Chapter 30: Then And Now

← Before Today: A History of Holt County, Nebraska

because the Hookstras had a parrot that talked.

When the older sister, Hazel, was in the eighth grade the winter was long and severe. “We had so much snow,” wrote Celia long years later, “that Dad took us to school with a team and a sled. The snow was so deep we could drive right over the fences. Finally it became so bad that the teacher, Merle Hookstra, and her sister Quentin stayed at our place and Hazel and Quentin studied together for the eighth grade examinations. For play we went out and walked on the snow banks that were as high as the house.” However, the Fowlers hadn’t much time for play, for they milked cows for cash money (the cream checks) and as soon as the two girls were old enough they helped. A daily morning and evening chore, milking cows tied a family close to their farm. After the girls were old enough to help, Celia wrote, “it took us about three weeks to put up our hay. And after the hay was up one of us got to go to town with Dad in the wagon. The next year the other one got to go. Dad always tried to be at Holt Creek by sunup, for we had to make the round trip by evening, when it was time to milk the cows again.” In 1915 the Inez school board voted to institute a high school. Celia Fowler went through the ninth grade there, then went into Atkinson to board and room while completing the tenth grade. In 1919 the Fowlers held a sale and moved into town. Hazel married Charles Freouf that same year and went back to the Inez-Green Valley community to live. Her four children were born there.

Following her graduation in 1921, Celia taught school for ten years. She married William F. Backhaus in 1941. Michael M. McCarthy, born in County Cork, Ireland, in 1861, came to “the land of opportunity to start a new life and raise a family” when he was twenty-two years old. His first ten years in the states were spent in various parts of the Middlewest, where he raised and fed cattle. In 1893 he married Mary McGinley, a native of Otoe County, Nebraska. They lived on ranches until 1915 when, with their nine children, they moved to Holt County.

While a snow storm raged they came by train to Atkinson, and then by wagon to their new home in the Inez Valley. Here they found the ideal ranch country they had been looking for, a fine grassland, watered by flowing wells.

The five McCarthy sons and the four daughters attended the Inez grade school, then went to one or the other of the parochial high schools in Atkinson and O’Neill.

Mike McCarthy had bought a car, a handsome Carter, while the family lived near Tecumseh, Nebraska. But their pride in the big car turned to irritation when they found themselves stuck on the sandy Valley roads every time they took it out.

Mike was the leader in organizing a Catholic parish at Inez, and then at Amelia. On Saturdays he made the long trip to Atkinson to bring Father Loecker out to the ranch to spend the night. The next morning the priest would say Mass at the Inez schoolhouse (where the Methodists also held Sunday services), after which Mr. McCarthy would take him back to town.

“We never had any sort of crime problems in Inez Valley,” wrote a family member, Mrs. Bill Wilkinson. “Seining fish was about as illegal as anyone ever got, for the Valley was too far off the beaten path to be bothered by outlaws or people of that stripe.” Mrs. McCarthy, never very well during her years in Holt County, finally succembed to cancer. For this she went to Omaha for surgery in 1918, the peak year of the great flu epidemic in the United States. When it was time for her to come home her husband went to Omaha to get her. The children had already been released from school to avoid contracting the often fatal influenza. When Mike reached Omaha he rode on the outside of the streetcar to avoid the risk of exposure to the disease. The precautions, or the rest of the family’s general robustness, must have helped for none of them had the flu, although almost everyone else in the neighborhood did. Mary McCarthy died in August, 1920. After which the family carried on without her, keeping the home together, putting up the hay and marketing the cattle.

Haying was a job that lasted for weeks. All the McCarthy men and eight or ten hired men as well, finally rounded off the job. After that the cattle were gathered, sorted and trailed to the loading pens at Atkinson. The first day’s drive ended in a night camp on Holt Creek. The next took them to the railroad. When the last of his brood had grown and left the ranch, Mike sold it (in 1937) and moved to Arizona to live out his years. He died in 1941. Three of his sons are also deceased. James McCarthy lives in Alliance, Nebraska. The other son in Montana and the three sisters in Idaho. Claude Wicks came to Atkinson about 1899 or 1900. Soon after arriving he wrote to Altheria Frink, probably in New York state where she was born, asking her to be his bride. They were married the day she got off the train in Atkinson, November 21, 1900.

Claude Wicks was born Claude Moore in 1878 in New York state. His mother died a few days after he was born and the next door neighbor took him in, raised him and gave his family name, Wicks. Claude was a full-blooded Irishman.

Altheria was English and Yankee. They lived for a time on the Will Conklin farm, where they made and sold cheese. Later they moved to Atkinson and Claude worked in the lumber yard until his health failed. Mrs. Wicks, one of Atkinson’s midwives, helped all three of the town’s doctors, Douglas, McKee and Sturde-vant, deliver babies. There is a mention in the Green Valley history of a “Midwest Barn,” built “where the Gotschalls now live.” A Jack McAllister and a Dr. Clark from Omaha built the big barn, “which was a landmark for many years.” The 1970 tornado that cut a long swath through the beautiful Valley demolished the structure. Also in Green Valley, in the far southwest corner, stands another landmark, a high sandhill. From its top a vast sweep of country cradling the towns of Stuart, Atkinson and O’Neill can be seen. The hilltop has long been known as “Malloy’s Peak,” but there are two stories as to how it got its name.

Caught in a severe storm one day, the teacher did not return to his boarding place that night. On the heels of the waning storm most of the men of the neighborhood set out on horseback to search for him. After several fruitless days they gave up. 270 When spring thaws bared the draws and swales a man who drove a cream route that passed near the high hill saw some bones, some shreds of clothing and a lunch pail in the greening grass. He gathered the bones into a cracker box and took them into town for burial— mute evidence of another prairie tragedy. Another tale, this one in a lighter vein, is also told of Green Valley. In those days, when families were large and houses small, the boys usually slept in the haymow in the summer time. One family, also unnamed, had a large white cat. One night a pair of brothers dressed up and went to a dance. One of the boys came home first and went to bed in the haymow, wearing his white shirt.

His brother came home later, saw the white patch in the bed and thought it was the cat. Seizing the bull whip, he sent it zinging into the white blur. It is hard to tell which was the most surprised when the other brother came yelling out of the hay.

Still another unnamed young fellow was hauling stacked hay out of the Valley for shipment east. The weather was warm and dust and hayseeds sifted through his clothing, scratching and irritating his skin. On the way home with his empty rack he drove by a pasture tank of cool water. The temptation was too strong. Stopping his team by the tank, he undressed, piled his clothing on the rack and jumped into the tank.

His usually gentle team took one look at the strange, naked white object, snorted in fright and took off for home. The young ranchman leaped out of the tank and sprinted after them through the sandburrs and cactus, yelling, begging and scolding with every jump— until the horses finally ran down and stopped.

Another offering from the James Deming fund of stories tells how young John Deming once had the tables turned on him when he attempted to “josh” a neighbor, Jim Beck. A new family with an attractive daughter had moved into the neighborhood and Jim had taken to calling on the girl on Sunday evenings. He always tied his horse to a tree in the timber on the creek bank, and one evening John moved the horse to the far side of the stream, then hid to see the fun. Sure enough, when Jim came down to the creek to get his horse he kept on walking, expecting to bump into the horse at every step— and fell into the creek.

