Green Valley Chapter Twenty-Seven Green Valley may have been named by early hunters, or by the first families who came to live on its beautiful grassy plains. The name was most fitting. It is indeed that, with its lovely hay meadows, low hills and scattered lakes. When John Ziska heard about Holt County’s rich, fertile lands and came and saw Green Valley he hurried back and spread the word in his Iowa home town. As a result twenty-two covered wagons bearing his friends and relatives started west in 1884.
There were, however, already settlers in the big valley before Ziska’s wagon train arrived. The Slaymakers, Reuban, Daniel, Rebecca and Emily, all unmarried, and another brother Henry, with his three teenage children, had arrived in 1879. They had driven overland in covered wagons, bringing a small herd of cattle with them from their former Minnesota home. The next year another brother, John, his wife and family, and a sister, Caroline Slaymaker Whipple, with her three children, joined them in the valley. Reuban and Henry had served on the Minnesota frontier at the time of the Indian uprising there, and had marched into Dakota and across northern Nebraska Territory. They had liked what they saw of the Nebraska region and made up their minds to settle there someday. Reuban, Henry and Daniel took homesteads and tree claims south of Atkinson and built sod houses. Gilbert Whipple, one of Caroline’s sons, settled in Green Valley proper, farther southwest of Atkinson than the Slaymakers. He surveyed land, helped later settlers locate claims, broke sod with oxen, built sod houses and planted trees, all as a means of making a living. Even so he finally lost his claim to the mortgage holder, moved up into the sandhills near his mother and the Slaymakers and made a fresh start. The colony of relatives there became quite extensive. Henry’s three children married in the community and their families added to the clan. Lewis, the eldest son, married Mary Neibaur and lived out his life on his Uncle Dan’s homestead. his son Vernon still lives on the old place. Mary, Henry’s daughter, married Rob Lumsden, for years a delivery man for the Atkinson grocery stores. Wesley married Bertha Davis and moved onto his uncle’s tree claim, proved up on it after Reuban’s death and made it his home for the rest of his life. Wesley owned one of Miner Davis’ violins and played for dances, riding horseback with the instrument slung over his shoulder. Wesley’s son Elmer married and raised five children on his father’s place. He, too, was a violin player. Another son, Ed, a veteran of World War I, with his wife, the former Amy Anderson, operated “Amy’s Cafe” in Atkinson for some years. Another son, Harry, married Emma Prussa and made his home on his grandfather Henry’s homestead. Harry, also a violin player, played with local orchestras for dances.
Wesley’s daughter, Rinnie, married Perry Barnes and lived in or near Atkinson all her life. One of her sons, Lloyd, lost his life in a plane crash in World War II. Lawrence, Wesley’s youngest son, married Serena Johnson and still lives on a Slaymaker farm five miles southwest of Atkinson. In 1895 Gilbert Whipple married Estella, John Slaymaker’s second daughter, and lived on the sandhill claim the rest of his life. They tried raising hogs, then switched to chickens, using the hog house for the poultry. They milked cows too, and sold the cream to the Amelia creamery. A hauler traveled a laid out route once a week, picking up the cream from the farms. The creamery operator showed the Whipples how to make cheese.
“We made more from our milk, that way,” Ora Whipple wrote, “but Oh, the work. You never stopped until the cheese was sold.” The Whipples lived on the main road to Atkinson and people farther south counted on making it to their place the first day, staying all night and going on into town the next day. The travelers reversed the schedule going home’and the Whipples loved it. “We always had a great time visiting with these people,” Ora remembered. “Many brought along and played musical instruments and that added to the fun.” The Whipple family used a hay burner and Ora wrote that, if it burned well it heated a room and baked fine. A slit in the drum provided a place to insert a poker and stir up the fuel inside. While this was going on “a surprising amount of smoke, flame and ashes came out of the slit. If you saw anyone with singed hair and eyebrows you needn’t ask how he got them. Why those burners didn’t burn the house down I don’t know. Charlie Preston 242 made our burner, and I’ve heard that Gib Morgan made an average of five hundred a year.
“After two sod houses,” Ora wrote on, “the folks built a frame house on the section line (partly on their claim and partly on young John Slaymaker’s adjoining claim, so he could live with them while he proved up on his place). The road went forty rods east of the house, but a neighbor wanted to open a road right on the section line. He spent quite a lot of time trying to get our house moved, but finally he died and the house still stands on the line.” Ora several times mentions a lake, but gives neither the name nor location. However old maps show a “Whipple Lake” about four and one-half miles southwest of Inez and about eighteen miles southwest of Atkinson. Anna Slaymaker built a shanty on her claim on the north side of the lake and Ed, when he came of age, took a Kinkaid northeast of the lake. John and Ed eventually bought Anna’s land and John, after he got over a fever contracted during the Spanish-American War, returned to the old place in Green Valley. There weren’t many children in the district, Ora records, and the school house was small and crude, ten by twelve feet in size with two little windows. It was finished on the inside with heavy red building paper. The school term was seven months and whichever end of the district had the most votes periodically moved the little building to that location. The procedure was “good for a constant fight.” Ora Whipple now lives in “the house on the line.” Sanford and Mellissa Whipple, Gilbert’s brother and sister, still live on their mother’s place about two miles south of Ora. Most of the other families in the district have moved to town and the roads are abandoned, the old buildings crumbling. Cattle now graze the meadows as well as the hills. Slaymaker heirs still own the land around the lake.
Charley Preston, mentioned above, a friend and neighbor of the Whipples and Slaymakers in Minnesota, had followed them to Nebraska. He set up a blacksmith shop in Atkinson and did carpentry and handyman jobs as well, building and repairing houses and furniture and lending a hand wherever needed. He was a “year around Santa Claus” to all children and when the housewives’ wooden wash tubs fell apart he built them new ones.
At the turn of the century Charlie moved to Inez, where Johnny Moss had opened a store and post office. Later he moved his blacksmith shop to a homestead just over the hill from Sanford Whipple’s place, and operated it until automobiles put him out of business.
Another family who preceded the Bohemian wagon train to Green Valley was that of John Torpy. John emigrated at an early age from Ireland and settled in Columbus, where he met and married Margaret Jennings, likewise from Ireland. They moved to their homestead three and one-half miles southwest of Atkinson in 1880. They were the parents of eight children. Two died in infancy, Agnes died at twenty years of age. Of the others, Julia married James Barrett, Margaret married Mike Flannery and Anna married Joseph Galligan, all of Atkinson. Florence married Walter Crowley of Stuart. After John’s death in 1909, Margaret moved into Atkinson, where she lived the rest of her life.
William, the youngest child and only son, farmed the home place. In 1914 he married Abbie Murphy of Stuart. William died in 1925. Of his four children, Francis, the oldest son, is still living on the home place. He married Loretta Flannery of Atkinson and had nine children.
John Ziska’s train of twenty-two covered wagons started west in January 1884, very early in the season for wagon trains to be on the road. In addition to the Ziska’s there were Pacha, Freouf, Tasler, Krysls and Mlinar families in the train. The Frank Prussa family may have come that year, or possibly the year before. John Ziska was born in Bohemia in 1860, the eldest son of John and Frances Tasler Ziska. He was only six when his parents settled in Diagonal, Iowa, where he grew up. In 1882 young John went out to Wayne, Nebraska and broke sod for awhile. There he heard about the fine, free land in Holt County and, after finishing his job, went there to see for himself. He returned the next year to take a homestead ten miles southwest of the budding town of Atkinson. A good farmer, John soon had one of the better farms in that community of hard working people. A patient, kindly man, he never spoke an unkind word about anyone. In 1888 he married Mary Regal, whose family lived about eight miles west of Atkinson. They had a son, Fred, two daughters, Annie and Ella, and a son James. Mary and Fred helped John in the fields and the two little girls took care of the baby, Jim. When it was time for his mother to nurse him they hauled him to the field in their little wagon.
Ella began helping in the fields when she was six, driving stacker team and, when she was ten, mowing hay. Mary often told her husband he worked the children too hard, but John, a tireless worker himself, kept the small fry busy anyway. One time, when the Ziska corn grinder was not working, Ella rode to the Ogle farm with-her mother and Freddie to grind some chicken feed.
