s Academy and at Oberlin College. At eighteen she started teaching music in O’Neill, Inman, Page and Emmet, having as many as thirty-eight students at one time. She drove a buggy and the mare “Float” and her grown-up colt “Prince” a good many miles in following her profession for some nine years. She married Arthur Lewis Cook and went to live in South Dakota, where she continued to give music lessons until a short time before her ninetieth birthday.