This was so much fun that John thought up a new stunt. Fastening some sleigh bells to the rim of his hat, he wrapped a sheet around himself and waited for Jim. As the young swain mounted his horse the ghost came floating and tinkling out of the timber. Jim plumped himself down in his saddle, pulled his gun and began plunking bullets at the ghost’s feet. The ghost naturally began a rapid retreat toward home, with the wrathful Jim right behind him. A final anecdote from the great hay valley of Holt County has to do with unique contests, for which prizes were awarded. Rather than seeing how many people could cram themselves into telephone booths or small cars, the young men of those long gone days strove to see which one could get the most girls onto his rayrack. Stuart— Then And Now Chapter Thirty Stuart, a village on the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad, is located on Section 1, Township 30, Range 16 in the northwest part of Holt County. Ten or fifteen miles to the north are the beautiful fertile valleys of the Big Sandy, the Beaver, Clay, Otter, Ash, Deer and Willow creeks, all flowing northward into the swift running Niobrara. To the south lies many miles of one of the finest hay meadow sections of the west. A few miles farther to the northwest the Elkhorn rises, its forks coming together just west of the town. The whole area is unsurpassed as cattle and hay country.

John Carberry, one of the first settlers at the site of Atkinson, ten miles to the southeast, in March, 1878, moved up the river to a timber claim just west of the present site of Stuart. The Elkhorn ran through the southwest corner of his land. Quickly carving himself a dugout home in a con- venient hillside, he spent the next few weeks hauling logs from Long Pine, forty miles north.

Being skillful with a broadaxe, John soon trimmed and fashioned his logs into a neat building with a room upstairs, an attic and a “stairway leading out to the south end of his building.” He also built sheds for livestock and, by the following year, was able to offer board and lodging to some of the many settlers flooding into the region looking for homes. Five other “first settlers” in the new settlement were Orange Hallock, Jack McGrew’s father, Dick Johnson’s mother, Orin Dorf and a Mr. O’Connor. And, of course, Peter Stuart. F. Roseler’s history of Stuart states that Peter, a Scottish sea captain, was one of the area’s outstanding pioneers. Soon after arriving “he had title to fourteen quarters of land, a large herd of high grade cattle, some sheep and seventeen pedigreed stallions. (He) also owned an opera house, store and flourmill.” Carberry is given the distinction of having founded the town, probably because he opened its first store, but several sources say he named it for his father-in-law, Peter Stuart, its first postmaster. For, in addition to all his other superior possessions, Mr. Stuart had a beautiful daughter, Mary. A romance blossomed between Mary and John, who married her and took her to live in his big log house, Stuart’s first building.

In 1881 John O. D. Nightengale surveyed and platted the town site. Its incorporation took place in January, 1884. The price of liquor licenses was set at $500 per applicant, the money to go into the school fund; there was to be no litter in the streets and alleys in the business district, nor pigs running loose down town. In 1885 wooden sidewalks were laid on Main Street and trees planted. Two years later the city fathers erected a windmill at the center of the square, where Second Street crossed Main, and purchased four hundred feet of fire hose, four years after the town’s first fire, which started in a meeting house in the southwest part of town and took the rest of the block (where the present bank stands) with it. According to the Stuart Advocate the town was mostly Republican for its first twenty years. By 1899 the Democrats were the important party, “but did not accomplish anything remarkable.” The two parties then got together and formed a new party, The Farmer’s Alliance. Anyone interested in the improvement of the settlement could belong and meetings were held in the old depot.

The first train ran through Stuart early in 1882. The First National Bank was opened the following year; the “Stuart House” was the first frame building in the town. Of the village officials one mayor, Norris Coats, served in that office for eight years; T. E. McGuire was village clerk for nineteen years and treasurer for forty- two years; L L. Cosner was Police 271 attended this school, which was located in Ed Slaymaker’s pasture about two and a half miles from where Ora Whipple lives now. About 1910 the schoolhouse was moved two miles nearer the Fowlers.

The Fowlers got their mail at Inez, five miles away. However there was another post office at Tonawanda, only a little farther away, at the Hookstra place. There was a store there, too, and the Fowler girls, Hazel and Celia, liked best to go there because the Hookstras had a parrot that talked.

The five McCarthy sons and the four daughters attended the Inez grade school, then went to one or the other of the parochial high schools in Atkinson and O’Neill.

Haying was a job that lasted for weeks. All the McCarthy men and eight or ten hired men as well, finally rounded off the job. After that the cattle were gathered, sorted and trailed to. the loading pens at Atkinson. The first day’s drive ended in a night camp on Holt Creek. The next took them to the railroad. When the last of his brood had grown and left the ranch, Mike sold it (in 1937) and moved to Arizona to live out his years. He died in 1941. Three of his sons are also deceased. James McCarthy lives in Alliance, Nebraska. The other son in Montana and the three sisters in Idaho. Claude Wicks came to Atkinson about 1899 or 1900. Soon after arriving he wrote to Altheria Frink, probably in New York state where she was born, asking her to be his bride. They were married the day she got off the train in Atkinson, November 21, 1900.

One states that Judge Malloy was looking for some horses that had strayed and climbed the hill for a better look for the missing animals. The tale does not say whether or not he found the horses, only that he named the peak for himself. The other story claims the hilltop was named for a young teacher, Richard Malloy (no relation to the Judge). His school was located southwest of Atkinson and he walked to and from his boarding place to the schoolhouse. Caught in a severe storm one day, the teacher did not return to his boarding place that night. On the heels of the waning storm most of the men of the neighborhood set out on horseback to search for him. After several fruitless days they gave up. 270 When spring thaws bared the draws and swales a man who drove a cream route that passed near the high hill saw some bones, some shreds of clothing and a lunch pail in the greening grass. He gathered the bones into a cracker box and took them into town for burial— mute evidence of another prairie tragedy. Another tale, this one in a lighter vein, is also told of Green Valley. In those days, when families were large and houses small, the boys usually slept in the haymow in the summer time. One family, also unnamed, had a large white cat. One night a pair of brothers dressed up and went to a dance. One of the boys came home first and went to bed in the haymow, wearing his white shirt.

John Carberry, one of the first settlers at the site of Atkinson, ten miles to the southeast, in March, 1878, moved up the river to a timber claim just west of the present site of Stuart. The Elkhorn ran through the southwest corner of his land. Quickly carving himself a dugout home in a convenient hillside, he spent the next few weeks hauling logs from Long Pine, forty miles north.

The first train ran through Stuart early in 1882. The First National Bank was opened the following year; the “Stuart House” was the first frame building in the town. Of the village officials one mayor, Norris Coats, served in that office for eight years; T. E. McGuire was village clerk for nineteen years and treasurer for forty- two years; L. L. Cosner was Police 271 Judge for twenty-eight years.