The Ogle’s had a little wind-powered grinder on top of their well-house. There wasn’t much wind that day and the grinding was slow, giving Ella time to play with the Ogle children. The mud pies they were making fascinated her, as did swinging in their swing. The next day Ella found a can and a stick and began stirring up a mud pie. Her father saw her, chided her gently for wasting time and sent her to the garden to pull weeds.
Mary, saddened because her children never had time to play, then put a swing in a tree beside the garden and sent the children there John Ziska, Sr. Courtesy Lawrence Kramer Frances (Tasler) Ziska. Courtesy Lawrence Kramer.
243 occasionally to swing “to keep the birds out of the garden.” The Ziskas hand milked thirty to forty cows and sold the cream and molded the butter. Butter, molded in one pound blocks with a printed design on top, brought a penny or two more than bulk butter. Annie and Freddie often had to herd their father’s cattle, riding double on a bay pony to do the job. One afternoon they took shelter from the sun in the shade of a hay stack and played their mouth harps to pass the time away. They forgot to watch the cattle, and when their father saw them trying to chase the cows out of the rye field he sent the hired man out to help them. John had never spoken harshly to his children but the hired man, only about seventeen himself, scolded them roundly for being so careless. At eight-two, Freddie Ziska still wryly remembered that scolding.
During the dry ‘nineties, after some of the homesteaders abandoned their claims, Freddie and Annie herded the cattle on the deserted pastures. While herding on the Daugherty place Freddie found a huge old broken bicycle someone had left there, he took it home and ordered parts for it. When he had it in working order he used it to bring in the milk cows and the horses and rode it to and from the mail box, a mile away.
On winter evenings the Ziska family stripped feathers for pillows and feather beds. Each child’s quota was a cupful an evening. Cups were inverted on the table and the stripped feathers tucked under the brim. One could strip all evening and never get the cup so full that one more feather couldn’t be tucked under. It was a tedious job because quick movements or bursts of laughter sent feathers flying all over the room.
When Annie grew up Joe Dobrovolny, a neighbor boy, began coming to see her. Joe drove a team and buggy and one evening as he came up the lane Jim, riding Freddie’s big bicycle, suddenly rode into view ahead of the horses. The team reared, breaking the tongue from the buggy. It took Joe a few minutes to bring the plunging team under control’and by then Jim had wisely disappeared.
The grown Ziskas and their mother, one of the musical Regals, played various instruments and danced well. Consequently their home was a popular place for parties and dances. It was also a favorite stop-over point for people on their way to Atkinson from the hill country to the south. Annie and Joe decided to marry and Joe bought some land twenty-two miles southwest of Atkinson, built a little house and bought some calves to start a herd. Then Annie became ill and could no longer work in her father’s fields. During the next two years her worsening condition baffled the doctors. Finally she could no longer even leave the house.
During this time Ella had a bad runaway. Usually a well broken horse was hitched with a half broken animal and all went well. But one day the hired man mistakenly hitched both well broken horses to his machine and left the half broken team for Ella. Confident that she could handle them, she hitched them to her rake and went to the field. After awhile,, as she turned them on a fireguard at the edge of the meadow, the rough ground caused the tongue to swing and hit first one horse and then the other. The near horse got a glimpse of Ella’s dress and floppy hat’and plunged in terror. Instantly they were both running wildly down Wedding picture of Mary Regal and John Ziska, taken in 1888. Courtesy Marie Krysl.
Mary Regal was a laundress in the old Northwestern Hotel in Stuart from the age of fifteen until she married John Ziska at eighteen. Courtesy Lawrence Kramer.
the fireguard, the rake teeth flopping up and down.
Her father ran from the haystack to catch the running team, but as he grabbed for the nearest bit the team swerved so sharply that Ella was thrown from the rake, caught beneath the teeth and dragged for some distance. She was badly bruised, punctured by rake teeth and had an injured ankle. The runaway team and rake tore on, took out eight fence posts and finally caught on a tree. Ella walked home, where her mother cared for the ailing Annie. It was two weeks before she could work again, and her ankle gave her trouble the rest of her life.
On November 1, 1915, Mary was called to the Frank Dobrovolny home to deliver a baby. After taking care of the glad business of life she went home again, to her own house of death where, two weeks later, Annie died. When the doctor told them h 244 Barn on the John Ziska, Jr. farm. Built in 1910. Courtesy Lawrence Kramer.
death was only hours away they sent for Joe, then gathered round the dying girl’s bed. John was supporting her on his arm when she looked up and said to them all, “I don’t know how I will ever pay you for all the trouble I’m causing you.” The mother hurried from the room.
After a little while Annie’s struggle ceased and John said, “She’s gone. Go find Mama.” At the door Ella met Joe. Then she found Mary in the separator room, bent over a milk bench, weeping.
Annie, who had had so little time to play, or live, was laid out by her Aunt Frances Freouf. On her funeral day she was carried to her grave in St. Joseph’s cemetery by Frank Kilmurray in his horse drawn hearse. A long procession of buggies followed, all at a slow stately walk.
Ella could not seem to get over her sister’s death and, even after the customary year of formal mourning, still dreamed that Annie was calling her. Her mother then arranged for her to visit her Regal grandparents. Her uncle Joe Ziska lived near them and the young girl began to brighten in the company of her cousins, Josie and Charlie.
After some weeks she met her father at the cream station in Atkinson one day and asked him how they were getting along at home, he lookd at her sadly. “How would we be?” he replied. So Ella went home again and, in April 1917, married Joe Dobrovolny. Her pale blue wedding dress with its lace overskirt and her wedding veil, ordered from National Bellas Hess, cost $10.
The wedding party gathered at the Ziska home and rode to Atkinson in a double carriage, borrowed from William Blackburn. The attendants, Freddie and Josie Ziska, sat in front, with Freddie driving. Joe and Ella rode in the back seat. The wedding festivities took place at Ella’s home, after the ceremony.
In true old country fashion John and Mary had butchered a cow, two pigs, ten geese and fifteen chickens for the wedding feast. There were literally bushels of cakes and kolaches, many of them baked by the groom’s mother. The formal meals were served in the house but there were many “outside” guests too, and, even though the day was cold and wet, every little while the women carried boilers of hot coffee and tubs of sandwiches and cakes around the yard and into the barn to serve them. There was dancing in the barn loft, where planks covered the manger openings to make more room. The eating and dancing went on all night and Joe’s mother, who had led a lonely, secluded life after coming to America, at her son’s wedding cast aside all care and danced the night away. When someone told John Regal, the fiddler, to see if he could “wear her out,” he tried. But the faster he fiddled the faster she Wedding picture of Joe Dobrovolny and Ella Ziska, 1917. Courtesy Lawrence Kramer. John and Mary (Regal) Ziska and their children. Left to right: Freddie, Jim (on father’s lap), Ella and Annie. Taken in 1902. Courtesy Mr. Lawrence Kramer. Scene at Frank Freouf’s place, after the couple’s friends had charivaried them in 1912. Courtesy Lawrence Kramer.
danced.
Many of the more distant guests were still on hand the next morning, which dawned stormily. After Joe and his best man had hauled hay to the cattle, the celebration resumed. It is interesting to note that Ella, although excused from milking the cows on her wedding day, appeared at the cow barn as usual the next morning’and not for dancing. Two days later Joe took his bride to the little house he had built for Annie in the edge of the valley next to the sandhills. Joe and Ella raised seven children and buried one baby.
The Taslers, Anton and Josephine, married in Austria in 1859, had four children before they came to America in 1866. One child died there and eight more were born in the new home in Iowa. Two others died before they came to Green Valley, twelve miles southwest of Atkinson, with the remaining nine. The children had little opportunity for education on the frontier. The early school terms were only two months long and the Taslers had to walk two miles to the sod schoolhouse. The pressure of work at home, coupled with bad weather, permitted them to go only once or twice a week.
The Tasler children, herding their cattle on the prairie one day when their parents were making the long trip to Atkinson for supplies, were 245 frightened when it began to get dark very early in the day. They hurried the cattle home and corraled them and ran for the house. The eclipse, however, was over by the time they reached it and the sun was shining again.