Hazel Lockmon, in her excellent history of Stuart, states that the Stuart House was built in 1881. An eight-room hostelry with a “sample room,” diningroom and kitchen, it had various managers until 1916, when its name was changed to the Commercial Hotel and it was reopened by Charles Adcock. A quarter of a century later Minnie Haskins remodeled and redecorated the old hotel, renamed it the “White Way” and operated it until 1963.

The pretentious Northwestern Hotel, built in 1886, was three stories tall, had twenty-seven bedrooms, a large sample room, big diningroom and kitchen. As in all other railroad towns of that period, salesmen came to Stuart on the train and were met by the hotel expressman, Lawrence Lof- quest. In his express cart, built on cultivator wheels, Lawrence hauled the salesmen’s trunks to the hotel, where they displayed their wares in the sample room and took orders from the merchants who came to make their selections.

Bed bugs were common in all hotels, Mrs. Lockmon notes, but the Northwestern had other livestock as well. Out back, just beyond the kitchen, the hotel maintained its own disposal system, a pen full of pigs which were fattened on the hotel garbage. The odor, especially on warm summer nights, as well as the grunting and rooting of the swine, may have disturbed the more fastidious guests. The old Northwestern was torn down by F. P. Murphy in the 1 1930’s.

Gas street lights were installed in Stuart in 1906. Only thirteen years later Max Seger installed the town’s first electric light plant. Today the Stuart Municipal Light Plant is one of the few remaining plants in the state which produces its own electricity. City owned and efficiently operated, it is one of the largest enterprises in Stuart.

The light plant also houses the present jail. Stuart’s first marshal was Marshall Jones, elected or appointed in 1884. In 1886 the first calaboose (jail) was built. G. P. Edman, constable in 1887, received $10 per month as wages. Constable Addison was murdered in the line of duty in 1964 by James Newman, who was found guilty and sent to the State Penal Complex in Lincoln in 1966. A disastrous fire in 1910 leveled the John Skirving store, the Jamison Cafe and pool hall and the Taft Brothers Grocery, adding up to a total loss of about $25,000. In 1917 Andy Moss’ livery barn burned to the ground; in 1949 Charley Biglow’s barn and two horses belonging to George Wallinger were lost to another fire. In 1951 the Frank Biglow and Corn States Hay Barn went up in smoke in less than twenty minutes. In 1966 the bulk tanks belonging to the William Krotter Company burned.

Stuart erected its flag pole in Main Street Square in 1912, and in 1919, when the increasing use of cars called for better roads, in town at least, the “city dads” turned to and graded the most important streets.

In 1919, the year that he introduced electric lights to the town of Stuart, Max Seger made the front part of his building into a theatre and showed moving pictures. A Mr. Gardner brought the “talkies” to Stuart in 1927, Hoy Briggs showed the first colored pictures in 1938. The theater closed in 1941, was reopened by Dwaine Lockmon at the end of the year and operated by him until 1957. During this time he brought in 3D and Cinemascope pictures. As of now the Stuart Theater still shows movies over the week ends.

D. G. Kunz opened the first cream station in Stuart in 1891. It soon became a “produce station,” buying eggs, chickens and other “produce,” and probably selling poultry feeds, medicines and other supplies needed by farmers and poultrymen. Mr. Kunz operated his station until 1935. Through the years John Skirving, Herb Bitney, O. B. Stuart and a number of others, ran produce stations. Larry Cobb and Lawrence Hamik opened a cream station in 1952. Hamik is the only operator who buys, sells and tests cream in Stuart today. He also has a men’s clothing store in conjunction with the cream station. Back in the town’s beginning dray-men had to pay $10 per year for a license to operate their drays. John and Robert Kemp operated the first Northwestern Hotel built in 1886, torn down in 1930’s. Courtesy Dwaine Lockmon. line in 1881. Various other men followed the business at different times. One was Martin Hamik, who drove horses to his wagon as late as 1957. Since then trucks have taken over the business.

Stuart has had many saloons over the years. Fred Liniger seems to have been the first saloon keeper, opening his place in 1881 and running it until 1913, when he sold the liquor business and ran a pool hall until his death in 1936. Eleven other saloon men are named, up until prohibition made the business illegal in 1919. When 3.2% beer became legal in 1933 two beer joints promptly opened. Since then numerous bars have flourished in the town. The Elkhorn School built in 1889. Replaced in 1955. Courtesy R. C. Patterson.

272 Bar, operated by Darrel Hamilton, is the present emporium.

Among the very early settlers in the Stuart area was John X. Farner, his wife and five children, who came from Switzerland in 1877 to a tree claim three miles southeast of town. Three more children were born in the new home, but of the eight only the three oldest, Sophet, Ben and Aggie (Cowles) spent their lives in Holt County.

For a number of years Ben was in partnership with Harry Shank in the ownership of the town’s largest general merchandise store. Later Ben became sole owner. Sophet spent the years between 1905 and 1916 as general merchant and postmaster at the inland village of Dustin, twenty miles to the north, then returned to Stuart because of better schools for his children. From then on he was in the store with his brother, Ben. John Hoffman, a Pennsylvanian who had served through the Civil War with the 78th Pennsylvania Volunteers, brought his family to Stuart in 1879. The family history states that “John with his wife and five children left Pennsylvania in March with a team of ponies, a pair of cows and a dozen chickens in a covered wagon. They gathered eggs all the way.” Because they had only one box of shot gun shells, they trapped grouse for meat along the way to save on ammunition. They lived in a dugout during their first year in Nebraska. The Hoffmans had six more children after coming to Stuart. James and George Hoffman served in World War I. Mary Fisher Hoffman, mother of the eleven Hoffman children, died in 1895 and was the first person to be buried in the Catholic cemetery in Stuart. Garhart Hoffman’s wife, the former Clara Shold, was the first in the area to die of the flu.

Charles Mulford and his brother Cyrus came to Holt County in the fall of 1879. Charles filed on a homestead one mile west of Stuart. The family came on from New York the following spring. Mary Hallock (probably the wife of Orange), an aunt of Mrs. Mulford’s had been instrumental in persuading the Mulfords to come out to the frontier.

Charles, a carpenter, was also a veteran of the Civil War. Since the Mulfords preceded the railroad into Holt County, they came overland from Niobrara, bringing with them lumber for their new home. “An uncle, just under eighteen years of age, was accidentally shot with a pistol he was cleaning. His was one of the first funerals and burials at Stuart. This first cemetery was just south of the present high school building. It was later moved to the site it now occupies. Mr. Mulford helped build many of the buildings in and around Stuart. One of his seven children, Fred, married Laura Miner. The Miners, George and Elizabeth, had come from Iowa in the early ‘eighties to a homestead north of Stuart. A mason by trade, George Miner also worked on many buildings in the neighborhood. While helping plaster a Stuart home he lost the sight of one eye when lime exploded in his face. A twin baby son of the Miners is buried in a small cemetery near the Willis Peterson ranch. Fred and Laura became the parents of five children. In 1908 Fred Mulford bought a ranch on the Big Sandy where the old Sanders Mill had once stood. Charles Mulford, Fred’s oldest son, well remembers a cloudburst on the upper Big Sandy that took out all of the bridges. “It was two days before some of our milk cows could get home to be milked,” he wrote. Charles Mulford and his sister, Laura, graduated from Stuart High School in 1917. In the fall of 1918 Charles went off to Grinnell (Iowa) College and joined the Students Army Training Corps. He was discharged that same fall, a month after the Armistice was signed.