Antona A., Anton’s oldest son, got a job helping build the railroad through that section of the country, and walked to and from Atkinson while he kept the job. Later he freighted from Atkinson to Butte. When he came of age, shortly after reaching Holt County, he took a homestead near his parents and, two years later, married Caroline Mlinar. During some of the early hard years on the claim they shelled corn by hand and sold it for eleven cents a bushel. “By working early and late about fifty bushels could be shelled in a day.” In 1892 Anton Sr., moved to another farm, five miles west of Atkinson where he was killed the following year. He owned a beautiful team of sorrel horses, which he drove to town every week to deliver butter and eggs. After unloading the produce at the station, he put his foot on the front wheel hub to get back into the wagon. At that instant something frightened the horses and they exploded into a run. His foot slipped between the spokes and held him fast. The team ran wildly all the way down Main Street and Anton was dead when taken from the wheel. Frances Tasler and Polly Mlinar herded their fathers’ cattle together. Usually barefooted, the girls passed the long hours on the prairie by crocheting lace from No. 40 sewing thread. When Frances grew up she married John Dobias, a neighbor’s son. John died twenty-five years ago. Frances, now ninety-six, lives in the Good Samaritan Center.
Joseph Freouf, another of the Bohemian born colonists, came to Iowa at age nineteen in 1876. In 1880 he married Frances Ziska, daughter of John and Frances. They had a son, Joseph, by the time they came to Green Valley, and ten more children were born in the valley. Mr. Freouf did blacksmithing for his neighbors, also shoe and harness repairing, being skilled in all these trades. In later years he put out a big orchard, grafted fruit trees, raised bees and sold honey. He also raised and pressed one hundred gallons of cane sorghum every fall. The Freouf children all went to school in District 213, known both as the Tasler and Bouska school. Mr. Freouf subscribed to two papers, the “Hospodar” and the “Hlasatel,” which he shared with his Bohemian neighbors.
Joseph was twice knocked down by lightning. “The next time,” he jokingly told his family, “it will get me.” Seven or eight years later, in August, 1927, at the age of seventy he was raking hay in his field when he was struck and killed by lightning. His son saw him struck down, that final time. One of the eleven Freouf children, Blanche Engler, still lives in Atkinson.
Frank Mlinar, Sr. was the son of a wealthy Bohemian. His mother died when he was small and his older sister cared for him. His father would not let him work on the estate, as hand labor was considered demeaning for a gentleman. Once, when his father was away, the boy spent a happy afternoon helping the gardener. His father came home, caught him and punished him severely. Then his father remarried’and died three years later. The second wife’s family managed to collect all the inheritance and Frank and his sister were left penniless’and unskilled.
The lad found work in the fields around his home and so learned to be a farmer. He was farming for himself by 1854 when he married Caroline Kodytek. Their first four children, all boys, died in infancy. The first was named for his father, and as each succeeding son was born he, too, was named Frank. The next two children, Anna and Josephine, lived, as did two more sons, Frank and Fred.
With their four children they started for America in 1865. Their ship met with contrary winds and was seven weeks in crossing. Food ran low and some of the passengers died. Then little Frank began to go blind. However there was a faith healer on board who made a cross above each of the boy’s eyes and said a prayer. His sight returned and, to the end of LeRoy and Tony, sons of Joe Dobrovolny, feeding hay from rack in 1937. Courtesy Lawrence Kramer.
his life at almost seventy, he did not need eyeglasses.
The Mlinars had $75 when they landed in New York. Frank, Sr. got a job on the railroad and, as soon as he’d earned enough money, took his family to St. Louis on a freight train. Another family made the trip with them, and all were amazed at how fast the train traveled, although at some point on the journey the two men jumped off the train, grabbed a pumpkin apiece from a trackside patch and jumped back on the train again. They were seven days on the trip to St. Louis.
Times were hard there and, as soon as they’d saved enough money, they moved to Mount Ayr, Iowa. The Mlinars had supposed America was an island and very small. By the time they had traveled from New York to St. Louis and on to Iowa, they knew they’d been wrong. At Mount Ayr four more children were born to the family.
They were in the process of moving to Minnesota when the Indian uprising there changed their plans and they halted at Minburn, Iowa. Three more children were born there and the oldest daughter, Anna, married T. Miller Wilson and settled near her parents. Two years later they all moved back to Mount Ayr among their former friends. While they lived in Iowa that time Jesse James and some of his crew stopped, put up their horses and asked Mrs. Mlinar to cook them a meal.
After they settled in Green Valley Frank, Jr., married Mary Coufal, Fred married Mary Ziska, Tillie married James Radcliff, Cora married Anton Tasler, Mary married Joe Reiser, Joe married Libbie Kubart, Barbara married John Jonas, Pauline married Charles Davis and John married 246 The Joseph Mlinar family haying crew, 1920. Courtesy Dwaine Lockmon. Jennie Munt.
Caroline Mlinar died in 1912 at the age of seventy-seven, Frank in 1916 at eighty-one. He was survived by eleven children, forty-three grandchildren and fourteen great grandchildren. His funeral expenses were $100 to the undertaker and $150 to Father Loecker. In 1973 the Mlinar descendants total eleven children, fifty-six grandchilren, one hundred and forty great-grandchildren, over two hundred great-great-grandchildren and twelve great-great- great-grandchildren. There are ten sets of twins among these descendants, and more than half of the total group have lived in Holt County.
Josie Mlinar married Frank Pacha in 1877, and in 1884 the Mount Ayr and Ringold County colonists headed west. The Mlinars, their nine children and their possessions filled three covered wagons. The Pachas had another covered wagon and, in the excitement of getting started, forgot their baby daughter and had to go back for her.
ordered as slips from Bohemia. People came for miles to pick their winter’s supply of fruit from the big orchard. A neighbor, Ora Whipple said, years later, that she always loved to go to the Pacha home, where roses and house plants bloomed all winter in the house and Mrs. Pacha grew a profusion of herbs.
The Pachas loved company. Settlers from far to the south made the home their overnight stopping place on their way to Atkinson, and many a wedding dance was held in the big living room.. Miner Davis, the Slaymakers and Nightengales provided the music. In summer the grove sheltered many a picnic and Frank made a croquet yard there, with raised sides that saved a great deal of chasing after hard hit balls.
There are still a few people living in Green Valley who remember one Thanksgiving when the Pachas invited the whole country to their home for the day. Everyone came, and enjoyed the fellowship and the wonderful Bohemian food prepared by the good ladies. The children, of course, had to wait until the grownups had eaten before their turn at the table came. This was a refined form of torture, practiced at all such functions until well after the turn of the century. Frank built a large barn on his farm in 1905, and also raised the roof of his house and added three bedrooms upstairs. In 1924 he and Josie retired to Atkinson, where she died a year later. Frank died in 1931 and both are buried in Woodlawn Cemetery.
A young man named Jonas helped the colonists get settled in Green Valley, where they arrived on March 10, 1884. John Baptist Jonas was born in a dugout in Colfax County, near Howells, Nebraska. As a young man Tillie Mlinar Radcliff, 1866-1931. Courtesy Marie Krysl. Frank Pacha was born in Czechoslovakia in 1852 and came to America at eighteen. His family located at Diagonal, Iowa. He and Josephine had three children by the time they came to Nebraska; Paulina, Adolph and Effie, the baby they forgot.
They took a homestead and a timber claim and, as did so many other Bohemian settlers, set out a huge grove of trees. The Pachas beautiful grove was more than eighty-five years old when the 1970 Labor Day tornado ripped through it. The Pachas also planted a large orchard. Josephine was the horticulturist of the family, grafting trees with the best of them. Many of her fruits grew on trees that she The family of Frank and Caroline (Kodytek) Mlinar, 1916. Back row: Matilda Radciffe, Pauline Davis, Cora Tasler, Mary Reiser. Middle row: Anna Wilson, Barbara Jonas, Josie Pacha. Front row: Joe, Fred, Frank and John Mlinar. Courtesy Dwaine Lockmon.
247 he had worked on the X Bar B ranch in Wyoming. He then came to Holt County to homestead on the place where Ronnie Jonas now lives.
While proving up on his claim he and his brother Frank freighted to the the Rosebud Indian Reservation and traded supplies for furs trapped by the Indians. At this time he was made a blood brother of Chief Yellow Horse, presumably for once saving the chief’s life.
Historian Hy Nightengale wrote that the Jonas and Tomsik families were good friends until they had a dispute over a claim. There were three Tomsik brothers. John, the oldest, was married and had a claim of his own. Clement and Lewis still lived with their parents on another homestead. John Tomsik persuaded Lewis to contest John Jonas’ claim.