“Our family and my parents attended the Cleveland Presbyterian church,”Charles wrote. “This church celebrated its 90th birthday in 1972, and the old Cleveland Cemetery encloses the graves of many of the Old Timers of the region.” Lafe Thurlow, born in 1860 at Bryant’s Pond, Maine, was two years old when his parents came to Wahoo, Nebraska, in a covered wagon. As a lad he herded cattle on the range along the Platte and Elkhorn rivers. At the age of eighteen he went to work in the Union Stock Yards in Omaha, saving his wages to buy a team and wagon. In 1880 twenty-year-old Lafe married Emma Whitney, who had come west from Rochester, New York, with her parents five years earlier. Her family had settled near Wahoo, where Lafe and Emma met and married.

Shortly after their marriage the young couple headed west with their team and wagon, a plow, a tent and their few other possessions. One of their wedding gifts had been a hen and a setting of eggs. Emma carried the eggs on her lap while traveling and, as soon as they reached their homestead, five miles southwest of Stuart, she set the hen in a box under their bed in the tent. This was her start in the chicken business.

Lafe went to work on the railroad as it built toward Valentine. Emma went with him, camping in their tent along the railroad grade. Lafe was plowing along the right-of-way one day when a couple of Indians came along and tried to take the team away from him. Emma heard the argument, put their revolver under her apron and ran out to give it to her husband. With the gun in his hand, Lafe had the upper hand and had no more Indian trouble.

While traveling at this time they lost a section of their stove pipe. To make what was left reach from the stove to the hole in the top of the tent they had to set the stove on a high box. The family was still living in a tent at the time of the blizzard of ’88. To save their team, and also utilize the animals’ body heat, they took the horses into the tent with them. A year later Lafe built a two-room sod house for his family.

There was no bridge over the Elkhorn River in the Thurlow’s pioneering years, when Lafe used a team of oxen for plowing on his farm and for the hard pulls into Stuart and back with a loaded wagon. On the first trip to town Lafe was walking beside the team as they neared the river. When the thirsty oxen smelled the water they broke for the river on the run. Lafe ran beside them, knowing he must stop them before they pulled the wagon, where Emma and their infant son rode on the seat, into deep water. He was successful, stopping the team just before they rushed into the river. The Thurlows were the parents of eight sons and one daughter. On May 20, 1930 Lafe and Emma celebrated their Golden Wedding anniversary in their second farm home, on the land now known as the Robert Greenfield farm. In 1901 they had shipped lumber out from Omaha for their first frame home, built on the original farm. Nearly twenty years later they had built the second frame house, the one in which they observed their anniversary.

Lloyd Thurlow, born to Emma and Lafe at their first farm home in 1902, received his education in District 58, near his home. After graduating from grade school he stayed on, helping his parents farm and put up hay. In the winters he hauled hay to Stuart. In 1929 he married Hazel Gesiriech in O’Neill. They lived with Lloyd’s parents until the spring of 1932, then moved back to the original Thurlow place, into the house where Lloyd was born.

Six children were born to this couple, three of them in the same house and room where their father was born. In 1935 they moved into a new house, built in the yard beside the home of the aging Lafe and Emma. The children went to the same school their father had attended, and where he later held the job of District 273 treasurer for twenty-seven years. In 1947, after the death of his parents, Lloyd moved the newer house from the farm into Stuart, where they lived while their children went to high school.

After moving to town Lloyd tended bar for Joe Langan for awhile, then hired out to the city as town marshal and constable, a job he held for twelve years. He was also a deputy sheriff under Leo Tomjack for three years. When the production of blue grass and other grass seeds began to boom in Holt County he was a seed buyer for Wilson Brothers of Paris, Kentucky, for six years. He then helped Clifford McGregor and William Gillespie organize the Stuart Seed Plant, staying with the business for twelve years, buying and processing seed for shipment. One year he employed fifty people in his curing and cleaning plant, making him the largest operator in the state. When his doctor advised him in 1960 to give up the seed work, he and his wife opened a little cafe, Lloyd and Hazel’s Place. In 1957 he had accepted the position of Civil Defense Director of Holt County, holding the office for thirteen years. During this time he was able to secure a radio base for Stuart and put radios into the police cars, fire trucks and ambulance. He also initiated the Stuart Civil Air Patrol.

After suffering a stroke in 1960 he became paralyzed and bedfast, and was the second resident to enter Stuart’s new Parkside Manor rest home. Only two of his children, Norton and Lloyd, survive him. About 1880 Cyrus and Margaret Garwood left their homestead near Seward and moved to Holt County, to a farm they had purchased north of Stuart where the Keya Paha and Niobrara rivers join. Chief Yellow Horse and his Indians often passed through the area, stopping at the Garwood place to trade for grain and other necessities. The Chief became very friendly with Mr. and Mrs. Garwood and their older daughter, Daisy.

Cyrus made his big barn-granary building into a community hall and opened it to meetings and social gatherings for the neighborhood. A grove nearby was popular for picnics in summer and the neighbors went together in the erection of a tall pine tree flagpole, which is still standing today.

About 1890 the Garwoods traded their place for a beautiful farm with a six-room house in Missouri. They sold the rest of their possessions for transportation money— and upon arriving at their new home discovered that they had been swindled. The land was rocky and worn-out, the house was a one-room log cabin with a dirt floor.

Cyrus and a son went to work in a sawmill to earn enough money to get the family back to Holt County. After some two years they returned and went into a ranching partnership with Dr. Sturdevant on his holdings three and a half miles south of Atkinson, where Cyrus remained the rest of his life.

While the family lived in Missouri Daisy met and married Myron Thornton. With her husband she, too, returned to Holt County, where they later made their home southeast of Atkinson. With their baby daughter, Margaret, the Thorntons went to Butte for a community-wide celebration. Daisy was carrying the baby in her arms when old Chief Yellow Horse came up to her and said, “Ugh, fine papoose, fine papoose.” Then he took the baby from her mother, went up on the orator’s platform and showed off his old friend’s papoose. Daisy did not enjoy this in the least, for she was fearful that the Indian might demand a ransom before he would give her baby back. He didn’t, of course. Margaret grew up and married Oscar Nelson of Dustin. In partnership with his father, Oscar built a garage in Dustin where, from 1905 to 1910, they sold Overland automobiles. Oscar and Margaret then ranched west of Chambers for a few years before moving to Glenrock, Wyoming. Cecil Thornton, born to Myron and Daisy near Atkinson in 1900, grew up in Wyoming and worked in the developing oil fields there. Later, while working in the Oklahoma oil fields, he married Rosa Tracy. In 1931 Cecil moved his family back to Holt County, where he worked on the Robertson ranch northwest of Chambers. His daughter, another Margaret, married Clay Johnson, Jr. of O’Neill. After the second World War Cecil Thornton set up a house moving business. This proved to be a flourishing project, for times were changing fast and small ranches and farms were rapidly being absorbed into larger ones. As buildings were abandoned the new owners wanted them moved to other locations. When the Fort Randall Dam was built some fifty- five miles north of Holt County in South Dakota, Cecil was called on to move many buildings out of the path of the rising waters as the reservoir filled. He died in 1961.