John had a little house on his land and, when he heard the Tomsik boys might try to run him off his place, he had his brothers, Frank and Jim, come to stay with him. On the day that the three Tomsiks, with their guns, walked the mile between the two claims to attempt to evict Jonas, he and his two brothers, also armed, were waiting for them.
Mr. Nightengale wrote that it was a gray day in early April and he, only a boy, was at school in the Dog Town District. While they were out playing during the afternoon recess they heard a volley of shots, off to the west. As geese were then going north in great flocks they attributed the shooting to hunters’and did not learn until that evening that the Tomsik and Jonas boys had had a shootout.
Frank Jonas was badly wounded by a bullet in one lung. Clement and Lewis were full of buckshot. The Jonas boys took Frank home and called a doctor. Another doctor was called to the Tomsik home to pick the shot out of Clement and Lewis. All recovered. The case went to court, where it remained for several years.
Eventually it was decided in favor of John Jonas.
In guiding the Bohemian immigrants to locations in Green Valley, John did not realize, then, that one of them, nine-year-old Barbara Mlinar, would one day be his bride. John and Barbara were married in 1898. They lived on John’s homestead for several years, then bought ranch land from Charles Davis, twenty miles southwest of Atkinson. After Henry Hookstra retired the Tonowanda post office was moved to the Jonas place and John became the postmaster, he also served as a Justice of the Peace, and on the Francis Township election board for many years. A small town soon grew up at Tonowanda, where Jonas opened a little store and blacksmith shop. When the township hall was built there, neighbors used it for dances and meetings, as well as for township business.
John retired and moved to Atkinson in 1928, then took a job in the Chace Market, where his specialty was homemade bologna. Mrs. Jonas died in 1931, John ten years later. Both are buried in Atkinson, as is their son Lawrence. Another son, William, is buried at Burwell. A third, Lester, lives in Columbus.
Joseph and Anna Holub Kubart, although both born in Bohemia, did not meet until after they had immigrated to Chicago, where they were married in 1870. With their four children they came in 1885 to a homestead four and one-half miles southwest of Atkinson in the edge of Green Valley. Another son, James, was born to them there in 1887. Two years later they moved a mile farther southwest.
The Kubart children attended the Dog Town shcool with some twenty-five other children. Their favorite teacher was Anna Slaymaker. Joseph Kubart, a cabinet maker by trade, made many coffins for his neighbors, those first years on the homestead. When the little Balloon boy died his father went to Atkinson, bought some boards and brought them to Mr. Kubart for the casket. Joseph worked on it most of the night while the father spent those dark, sad hours under the wagon which held the body of his son. The next morning he put him in the new coffin and buried him on a hill near his home, several miles south of the Kubart place.
The father later moved away and, as the years passed, the wind blew the sand away, exposing the casket. No one reburied it and, finally, the elements won and all trace of it disappeared.
Theodore, eldest son of the Kubarts, married Effie Pacha. Libbie, the eldest daughter, married Joseph Mlinar. Victoria married another settler, Frank LeMunyan, and Mary married one of the Pacha boys. James met his bride-to-be, Lena May Gasser, of Hayes Kansas, when she came to visit her uncle, Frank LeMunyan. They were married in her Kansas home and came to Atkinson on the train. They lived on the Kubart farm where James grew up, raised their five children there, then moved to Atkinson in 1950. James passed away in 1968. Lena May still lives in her home there, and Charles, her son, still lives on the home place.
Mary Kubart and Adolph Pacha were married in St. Joseph’s church in Atkinson in 1908 and set up housekeeping on a Green Valley farm near the Pachas. For years they and their two sons attended the nearby Green Valley church, later they transferred to the Atkinson Methodist church. Adolph hauled hay to Atkinson for many winters while Mary and the boys milked the cows and tended to the other chores. When their son, Arthur, married in 1941 Mary and Adolph moved to Atkinson, where Adolph died two years later. Mary lived on alone in her home for the next twenty-five years and passed away in 1968.
Arthur and his wife, the former Delores Morgan, were married in St. Joseph’s church and have since maintained their membership there. They are still on the old Pacha ranch, where they raised two daughters and two sons.
Lawrence Pacha, the other son, married Evelyn Smith in 1935 and moved to the Frank Pacha homestead. They are members of the Methodist church, raise cattle and quarter horses and train the latter. Lawrence has been president of the Atkinson Rural Fire District for twenty-two years and is a Mason and a member of the Sesostris Shrine. Their son Norman works for the Atkinson Livestock Market and is associated with his father in operating the ranch. Evelyn has become an authority of note on Indian artifacts and she and Lawrence travel extensively in many states, collecting artifacts and showing them at schools and meetings.
Theodore was a long-time hay dealer, buying and selling as well as putting up countless tons of the commodity on his own place. Every fall, after the Green Valley hay was in the stack, the neighbors gathered at the Kubarts to enjoy a picnic and talk over exciting incidents having to do with runaways and mowing into bumble bee nests. There was always music, with Effie at the piano and Theodore doing the fiddling.
Theodore hauled hay, too, for many years, rising at three in the morning to make one, and sometimes two, trips a day to Atkinson with loads of bales. In 1924 the family moved into town to a home on the corner of Union and Sherrill Streets. Mr. Kubart continued in the hay business as one of the biggest shippers from Atkinson. He served actively with the Volunteer Fire Department from 1926 through 1950 and was voted an honorary membership upon his retirement. Both he and Effie were active in the Catholic church and Theodore enjoyed a Bohemian card club that met weekly. He died of a heart attack in 1953. Effie, almost ninety, lives on in the home they bought nearly fifty years ago.
248 Their four children all live in Nebraska. Josephine, a registered nurse, practiced in Atkinson and married Leo Kramer, owner of the Kramer Machine Shop. Helen married Ed Coufal, owner of a Stuart grocery store for thirty-five years. Retired, they now live in O’Neill. Evelyn, after working for some years in the Office of Civil Defense in Washington, D.C., married Harvey Thompson, a Newport rancher and Rock County official. Since his death in 1961, she has lived in Omaha. Francis, the only son, became a priest, served in several Nebraska towns and now is pastor of St. Richards and Holy Angels Church in Omaha.
Joseph, born to Frank and Caroline Mlinar at Mount Ayr in 1870, was fourteen when his family came to Green Valley. He acquired a fourth grade education between working out and helping his father, then homesteaded for himself in 1895 near Tonawanda, some sixteen miles southwest of Atkinson. He built a one-room house, a hay thatched shed for his mules and a lean-to for his cows. In 1898 he married Libbie Kubart in the Catholic church in Atkinson. Libbie, a very bright young lady, missed only two days of school in 1891 and made very high grades. In her little new home the bride had polka dot curtains at her two windows, and pillows covered with white “shams” on which she had embroidered in red, “I slept and dreamed that life was beauty,” and “I woke and found that life was duty.” A son Charley and a daughter Tillie were born there. Tillie died of croup at nine months of age.
In 1902 Joseph and Libbie bought the James Davis farm four and one-half miles southwest of Atkinson, only a mile from Libbie’s parents. Seven more children were born in that home. By 1912 they had added two bedrooms to their home and built a pantry in the kitchen and installed a sink and pump, thus achieving “water in the house.” Even though you pumped it by hand it was a great improvement over carrying it from the windmill, or a pump in the yard or out by the barn.
In 1915 Joseph bought a four-door touring car, a twenty-five horse power Maxwell with carbide headlights. Wrote his daughter, Hazel Lockmon, “We all had to be real quiet when Papa had to drive over a bridge, on a high grade, or turn a corner. If we got stuck in the mud we all piled out and pushed.” When the flu epidemic struck they were all very sick, except for Joseph. “He went to town,” wrote Hazel, “and bought us an Edison phonograph that played cylinder records. We were so excited that our fevers all went up and we didn’t get to play it for several days.” “Papa hauled a lot of baled hay and always drove mules. As soon as he had a mule broken to drive well he traded it off for an unbroken one. Of course he was always having runaways. I remember one time when four head of mules came charging into the yard with an empty hay rack, jumped a water pipe running from the milk house to the tank and headed for the barn. Two went into the barn and two stayed on the outside. The tongue ran through the side of the barn.
One time Charley hooked the broke mules to a load of baled hay and headed for town. Papa was to follow with a couple of sows in the lumber wagon, pulled by a team of unbroken mules. They started, then the sows suddenly grunted and scared the mules. They ran away and ran into a tree, breaking out the wagon tongue and turning the mules completely around. When Papa looked up out of the bottom of the wagon box the mules were standing there, looking down at him.