Another newcomer to the Stuart area in 1880 was John Coufal. Both John and his wife, Anna, came from Moravia at this time with their five-year-old son, John A. Coufal. They settled on a homestead southeast of Stuart. Young John grew up there and, in 1899, married Anna Mary Koziol, daughter of Stanislaus and Hedwig Koziol of Green Valley. For the next thirty-three years John and Anna Mary lived on their farm ten miles southeast of Stuart, then retired and moved into Stuart. Both were active in community affairs and both are buried in St. Joseph’s Cemetery in Atkinson. Their daughter Mary still lives in Stuart and their son, Edward, who married Helen Kubart, lives in O’Neill. Of their nine grandchildren only one, Constance Ramold, now lives in Holt County, making her home at O’Neill.

John Schneider was born in 1874 at Platte Center, Nebraska. His mother died when he was a babe, his father remarried and brought the family to a farm south of Stuart in the early eighties. John went to the nearest country school for about four years, then went to work to help out at home. While freighting from Stuart with a team and wagon he was once caught in a tornado while in town. He stopped his outfit south of the bank building, got out of the wagon and laid flat on the ground, holding fast to the lines to control his team. The big wind passed over him without doing any damage.

John married Emma Kunz and worked for awhile at “the five-mile pit,” the gravel excavation between Stuart and Atkinson. The railroad built a spur line to the pit and a crew of about a dozen men loaded the cars by hand. Wages were one dollar per day, per man.

In 1921 John went to work for the Standard Oil Company, driving four head of mules to a tank wagon, delivering oil and gas to inland towns. A trip to Dustin took twelve hours. His wages were fifty dollars per month. The railroad oil cars were unloaded with a hand pump, the job requiring eight hours of steady pumping to unload a tank car of gas. Emma Schneider, the mother of six children herself, served as mid-wife to many Stuart families.

From Eltamount, Illinois, in 1882 came Delvan Beck, his wife Marilla and son James in a covered wagon to northwest Holt County. Three more children were born in the sod house. Caught in the blizzard of ’88, young James rode horseback four miles, using a shovel as a shield to protect his face.

James married Rose Wright of Boyd County in March, 1898, and moved to another sod house. They raised cattle and a small flock of chickens, did a little farming and some gardening. The source of their main income, however, was Jim Beck’s threshing machine; for Jim was Holt County’s best known thresherman for more 274 than thirty-five years.

Several settlers have claimed to have owned or driven the first car in the county. This claim is made for Jim, too, but the date is not given. The car was an Overland. Although Jim and his wife lived in several different houses over the years, they never moved out of their precinct.

There was good grazing near one of Jim’s places. Some men in town took note of this fact, bought some cattle and built a corral convenient to the good pastures. Each evening someone came out and corraled the cattle; each morning someone turned them out to graze. This project interfered with Jim’s use of the land adjoining his own holdings, so, one moonlight night, he wound a sheet around himself and took a run at the corral, shouting and waving his arms. The cattle left immediately, taking the off side of the corral with them. The townsmen came out and repaired the corral, then rounded up the cattle and attempted to put them back in the enclosure. They had no luck. Not a one of the spooked cattle would ever again enter the hoodooed corral. Of the six Beck children, Richard married Metha Nicklous, George married Helen Mlinar, Roy married Ellen Berry, Amanda married Charles Day and Clarence married Irene Keidel. One grandson, George Beck’s son Duane, and his family still lives north of Atkinson. The others have scattered to the four corners of the United States.

George Horton and Fannie Lane were born in England and married in that country in 1878. They sailed for America the following month, then came on to Holt County in 1882. Traveling by ox cart and covered wagon, they selected a homestead about ten miles northeast of Stuart and lived seven years in a sod house. By 1884 the settlers had built and furnished a little schoolhouse. Their post office, Twain, was about a half mile from their soddy. Patrons of the school and post office were the Crawford, Englis, Burres, Blonden, Kruger, White, Schaaf and Horton families. The Twain children also attended the school. The post office was housed in their sod home.

Mr. Horton kept his oxen after most of his neighbors had disposed of theirs, consequently he had more plowing jobs than he could handle, for the powerful animals could pull a plow through the tough prairie sod with ease.

Henry Timmermans was born near Harlan, Iowa, in 1881. When he was five his parents moved to a Dutch settlement twelve miles north of Atkinson. They crossed the Missouri River in a four car train, on rails laid on the river ice, and reached their new home on March 4, 1887.

Anne Kubik, born in 1883 in Polk County, Nebraska, moved with her parents to their new home, eight miles south of Stuart, while still a babe. She and Henry were married in St. Joseph’s church in Atkinson in May, 1917.

Henry’s father moved to what was known as the Moeller place, eleven miles northeast of Stuart, in 1896. The land is now a part of the Wilson Ranch. In 1908 Henry homesteaded the land now owned by David Keidel, then twelve years later purchased a place four miles north of Stuart, here they lived until 1949, when they sold the land and retired in Stuart. In 1967 they celebrated their Golden Wedding anniversary by holding open house at their home in town.

Stencil (Stanislaus) and Fred Hytrek came over from Germany in the early eighties. Stencil opened a store in Newport, Nebraska, Fred established his home in Missouri, then later came to Holt County. A third brother, George, also came to Holt County. Their sister, Magdalena Frost, with her husband, Frank, their two sons and a daughter, followed them in 1884 and homesteaded south of Stuart and west of Atkinson. Two more sons were born on the homestead. Frank and his sons engaged in ranching and farming. A good carpenter, Frank also made coffins for his neighbors when the need arose. He bought his lumber from the Krotter Lumber Company and the crepe from Coats, the Stuart undertaker. Coffins for old people were painted black, for younger people gray and for children white. William and Phillip Frost, the two youngest sons, sometimes took turns getting into the coffins and playing dead.

Before he had been long in the county, Frank built a fanning mill out of packing crates. It efficiently removed the chaff from grain and separated the kernels into three sizes. After many years of use the mill still runs, but is now on display in the Stuart museum.

Phillip Frost remembers when his family and the neighbors had to tie their wagon boxes to the running gears, during periods of high water, so they could cross streams without having the boxes float away on the swollen waters. The horses often had to swim. However, those good old days were happy ones, he recalls, for the Frosts gathered often with their Hytrek cousins, neighbors and friends. The family later acquired an organ, which his sister Hedwig played, adding to the merriment. Even after the family moved south to a farm near Burwell, they kept in close touch with their Holt county relatives and friends. About 1950 Phillip returned to the Stuart-Atkinson area and still lives there. The rest of the family are widely scattered.