“In the evenings we studied our lessons around the old dining room table with the old coaloil lamp on it. Mama sat and crocheted and Papa read stories and “westerns,” his specialty. After we finished our lessons we picked over navy beans, shelled popcorn or played a game or two. We could raise the roof and Papa wouldn’t hear us, absorbed as he was in his story. I think he checked out every Western in the Atkinson libraray. He always marked a JAM in the front of the book so he would know which ones he had read.
“Papa was a very mild mannered man. Mama was the disciplinarian. Sometimes she had a pretty wicked right hand’but we deserved it when we got it. While the older kids were still in school we drove “Babe” to an old buggy. Later, when I went along I rode old “Ted,” walked, or caught a ride with Gilbert Davis, our mailman. “Until I started to school I spoke very little English, only Bohemian. Mama almost always talked to us in Bohemian and we answered her in English. But after the day I was married she never talked to me in Bohemian again. I can still say a few words in Bohemian, but doubt if I could converse with anyone, as the words I remember are mostly the ones I shouldn’t.
“Papa and Mama sold their farm to brother Edward in 1944, held a farm sale and moved into Atkinson. They celebrated their Golden Wedding Anniversary there in 1948. All four of their attendants, Theodore and Effie Kubart, John Mlinar and Victoria LeMunyan, were there.” Anton Wondercheck, born in Czechoslovakis, married Anna Stazzie Hunacek in Vienna in 1878 and came to Chicago the next year. Six years later, lured by enthusiastic letters from his half brother, Joseph Kubart, he moved his wife and three children to a Green Valley farm five miles southwest of Atkinson, where he resided until his death in 1935. Six more children were born on the homestead.
The Wonderchecks accumulated a few cows and chickens. Once a week they walked to town with a basket of eggs to exchange, at six cents a dozen, for groceries at Frank Bitney’s store. Mr. Lyman, the cream man, drove to the farm to pick up the cream, skimmed by hand from the milk. Anton was at Kubarts, helping butcher, on the day of the blizzard of ’88 and, of course, didn’t get home until the next day. The baby, Frank, was only two months old and fuel was scarce. The family would have frozen had the storm lasted much longer.
The Wonderchecks lived less than a mile from Dry Creek, where the children caught many fine bullheads. Anton, a cabinet maker in the old country, made their household furniture, including a solid walnut bed, and a fine violin for his oldest son. Part of the original home is still standing and is now owned and lived in by the youngest son, John, who was born in it.
John Bouska came to the Atkinson vicinity about the same time as the other Bohemian colonists. Born in Czechoslovakia in 1860, he was orphaned at age seven. He then lived with friends of his parents, the Anton Maixners. He was fourteen when his foster parents moved to America. He agreed to work for them to pay for the privilege of coming with them. By about 1884 he was free to come to Atkinson, where he homesteaded and built a sod house.
In Atkinson one day he met Josephine Verzal. She and her sister Christena had come over from Czechoslovakia in 1889 to join their brother, Joe Verzal, who was already settled in the little town. Their mother came with them and Joe had a home ready to welcome them all. John and Josephine were married in 1890. John Bouska, too, was an orchardist. His wife, an avid reader, subscribed to numerous Bohemian magazines and read them aloud to her family in the evenings. She was the correspondent, mentioned earlier, of the farm paper, “Hospodarski Listy.” Devout Catholics, the Bouskas went in to Atkinson to Mass every Sunday. 249 Since there were nine in the family and they had only a five place carriage, the children had to take turns going to church. A son, Edward, now owns the original homestead. The nationality of another 1884 Green Valley settler, J. Nelson Tuller, is not given, but he was born in Rochester, New York, in 1854 and grew up in Iowa. For six years he was a logger in Wisconsin, then a farmer in Iowa, where he met and married Flora Jones. They had two daughters when they homesteaded twelve miles southwest of Atkinson on what is now known as the LeMunyon place.
Their first home was a sod house, where neighbors came from miles around to dance. In 1888 Nelson served as deputy sheriff under H.C. McEvony. After proving up on the homestead the Tullers moved to Culbertson, Montana, where they operated a hotel-store-post office combination in partnership with John Balloon. The Tuller girls, Bertha and Lettie, learned to speak Sioux fluently, as the reservation was only five miles away, and Bertha once bought a pony from an Indian for a sack of gingersnaps and $5.
In 1897 the family returned to the Holt County homestead and spent the remainder of their lives there. Nelson served as precinct assessor in Green Valley Township for twelve years, and ranged large herds of cattle in Nebraska and Iowa for more than forty years. A Democratic leader in the county, he was also mayor of Atkinson for a period. Property he owned on the west edge of town was laid out in lots and called the Tuller and McNichols Addition. The street running past Memorial Hospital was named Pearle Street after the Tuller’s first grandchild, Pearle Stephson. The north-south street past the Catholic church was name “Tuller.” For a number of years Nels Tuller used free Government range in Holt County, where he and his partner, John Balloon, ran three hundred head of long yearlings. The two men took turns, a week at a time, living in a tent and looking after the cattle. A half dozen other families, mostly of English or Swedish backgrounds were among the 1883-1884 influx of Green Valley settlers. These were the Moultons, Greggs, Phillips, Towers, Lymans and Smiths.
Charles Moulton, born in Vermont in 1832, was probably Scotch, for the name was originally Mac Oulton. He married an English girl, Charlotte Phillips, in Newark, Ohio, in 1853. A carpenter by trade, he trained his son, Ora Elsworth Moulton, in the same profession. William Gregg and his three sisters had come from Ireland to Illinois, where they lived until they moved to Atkinson. Ora Moulton married Gregg’s oldest daughter, Rebecca Jane, just before coming to Nebraska. The two Moulton families homesteaded north of Atkinson, at first, and the Greggs, with their other daughter, Catherine Elizabeth, settled near them.
A few years later Charles Moulton bought a farm seven miles south of Atkinson and Ora bought one three miles nearer town. Thomas Phillips had originally settled three miles south of town, so now the three families were near neighbors again. Thomas’ wife, the former Margaret Osborn, had soon become “Aunt Maggy” to the whole neighborhood. Thomas, a plasterer by trade, had gone into cattle and hay and the raising of fine horses on the Valley’s abundant grass.
Steven Tower, a friend of Charles Moulton, had married Celestia Parker in Iowa in 1861. The two families had gone to Denver in 1868, where they helped build railroad bridges for the Union Pacific. While in Cheyenne Charles saw the first seven locomotives to pull into the terminal. Sidney, the Moulton’s oldest son, had died there from burns received when his clothing caught fire at the fireplace while his mother was gone to the spring for water. Mrs. Moulton’s hands were badly burned, trying to extinguish the fire, and her hair had turned white by morning. The Towers, too, homesteaded seven miles south of Atkinson.
Ethel Nan Moulton, Ora and Rebecca’s second daughter, was born in her parents one-room sod home ten miles north of Atkinson in 1885. Ethel Nan remembered her mother saying that sod house was the most comfortable home she ever lived in’warm in winter and cool in summer’and she beautified it by tossing moss rose seeds on its sod roof, where they bloomed in a mass of color all season long.
Ethel Nan’s first teacher was her seventeen-year-old aunt, Elizabeth This sod house was larger than most such structures. It is titled simply “The Fowler Sod House.” If the settlers had a choice they would build their soddies in the fall when the prairie grasses were tough and woody, yet at a time when the sod was wet enough to hold together well. If the grass was tall the settler mowed it first and saved the cut grass for the roof binder. Squaring the walls was often accomplished by the help of the North Star on a clear night. Alkali from a nearby flat was often used to plaster the simple dwelling. Courtesy Celia Backhaus. Gregg. After they all moved south of Atkinson she attended the Phillips’ school, across the road from the Phillips’ house. Ethel Nan later taught the same school, and one term had thirty-six pupils in the little schoolhouse.
Until her brother was old enough to play with her, Ethel Nan played alone, talking to the prairie birds and making friends with a little snake. When her mother found her covering it with sand and watching it wriggle out, she paddled her soundly. (The next snake she took a notion to play with might be a rattler.) The Moulton, Gregg and Tower families spent special days Christmas, birthdays, wedding days together. Holt Creek and Dora Lake were picnic and fishing spots they enjoyed. One Sunday the Moulton children were left with their Gregg grandparents, who were strict Presbyterians. The children were expected to stay in the house and study their Bible that afternoon, but Ethel Nan’s two brothers slipped out and climbed on top of the barn. When their grandparents discovered them they commanded them to come down. The boys knew they’d be punished anyway, so opted for more fun while they were at it, and climbed to the other side of the roof. They were punished, of course, but considered the fun they’d had well worth it.
Ethel Nan’s older sister, Clara, who died in infancy, was the second to be buried in the cemetery near the school in Atkinson. There was, as yet, no undertaker in the town and Mr. Moulton made caskets for their neighbors and his wife padded and lined them inside. On this occasion they had to perform the sad duty for their own little one.
An odd bit of good fortune had saved the Moulton cattle from the blizzard of ’88. Some people traveling through the country had spent the night with them and, because of the extra people for breakfast, the family 250 didn’t get out to the barn to do their chores at the usual early hour. As a result, their cattle were still in the barn when the storm struck. Ethel Nan was the three-year-old who fell through the open cellar door into the barrel, the day of the blizzard, and broke her collar bone.
One of the bad prairie fires Ethel Nan remebered was started by a man on a load of hay, who set the hay on fire with his pipe. The frightened team ran away, scattering the flaming hay for quite a distance and setting a big fire. Another incident of her childhood that stood out so plainly was the time a Gypsy wagon camped near their house for several days. The mother came to the house to tell Mrs. Moulton they had buried one of their children down by the river. While she was talking she noticed the pants one of the Moulton boys was wearing. When she learned Mrs. Moulton had made them she asked her to show her how to make a pair. The woman-brought her material and Mrs. Moulton helped her make a nice pair for the Gypsy boy. When the rest of the Gypsy caravan came along they all went on down the road.
In 1895, after the hard years of drouth, the Moultons and Greggs sold out and moved back to Illinois. But, after the years spent in the high, dry climate of Nebraska, they were so plagued by ague that the Moulton family returned to Nebraska in 1904. Ora bought back his father’s place and his parents settled in town. Ethel Nan married Ransom Tower, youngest son of Steven and Celestia, in 1906 in Atkinson. They were the parents of five children, three of them born after the family moved to Oregon about 1910. Deloss Moulton, Ora’s second son, married Clara Lemmer in 1913. They lived for awhile in Montana, then returned to the farm four miles south of Atkinson. Later Deloss carpentered for awhile in town, then in 1928 moved back to Choteau, Montana and retired.
John Clark Lyman and his family settled on a homestead near the Moultons in 1885. John, a widower, had married Nancy Phillips McLain, a widow, in 1878. Nancy mothered John’s three sons and, later, her own son Homer, who was three years old when they came to Atkinson. Nancy Lyman’s mother, Charlotte Phillips, came to live with her daughter in later years. In 1900 the old lady celebrated her ninety-fourth birthday at the Lyman home. She was then one of the few surviving pensioners of the War of 1812. Her other daughter, Mrs. Charles Moulton and her only living son, Thomas Phillips, were among those who came to her all-day birthday party. There were, of course, many grandchildren and great-grandchildren. The old lady was truly the life of the party, recounting stories from her childhood when Indians had hunted in the forests around her old home in Genesee County, New York. She died two years later at the Lyman home. After seventeen years on the homestead, John and Nancy Lyman moved into Atkinson in 1904, where John ran the city scales and operated a feed store until his death in 1918. His wife, “Aunt Nancy,” lived on until 1934.
J.O. Smith, an Englishman, came from Michigan to a claim three and one-half miles southwest of Atkinson. With him were his wife, his three sons by a previous marriage and her two sons by a previous marriage. Herbert and William Smith were old enough to file on homesteads near their father’s. None of the Smith sons nor Mrs. Smith’s sons, the Baker boys, now live in Holt County.
Strangely enough, writes the Smith biographer, Edith Lumsden, “in a day when the informality of given names was customary, she was always spoken of as “Mrs. Smith” and he was “J.O.” No one seems to have know the given name of either.” Three other 1884 settlers in Green Valley were the Ballewegs, Spences and Boettchers. Ferdinand and Josephine Balleweg settled near Dora Lake. Ferdinand, one of thirteen children, was born in Baden, Germany, in 1842. His mother died when he was eleven and his father remarried and fathered five more children. Josephine Marks was born in the ruins of an old castle in Baden in 1847. They met when their two families sailed for America on the same boat. They settled in Posey County, Indiana, and Ferdinand and Josephine were married there in 1865, after he had returned from service in the Union Army.
Two daughters were born to them in Indiana before they moved to Illinois in 1870. Six more children were born there before 1884, the year they came to Green Valley, where two more were born. The family built and lived in a one-room soddy, and there Josephine died in 1890, leaving Ferdinand to raise the younger members of the family alone. The family went to church at Stuart, where Rev. Brethower of the Presbyterian faith was their minister.
Belle Balleweg, born in Indiana, was two when the family moved to Nebraska. She was quite small when, attempting to lift a bucket of water from the well, her feet slipped and in she went. Her brother George pulled her out with halter ropes, then laughed at her woe and told her not to cry, as she had only had a bath. Belle grew up, married Wright Hitchcock and became the mother of four children.
George Albert Spence, born in Pennsylvania in 1839, went to Illinois at eighteen and, six years later, enlisted in the Illinois Volunteers. Because he had “lung disease” he was discharged in 1864. The next year he married Adda Norris. With their seven children they settled in Green Valley. On December 11, 1896, he was shot in the legs by one Raymond Mus-ser and passed away two days later from pneumonia, aggravated by the gun shot wounds.
George’s son, George E., was eight years old when his family moved to Green Valley. He married Florence Norris in 1898 in O’Neill and spent forty years in the building and cement business in Atkinson. He built most of the city’s sidewalks and curbs and, with William Bruder, was running the concrete sidewalk around the new Pelcer and Spence Food Market at the time of his death in 1950. The market belonged to one of his four sons, Clarence E. Spence. George E. also served on the Atkinson police force for many years.
Friedman Boettcher grew to manhood in Germany and there married Augusta Gosdiche in 1869. With Augusta’s son, Charles, the couple came to Wahoo, Nebraska, then on to Holt County in 1884. Six children were born to them in Nebraska. Augusta learned to speak English fluently but Friedman never mastered the language. A family story has it that Augusta cooked and served a noon meal to a threshing crew, retired to a bedroom and gave birth to one of her children, then went to the field and helped shock grain to speed the harvest along. She died in 1912, Friedman in 1913.
Their son, George G., stayed in the Valley until he married Marie Hahn, a schoolteacher, in 1895. Marie, born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, was eight years old when she came with her parents to the Stuart community. The couple had six children. In 1926 they bought a small ranch at the south side of the county and raised cattle until Fred died in 1936. Marie stayed on the ranch until 1945, then sold it and moved to Atkinson. She died in 1959 at the age of eighty-eight years. Ben and Charlotte Neher settled in Green Valley in 1885, neighbor to the Pacha, Tasler, Ziska, Christianson, Boettcher and Dobrovolny families. Ben was born in Germany in 1847, Charlotte in Virginia in 1848. They came to Holt County from Wisconsin in a covered wagon and raised elevn children on their homestead. The children went to the “Bouska school.” 251 Since there were nine in the family and they had only a five place carriage, the children had to take turns going to church. A son, Edward, now owns the original homestead. The nationality of another 1884 Green Valley settler, J. Nelson Tuller, is not given, but he was born in Rochester, New York, in 1854 and grew up in Iowa. For six years he was a logger in Wisconsin, then a farmer in Iowa, where he met and married Flora Jones. They had two daughters when they homesteaded twelve miles southwest of Atkinson on what is now known as the LeMunyon place.
Their first home was a sod house, where neighbors came from miles around to dance. In 1888 Nelson served as deputy sheriff under H.C. McEvony. After proving up on the homestead the Tullers moved to Culbertson, Montana, where they operated a hotel-store-post office combination in partnership with John Balloon. The Tuller girls, Bertha and Lettie, learned to speak Sioux fluently, as the reservation was only five miles away, and Bertha once bought a pony from an Indian for a sack of gingersnaps and $5.