Lewis Fennard Brown was born in Ohio in 1884 but moved to Iowa with his mother in 1856. At seventeen he answered the President’s call and enlisted in the 32nd Iowa Volunteers, serving for more than three years before being mustered out in October, 1865. While in the service he took a minnie ball at the base of his lower left shoulder. The ball came out at the top of his right shoulder, carrying a piece of his uniform fabric with it. The wounded lad waited several hours before an overloaded ambulance came along. The only place left for him was on the seat of the vehicle, where he rode over rough and muddy roads for two days before receiving medical aid.

In 1885, with his wife Bridget, he came to Stuart. Bridget, born in Rhode Island in 1859, came to Boone County, Nebraska at the age of twenty-one, where she met Lewis. The couple settled on a “tree claim pre-emption”‘ northwest of the present Guy Parsons ranch. There, in 1889, their son Leo Jay was born. During these years Lew added to the family’s meager income by digging wells for his neighbors. The family then moved across the line into Rock County where Lew put in several years as foreman on the Del Akin ranch. Here, in 1892, Francis Lloyd Brown was born. In 1898 the Browns moved to what has since been known as the “old Brown Ranch” northeast of the old Hammond post office. Part of this ranch was Lew’s homestead. Here Joseph Harold Brown was born in 1899.

On this ranch Lew, Bridget and the boys planted a large orchard, built a “sizable barn,” and made other improvements. In 1916 the parents retired and moved to Stuart. Two years later they sold their stock and machinery and rented the ranch to Sam Barnes. Later Lloyd and Joe each lived on the place for a time. Bridget Brown died in 1931, the same year that the oldest son, Jay Brown, bought the home ranch, where he and his wife, Hazel Shald, made their home for the next ten years. When Lewis Brown died in 1933 he was the last of Stuart’s Civil War veterans. “Uncle” Matt Stevens of Page, ninety-five years of age and Holt County’s sole surviving member of “the boys in blue,” was among those who paid their last tributes to Lew Brown as he was laid to rest beside his wife in St. Boniface Cemetery. Today Lew’s great-grandson, David Sybrant, operates the old 275 Brown ranch and makes it his home. Frank Friedel, born in Austria in I860, came to New York by freighter in 1885. From there he came to Platte Center, Nebraska by train, then on to Stuart the following year, where he worked for the railroad west of town. He met Louise Heins, a native of Germany, in Stuart and married her in the Atkinson Catholic church in 1887. They homesteaded eight miles south of Stuart and made their home there until 1920. Their seven children were born on the homestead.

The Friedel’s first mail carrier was Ed Walker, who carried the mail on a bicycle, then with a horse and buggy, and finally in a Brush car. “I had a very nice childhood,” wrote Frank and Lousie’s daughter, Ida Stein- hauser, “and we always enjoyed ourselves, even though we had to walk many miles to dances and parties. Our first car was a 1913 Model T Ford, which we all thought was a luxury.” Prominent among early Stuart residents was William Krotter. His parents, German born John B. Krotter and Mary Weber, met in Philadelphia and were married there in 1862. They were living in Knoxville, Illinois, when William, one of their eight children, was born in 1865. William came to O’Neill by train in 1887 to work for the Barnett and Frees Lumber Company. He was unloading coal for the company when the blizzard of ’88 struck the town.

Three years later he purchased the Barnett and Frees Lumber Company at Stuart. In 1888 he married Mabel Hall of Long Pine and became the father of four children. Mrs. Krotter, a descendant of the Campbell Clan of Scotland, was born in Iowa. Her father, Robert Hall, from 1883 on operated lumber yards in Long Pine and towns farther west. Mabel Krotter served as church organist in both Long Pine and Stuart for sixty years. She had attended Oberlin College in Ohio and Nebraska Wesleyan University in Lincoln before her marriage. At one time she estimated that she had played the piano or organ for 1,200 funeral services.

Mrs. Krotter was a member of the Shipment of autos received by William Krotter in 1916. The buildings comprise a part of the Krotter holdings. Lumber yard on far left. Office building in center. Courtesy Donald Krotter. 276 Stuart school board, was active in the Stuart Woman’s Club and Eastern Star, and was secretary-treasurer of the family lumber business for thirty years.

Five months after William Krotter’s death in August, 1941, the Krotter company observed its fiftieth anniversary. At one time Mr. Krotter had operated lumber yards in ten other Nebraska and South Dakota towns. In 1894 he had organized the Interstate Telephone Company of Nebraska and South Dakota and the Citizen’s Telephone Company of Atkinson. In 1917 he organized the Stuart National Farm Loan Association, and also served as president of the Midwest Farm Implement Dealers’ Association and president of the Nebraska Lumber Merchants Association. In the operation of his various businesses, Mr. Krotter sold lumber, implements, hardware, grain and automobiles, being one of the earliest car dealers in the area. Over the years he handled dealerships for Maxwell, Hupmobile, Ford, Studebaker, Pontiac, Buick and Cadillac cars and trucks. In the early days his first car, a Red Rambler, was the only one in Stuart and on north where he had business interests.

An 1899 excerpt from the Stuart Ledger stated that the Krotter Co. was selling Cuban Belle buggies, surreys and spring wagons; Newton and New Stoughton wagons; Aermoter, Demp-ster and Dandy windmills; Standard and Jones mowers and rakes; Fleming, Dain and Champion sweeps and stackers at his yards in Stuart, Naper and Butte.

The Lockmon family came to a homestead twelve miles northwest of Stuart in 1887. John was born in Indiana in 1851, Nancy Hittie in Iowa in 1858. They were married in Albia, Nancy’s home town, in 1876. With their four children they came by covered wagon to Holt County, bringing with them a salt jar that they obtained soon after their marriage. The couple used it all their married lives and it is now on display in the White Horse Museum in Stuart.

In 1891 the Lockmons bought a farm two miles west of Stuart. They were flooded out that first year on the new place, so built a dyke around the place in 1892. Their home there was two old houses, moved together, and their barn an old house with a built-on lean-to. Mr. Lockmon and his oldest son, William, then made a cement block machine. With it they moulded blocks and built a workshop, then surrounded a sod cellar with more of the blocks. These last two buildings are still in very good shape. While Mr. Lockmon was in Stuart one day, he saw a bad storm building up. To be on the safe side he decided to put his team in the livery stable. As he was unhitching them a bolt of lightning struck, knocking him and his horses down. One of his boots was ripped all the way down one side, and the family kept it as a memento of the near disaster. From then on his team was always badly scared during a thunder storm and one of the horses, which lived to be twenty-eight years old, for the rest of its life had a patch of white hair behind one ear and another on one hind leg, no doubt the points of entry and exit of the bolt.

William Lockmon was an early day photographer in Stuart but later worked in the post office for J. W. Wertz. Toney, the second son and fourth child of John and Nancy, rode the range for the John Laird ranch for several years, then married Alta Julius in 1906 and moved to Winner, South Dakota. Two years later they moved back to Stuart and Toney barbered there for awhile. Though small of stature, about five feet, four inches, and weighing no more than 140 pounds, he hauled hay with the best of them, tossing bales seven tiers high on a hay rack.