In 1897 the family returned to the Holt County homestead and spent the remainder of their lives there. Nelson served as precinct assessor in Green Valley Township for twelve years, and ranged large herds of cattle in Nebraska and Iowa for more than forty years. A Democratic leader in the county, he was also mayor of Atkinson for a period. Property he owned on the west edge of town was laid out in lots and called the Tuller and McNichols Addition. The street running past Memorial Hospital was named Pearle Street after the Tuller’s first grandchild, Pearle Stephson. The north-south street past the Catholic church was name “Tuller.” For a number of years Nels Tuller used free Government range in Holt County, where he and his partner, John Balloon, ran three hundred head of long yearlings. The two men took turns, a week at a time, living in a tent and looking after the cattle. A half dozen other families, mostly of English or Swedish backgrounds were among the 1883-1884 influx of Green Valley settlers. These were the Moultons, Greggs, Phillips, Towers, Lymans and Smiths.
Charles Moulton, born in Vermont in 1832, was probably Scotch, for the name was originally Mac Oulton. He married an English girl, Charlotte Phillips, in Newark, Ohio, in 1853. A carpenter by trade, he trained his son, Ora Elsworth Moulton, in the same profession. William Gregg and his three sisters had come from Ireland to Illinois, where they lived until they moved to Atkinson. Ora Moulton married Gregg’s oldest daughter, Rebecca Jane, just before coming to Nebraska. The two Moulton families homesteaded north of Atkinson, at first, and the Greggs, with their other daughter, Catherine Elizabeth, settled near them.
A few years later Charles Moulton bought a farm seven miles south of Atkinson and Ora bought one three miles nearer town. Thomas Phillips had originally settled three miles south of town, so now the three families were near neighbors again. Thomas’ wife, the former Margaret Osborn, had soon become “Aunt Maggy” to the whole neighborhood. Thomas, a plasterer by trade, had gone into cattle and hay and the raising of fine horses on the Valley’s abundant grass.
Steven Tower, a friend of Charles Moulton, had married Celestia Parker in Iowa in 1861. The two families had gone to Denver in 1868, where they helped build railroad bridges for the Union Pacific. While in Cheyenne Charles saw the first seven locomotives to pull into the terminal. Sidney, the Moulton’s oldest son, had died there from burns received when his clothing caught fire at the fireplace while his mother was gone to the spring for water. Mrs. Moulton’s hands were badly burned, trying to extinguish the fire, and her hair had turned white by morning. The Towers, too, homesteaded seven miles south of Atkinson.
Ethel Nan Moulton, Ora and Rebecca’s second daughter, was born in her parents one-room sod home ten miles north of Atkinson in 1885. Ethel Nan remembered her mother saying that sod house was the most comfortable home she ever lived in’warm in winter and cool in summer’and she beautified it by tossing moss rose seeds on its sod roof, where they bloomed in a mass of color all season long.
Ethel Nan’s first teacher was her seventeen-year-old aunt, Elizabeth This sod house was larger than most such structures. It is titled simply “The Fowler Sod House.” If the settlers had a choice they would build their soddies in the fall when the prairie grasses were tough and woody, yet at a time when the sod was wet enough to hold together well. If the grass was tall the settler mowed it first and saved the cut grass for the roof binder. Squaring the walls was often accomplished by the help of the North Star on a clear night. Alkali from a nearby flat was often used to plaster the simple dwelling. Courtesy Celia Backhaus. Gregg. After they all moved south of Atkinson she attended the Phillips’ school, across the road from the Phillips’ house. Ethel Nan later taught the same school, and one term had thirty-six pupils in the little schoolhouse.
Until her brother was old enough to play with her, Ethel Nan played alone, talking to the prairie birds and making friends with a little snake. When her mother found her covering it with sand and watching it wriggle out, she paddled her soundly. (The next snake she took a notion to play with might be a rattler.) The Moulton, Gregg and Tower families spent special days Christmas, birthdays, wedding days together. Holt Creek and Dora Lake were picnic and fishing spots they enjoyed. One Sunday the Moulton children were left with their Gregg grandparents, who were strict Presbyterians. The children were expected to stay in the house and study their Bible that afternoon, but Ethel Nan’s two brothers slipped out and climbed on top of the barn. When their grandparents discovered them they commanded them to come down. The boys knew they’d be punished anyway, so opted for more fun while they were at it, and climbed to the other side of the roof. They were punished, of course, but considered the fun they’d had well worth it.
Ethel Nan’s older sister, Clara, who died in infancy, was the second to be buried in the cemetery near the school in Atkinson. There was, as yet, no undertaker in the town and Mr. Moulton made caskets for their neighbors and his wife padded and lined them inside. On this occasion they had to perform the sad duty for their own little one.
An odd bit of good fortune had saved the Moulton cattle from the blizzard of ’88. Some people traveling through the country had spent the night with them and, because of the extra people for breakfast, the family 250 didn’t get out to the barn to do their chores at the usual early hour. As a result, their cattle were still in the barn when the storm struck. Ethel Nan was the three-year-old who fell through the open cellar door into the barrel, the day of the blizzard, and broke her collar bone.
One of the bad prairie fires Ethel Nan remebered was started by a man on a load of hay, who set the hay on fire with his pipe. The frightened team ran away, scattering the flaming hay for quite a distance and setting a big fire. Another incident of her childhood that stood out so plainly was the time a Gypsy wagon camped near their house for several days. The mother came to the house to tell Mrs. Moulton they had buried one of their children down by the river. While she was talking she noticed the pants one of the Moulton boys was wearing. When she learned Mrs. Moulton had made them she asked her to show her how to make a pair. The woman” brought her material and Mrs.
Moulton helped her make a nice pair for the Gypsy boy. When the rest of the Gypsy caravan came along they all went on down the road.
In 1895, after the hard years of drouth, the Moultons and Greggs sold out and moved back to Illinois. But, after the years spent in the high, dry climate of Nebraska, they were so plagued by ague that the Moulton family returned to Nebraska in 1904. Ora bought back his father’s place and his parents settled in town. Ethel Nan married Ransom Tower, youngest son of Steven and Celestia, in 1906 in Atkinson. They were the parents of five children, three of them born after the family moved to Oregon about 1910. Deloss Moulton, Ora’s second son, married Clara Lemmer in 1913. They lived for awhile in Montana, then returned to the farm four miles south of Atkinson. Later Deloss carpentered for awhile in town, then in 1928 moved back to Choteau, Montana and retired.
John Clark Lyman and his family settled on a homestead near the Moultons in 1885. John, a widower, had married Nancy Phillips McLain, a widow, in 1878. Nancy mothered John’s three sons and, later, her own son Homer, who was three years old when they came to Atkinson. Nancy Lyman’s mother, Charlotte Phillips, came to live with her daughter in later years. In 1900 the old lady celebrated her ninety-fourth birthday at the Lyman home. She was then one of the few surviving pensioners of the War of 1812. Her other daughter, Mrs. Charles Moulton and her only living son, Thomas Phillips, were among those who came to her all-day birthday party. There were, of course, many grandchildren and great-grandchildren. The old lady was truly the life of the party, recounting stories from her childhood when Indians had hunted in the forests around her old home in Genesee County, New York. She died two years later at the Lyman home. After seventeen years on the homestead, John and Nancy Lyman moved into Atkinson in 1904, where John ran the city scales and operated a feed store until his death in 1918. His wife, “Aunt Nancy,” lived on until 1934.
J.O. Smith, an Englishman, came from Michigan to a claim three and one-half miles southwest of Atkinson. With him were his wife, his three sons by a previous marriage and her two sons by a previous marriage. Herbert and William Smith were old enough to file on homesteads near their father’s. None of the Smith sons nor Mrs. Smith’s sons, the Baker boys, now live in Holt County.
Strangely enough, writes the Smith biographer, Edith Lumsden, “in a day when the informality of given names was customary, she was always spoken of as “Mrs. Smith” and he was “J.O.” No one seems to have know the given name of either.” Three other 1884 settlers in Green Valley were the Ballewegs, Spences and Boettchers. Ferdinand and Josephine Balleweg settled near Dora Lake. Ferdinand, one of thirteen children, was born in Baden, Germany, in 1842. His mother died when he was eleven and his father remarried and fathered five more children. Josephine Marks was born in the ruins of an old castle in Baden in 1847. They met when their two families sailed for America on the same boat. They settled in Posey County, Indiana, and Ferdinand and Josephine were married there in 1865, after he had returned from service in the Union Army.