When his father died, Toney bought the Lockmon farm and became one of the top wheat and corn farmers in the county. In 1929 he bought a red Farmall tractor, being one of the first to own such a machine. He sold much of his fine corn to Governor Sam McKelvie for use on his famous By-The-Way ranch. Jim Beck, August Kaiser and John Hirsch all at one time or another threshed wheat for Toney. Of the four children born to Toney and Alta, one son, Dwaine, married Hazel Mlinar, and another son, Manly, married Veva Nightengale. Among Toney’s various activities was that of driving Dr. Fred Wilson of Stuart on many of his house calls. He used a top buggy in summer, and when the weather was not too bad in winter. After the snows came he used a bobsled, and finally he used a Model T. Toney and his wife moved into Stuart in 1941. He died there in 1949 and his wife in 1961.

John Hytrek, son of Gregor Hytrek, was born on a farm nine miles southwest of Stuart in 1889. Because he and his brothers and sisters were needed to help at home, they had little schooling. John finished the fourth grade, then quit at fourteen to herd cattle on a farm four miles away, where he lived alone in a sod house. He had a good saddle horse and a dog for help, and the nearer neighbors came to visit him on long winter evenings.

John and his older brother, S. W. Hytrek, hired two men to help them and baled hay all winter long, working from dawn to dark and changing teams on the horse-powered machine every two hours. When the baling was done they hauled the hay to Stuart.

One year when hay was very plentiful the boys couldn’t even get a bid on their hay in Stuart, so they shipped a carload to Sioux City. The hay lacked two dollars of paying its own freight when sold at the terminal. Mr. and Mrs. Gregor Hytrek built a big house in 1904, as the family was growing up and the young folks wanted to entertain their friends. The oldest son, Paul, played the violin and two of the girls played the organ. Stencil was handy with the accordion, making music enough for all.

In May, 1915, John married Therese Miksch, daughter of a neighboring family. In 1895, the year of her birth, Therese’s father moved his family from his original sod house into a new frame home. “There were nine children in our family,” wrote Therese, “and we had to work hard, then walk a mile to school. But we had lots of fun, riding horses while herding cattle and sometimes going to the neighbors’ to borrow something. We thought nothing of walking three or four miles to visit our friends. We skated in winter, played cards, sang and climbed trees. When we had snow drifts eight or nine feet high we sat on shovels and slid down their steep sides. The little girl sometimes had to herd the cattle alone. To while away the lonely hours she paid fifteen cents for a harmonica and learned to play it well. “I still like to take it out and play it,” she wrote in 1973.

Her mother, Marie Miksch, died when Therese was thirteen years old. Mary, the oldest sister, tried to take her mother’s place but had no cookbook. “Dad was a good cook,” wrote Therese, “so we learned cooking from him— until Mary could buy a cookbook.” After she turned seventeen, Therese worked out for the neighbors for money to buy her own clothes until she married John Hytrek when she was nineteen. “John had the first Model T Ford in our neighborhood,” Therese recorded, but we didn’t have good roads and it was hard to get to church unless the ground was frozen so we didn’t get stuck.” Even after John and Therese had several children, they followed a family custom of all moving into one room during the coldest part of the winter. A Topsey stove warmed the room and, to keep warm at night, “we just moved the bed closer to the stove,” Therese said.

John and Therese had ten children. The older ones drove a horse and 277 Brown ranch and makes it his home. Frank Friedel, born in Austria in 1860, came to New York by freighter in 1885. From there he came to Platte Center, Nebraska by train, then on to Stuart the following year, where he worked for the railroad west of town. He met Louise Heins, a native of Germany, in Stuart and married her in the Atkinson Catholic church in 1887. They homesteaded eight miles south of Stuart and made their home there until 1920. Their seven children were born on the homestead.

Mrs. Krotter was a member of the Shipment of autos received by William Krotter in 1916. The buildings comprise a part of the Krotter holdings. Lumber yard on far left. Office building in center. Courtesy Donald Krotter. WM. KROTTER COMPANY .. WTha… distributors Car276 Stuart school board, was active in the Stuart Woman’s Club and Eastern Star, and was secretary-treasurer of the family lumber business for thirty years.

Five months after William Kroner’s death in August, 1941, the Krotter company observed its fiftieth anniversary. At one time Mr. Krotter had operated lumber yards in ten other Nebraska and South Dakota towns. In 1894 he had organized the Interstate Telephone Company of Nebraska and South Dakota and the Citizen’s Telephone Company of Atkinson. In 1917 he organized the Stuart National Farm Loan Association, and also served as president of the Midwest Farm Implement Dealers’ Association and president of the Nebraska Lumber Merchants Association. In the operation of his various businesses, Mr. Krotter sold lumber, implements, hardware, grain and automobiles, being one of the earliest car dealers in the area. Over the years he handled dealerships for Maxwell, Hupmobile, Ford, Studebaker, Pontiac, Buick and Cadillac cars and trucks. In the early days his first car, a Red Rambler, was the only one in Stuart and on north where he had business interests.

When his father died, Toney bought the Lockmon farm and became one of the top wheat and corn farmers in the county. In 1929 he bought a red Forma 11 tractor, being one of the first to own such a machine. He sold much of his fine corn to Governor Sam McKelvie for use on his famous By-The-Way ranch. Jim Beck, August Kaiser and John Hirsch all at one time or another threshed wheat for Toney. Of the four children born to Toney and Alta, one son, Dwaine, married Hazel Mlinar, and another son, Manly, married Veva Nightengale. Among Toney’s various activities was that of driving Dr. Fred Wilson of Stuart on many of his house calls. He used a top buggy in summer, and when the weather was not too bad in winter. After the snows came he used a bobsled, and finally he used a Model T. Toney and his wife moved into Stuart in 1941. He died there in 1949 and his wife in 1961.

John and Therese had ten children. The older ones drove a horse and 277 buggy three miles to school, the younger boys rode horseback later on, “four boys and only three horses, so one horse had to carry double.” When they were old enough to go to highschool the boys drove a car into Stuart. All of the boys served in the United States Army in World War II and in Korea, but all came safely home at the war’s end. The ten are now scattered from coast to coast, except for James who, with his wife and family, took over his parents’ farm when they moved to town in 1956.

Nathaniel Zink and his four brothers were becoming restless and more and more dissatisfied with their lives in northeastern Missouri. All married men with large families, their talk of leaving home for a new and unknown country was frightening to their wives and children and sounded foolhardy to the neighbors.

Three generations earlier Jacob Zink had immigrated from Germany to America before the Revolution. He had served as a scout with the New Hampshire Militia during that war, then married and raised a family. In 1810, at age forty-one, Philip Zink, Jacob’s son, had moved his wife and big family from Virginia to the new state of Ohio. A generation later his son, Philip Jacob, had left Ohio for the new state of Missouri. With his wife, six sons and all of their belongings in a covered wagon, he had struck out for the new frontier, only to die of typhoid fever in Gales-burg, Illinois. The mother, a strong and able woman, had continued the journey on to Union Star, Missouri, where the boys grew up. With such a heritage it was not surprising that the Zinks of the 1880’s should want to do their share of pioneering.