Two daughters were born to them in Indiana before they moved to Illinois in 1870. Six more children were born there before 1884, the year they came to Green Valley, where two more were born. The family built and lived in a one-room soddy, and there Josephine died in 1890, leaving Ferdinand to raise the younger members of the family alone. The family went to church at Stuart, where Rev. Brethower of the Presbyterian faith was their minister.
Belle Balleweg, born in Indiana, was two when the family moved to Nebraska. She was quite small when, attempting to lift a bucket of water from the well, her feet slipped and in she went. Her brother George pulled her out with halter ropes, then laughed at her woe and told her not to cry, as she had only had a bath. Belle grew up, married Wright Hitchcock and became the mother of four children.
George Albert Spence, born in Pennsylvania in 1839, went to Illinois at eighteen and, six years later, enlisted in the Illinois Volunteers. Because he had “lung disease” he was discharged in 1864. The next year he married Adda Norris. With their seven children they settled in Green Valley. On December 11, 1896, he was shot in the legs by one Raymond Mus-ser and passed away two days later from pneumonia, aggravated by the gun shot wounds.
George’s son, George E., was eight years old when his family moved to Green Valley. He married Florence Norris in 1898 in O’Neill and spent forty years in the building and cement business in Atkinson. He built most of the city’s sidewalks and curbs and, with William Bruder, was running the concrete sidewalk around the new Pelcer and Spence Food Market at the time of his death in 1950. The market belonged to one of his four sons, Clarence E. Spence. George E. also served on the Atkinson police force for many years.
Friedman Boettcher grew to manhood in Germany and there married Augusta Gosdiche in 1869. With Augusta’s son, Charles, the couple came to Wahoo, Nebraska, then on to Holt County in 1884. Six children were born to them in Nebraska. Augusta learned to speak English fluently but Friedman never mastered the language. A family story has it that Augusta cooked and served a noon meal to a threshing crew, retired to a bedroom and gave birth to one of her children, then went to the field and helped shock grain to speed the harvest along. She died in 1912, Friedman in 1913.
Their son, George G., stayed in the Valley until he married Marie Hahn, a schoolteacher, in 1895. Marie, born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, was eight years old when she came with her parents to the Stuart community. The couple had six children. In 1926 they bought a small ranch at the south side of the county and raised cattle until Fred died in 1936. Marie stayed on the ranch until 1945, then sold it and moved to Atkinson. She died in 1959 at the age of eighty-eight years. Ben and Charlotte Neher settled in Green Valley in 1885, neighbor to the Pacha, Tasler, Ziska, Christianson, Boettcher and Dobrovolny families. Ben was born in Germany in 1847, Charlotte in Virginia in 1848. They came to Holt County from Wisconsin in a covered wagon and raised elevn children on their homestead. The children went to the “Bouska school.” 251 In 1906, after proving up on his claim, Mr. Neher moved to Atkinson, bought the acreage now owned by Barbara Mlinar, and built the house that still stands on the place. He did carpenter work and invented a machine that folded newspapers as they came off the press. It was a very good machine, but someone else copied and patented it and Ben did not reap the benefits.
Ben and Charlotte’s son Francis served in the Spanish American War and William, a Marine in World War I, died of wounds received in service. Vencil and Anna Dobias, married in Bohemia in 1861, came to Cleveland, Ohio, in 1866. James, one of their six children, was killed in Cleveland while herding cattle. He had tried to separate two fighting bulls, was stepped on and died of his injuries. The family then moved to Otoe County, Nebraska in 1868, then on to Green Valley in 1885. Fred Ziska and Joe Freouf helped Vencil haul lumber and build a three-room house.
Vencil Dobias died of “consumption” in 1890. His coffin, placed in a wagon on a layer of hay, was hauled to St. Joseph’s Cemetery. John Humpal, Frank Prussa, Anton Tasler and Anton Kolena, his pallbearers, rode horseback, two on each side of the wagon, from the farm to the cemetery. Anna died in 1915 and is buried beside him. Vencil and Anna’s son John married Frances Tasler in 1896 at the home of Jim Humpal in Atkinson. Of their six children three sons died in infancy. The other three, Mary, Ella and Charles, all live in or near Atkinson. John and Frances lived on the Dobias farm and John earned extra money by hunting and trapping. Saturdays, after the stores closed, some of the Atkinson businessmen often drove out to the Dobias farm so as to be on hand at sunrise for a day of hunting. Frances frequently got breakfast for as many as twenty hunters, all eager to get to the lakes before sunup.
One Saturday evening John and Frances, with their daughter Mary and Frances’ sister, Mary Humpal, were driving home from Atkinson with supplies. Mary Dobias and her little cousin, Mae Humpal, were playing in the rear end of the wagon on top of a load of sacks of bran. Mary was leaning too far out when the wagon hit a rut, throwing her out. The rear wheel ran over her head and she was unconscious when they picked her up. The family was nearly home when the accident happened and there were, as yet, no telephones. Anton Tasler, Sr. happened to be near, on a good saddle horse. He rode as fast as he could to Ed Humpal’s (now the Gans place) and Ed rode on to Cross’s. Mr. Cross rode the last of the twelve mile lap into town to summon Dr. Douglas. The doctor drove hard to Humpal’s, where Ed had a fresh team and buggy waiting. The doctor hurried on to the Dobias home and spent the night there. Brandy was all he gave the little girl, but by morning she was showing signs of returning consciousness. A few more days and she was as good as ever.
One summer afternoon, some years later, John and Mary rushed a load of hay to the barn and, while stormy clouds threatened, unloaded the hay in the barn loft, turned the team loose in the barn and ran for the house. John shouted at his wife and his mother, who lived with them, and the women took little Ella by the hand and ran for the cave. John pushed them all in and reached for the door to close it. As he did so he saw the barn lifted into the air and dashed to pieces.
When the tornado had passed they found the team standing, unhurt, where the barn had been. The hayrack, left beside the barn when they unhitched, hadn’t been touched. John’s boat had been lifted from the pond and twisted into a knot. Some of the Dobias trees, and some on the Tasler place, had been uprooted and twisted together.
In winter John Dobias and Anton Prussa often walked to Dry Creek, put on their skates and skated into Atkinson, landing at the flour mill and walking on uptown. Summers, they rowed their boat to town to pick up supplies.
Many a skating and boating party were held on John’s pond, with Prussas, Taslers, Mlinars and others sharing the fun. The pond was (and still is) fed by two flowing wells and some, skating too near the wells, where the ice was thin, got a ducking. John and his neighbors put up ice from the pond’and used most of it for making ice cream.
When Mary was little more than a baby, John and Frances were in the field, stacking oat bundles. Mary was in the wagon and when something made the team start to run, John sprinted for the wagon, got on and threw the little girl off’into a patch of sandburrs. A moment later the wagon tongue came down. John jumped, just as the wagon overturned and the horses broke loose from it. Except for “stickers,” Mary was unhurt.
When Mary was grown she married David Ratliff, the son of William and Josie Ratliff of O’Neill, and reared nine children. Two of her four sons served in the Army, two in the Navy. All nine graduated from Atkinson high school.
Mary, who continued to help her husband in the field, as she had her father, had several more runaways, once with a mower, once with a rake and once with a Model T Ford.
Something had gone wrong with the brakes, but she was “going slow,” and when she ran into a tree there wasn’t much damage done.
During the dry ‘thirties the. family moved into Atkinson and Dave and another man were engaged as formen of the W.P.A. Shelter Belt crew of twenty men, hired to plant trees for winter shelter and to prevent erosion. Thousands of acres of these beautiful “shelter belts” were planted at that time, and now, as Mary observes wryly, “they are pulling them out and farming the ground.” During that period the Ratliff’s daughter, Vivian, about three years old, was poisoned by eating green apples. She was a very sick little girl and Dr. McKee, although calling to see her two and three times a day, couldn’t seem to bring her temperature down. The horse trading Masons were camping in a nearby grove at the time and Mrs. Mason came in and asked if she could see the child. She looked at her and said, “I have cured worse cases than this. Bring me some cold water and soda and some towels.” Then she took an herb or root out of her pocket, put a piece in Vivian’s mouth and told her to chew it. In half an hour her temperature was down to normal. Their son Dean, however, was killed in a Christmas Eve car accident. Ella Dobias, sister of Mary, married Charley Mlinar in Atkinson in 1922 in the Methodist parsonage. A barn dance at the home of the groom s father, Joe Mlinar, celebrated the