In 1884 the oldest brother, Samuel Zink, took his wife and five children to South Dakota. Two years later Aaron Zink, his wife and three children moved to Newport, Nebraska. In 1890 Nathaniel Zink and family came to Stuart, and Joseph Zink, wife and seven children moved to Naper. In 1893 Hanby, with six children, moved up into Oklahoma. The youngest brother, Philip, had died soon after the Civil War.

Nathaniel Zink and his family came on the train from Missouri and spent several days in the new Stuart Hotel across the street from the depot. Mr. Zink had taken a homestead and tree claim on a little stream north and a little east of Stuart, a tributary to the Big Sandy. The oldest daughter, Florence, being of age, also took a claim. Mr. Zink and his sons soon had homes ready for the rest of the family. Land later added to the ranch brought it up to an eighteen hundred acre spread.

The original shack was much too small for his family, so Mr. Zink bought a new two-story home. The only drawback was that the house was eight miles southeast of the homestead. The pioneer took care of the matter by putting his mules and his many sons on the job.

The neighbors helped, too. They first cut a good supply of logs from some timber up on the Niobrara where Joseph Zink lived. With the logs for rollers and sixteen head of mules for power, the Zinks simply rolled their new house across the prairies to its new location, where it still stands today, seven miles north and a half-mile west of the Stuart-Atkinson Airport.

Nathaniel Zink broke out a hundred John Wertz, postmaster, and Will Lockmon, assistant, sorting mail about 1912. Courtesy Dwaine Lockmon.

Gregor and Johanna (Hoffman) Hytrek. Courtesy Marie Krysl. and sixty acres of meadow land for his first farmland. He or his family farmed it for over half a century but, over the years, it eroded badly and the present owner, Nathaniel’s son-in- law, George Keidel, has now put it all back to grass and hay.

The oldest daughter, Florence, had finished high school in Missouri. All of the younger sons and daughters, except Will, graduated from Stuart High School and all taught in rural Holt County schools. Fred, who graduated in 1901, celebrated his seventy second alumni anniversary in Stuart in 1973. Florence, who took a course in the O’Neill Normal, taught in high school and later served as Holt County Superintendent of Schools.

Nathaniel Zink was the adventurous soul who, with his wife and a neighbor couple, made the team and 278 wagon excursion to Yellowstone National Park in 1897. Seven years later, when Ernest, the youngest Zink, graduated from high school, the family moved again. This time to Peru, Nebraska, where the four youngest enrolled in the college. Edith had married Joseph Smith before the move, and Will had a good job on the railroad and didn’t want to give it up.

Dale, who had served through the Spanish American War and had seen some of the world afterward, thought he was too old for college at twenty-eight. At his mother’s urging, however, he enrolled, but dropped out after two years and married Blanche Gallagher. Bessie, Fred and Ernest graduated in 1908.

Fred was captain of the football team and played left halfback. Ernest was an end. During his two years Dale had been catcher for the Peru baseball team. He afterward played professional ball for a few years. After their childrens’ graduation Nathaniel, his wife and Ernest moved back to the Holt County ranch, where Mr. Zink died in 1916. Ernest helped with the ranch and taught school until he was called into the service in the first World War. Mrs. Zink was left alone on the ranch.

While the Zinks lived in Peru they had become friends of the Thomas Huff family of Dorchester, Nebraska. This family, too, had moved to Peru to put their children in college. Grace Ann Huff was a classmate of the Zinks and, after both teaching school for a year, Fred and Grace Ann were married in 1909. They first homesteaded in South Dakota and farmed there for eight years. In 1918, after Ernest had to go to war, Fred, with his wife and four children, moved back to the “home place” to help his mother run the ranch. Three more children were born to Fred and Grace Ann after their return to the old home. Fred kept his South Dakota land, which his son Harold later bought and where he still lives, sleeping in the same room where he was born sixty years before. He also eventually bought the Stuart ranch and all its cattle and machinery. During the years when the ranch work was done with horses, he wintered all the extra horses on the Dakota place. Each fall the Zink men herded thirty to forty head to the north place, then brought them home in the spring. It was a seventy-five mile drive, requiring two days each way.

About twelve head of work horses and two or three saddle horses were kept at home for winter ranch work and for taking the younger children to school. Putting up extra hay on the shares was a means of earning extra cash, but it also meant baling and hauling hay in winter. The Zinks found those jobs as cold and disagreeable as their neighbors did. All the young Zinks went to high school. Robert, the oldest, graduated from Atkinson, all the rest from Stuart High. He and three of his sisters taught school for several years, then Robert went down to Hastings Business College, where he graduated in 1933. Two of his sisters became registered nurses.

Robert married a schoolteacher, Gladyce Houchin, in 1934, then served three years in the Navy during the second World War. He now lives in Lincoln. A sister, Sarah, married James Allyn of Stuart and lives on the old Cal Allyn ranch in the Cleveland community. In addition they operate the old Sweet ranch and the Clark, McConnell and Whitehorse ranches, making a very large spread along the Niobrara River. As mentioned earlier, Margaret married George Keidel and lives on the home ranch. None of the others live in Holt County.

Vaclav Krysl married Mary Motis in Pilson, Czechoslovia, in 1880. In 1891 Vaclav, with his wife, three small children and his parents, Albert and Anna Krysl, endured a three months long Atlantic crossing to America. They came on to Stuart, where Vaclav’s half-sister, Josephine Kozi- sek, lived on a homestead. The newcomers also homesteaded, fifteen miles southwest of Stuart, and spent their first years in a sod house. After they put in their crops Mr. Krysl walked fourteen miles to the Atkinson gravel pit to earn his dollar a day loading cars. On Friday night he bought a week’s supply of groceries and carried them home on his back. The load always included a fifty pound sack of flour.

Mrs. Krysl, a small, frail but hard working woman, guided the oxen while breaking out more land. Her father-in-law, Albert Krysl, guided the plow. When their first crop of grain ripened Mrs. Krysl cut it with a scythe and, with the help of the children, gathered the stalks, bound them into bunches and shocked them in the field, ready for threshing.

Mr. Krysl, an expert swimmer, taught all his children to swim. Because of the many lakes in the region this was a popular summer sport, almost equal with baseball. One ball team in the neighborhood was made up of Frank and Vencil Krysl, George, Stencil and John Hytrek, Bill Strode, Frank Kozisek and Ed Slaymaker. Skating was the popular winter sport and, according to the chronicler of the Krysl family history, Catherine Jansen Krysl, “walking to and from the skating ponds was miles of fun.” The Krysls, too, stripped goose feathers and each of the children was given two featherticks on his or her wedding day. Christine Krysl was the first of Vaclav’s family to be married. It was a three-day affair; the first day for Stuart friends, the second for Atkinson and the third for O’Neill. The usual feast was set out each day— a beef, two hogs, a barrel of wine ordered from California, a wagon load of beer, so heavy it had to be pulled by four horses, was a part of the festival offering.

On the way out the load of beer bogged down and the driver had to unhitch the horses and go to a neighbors for help. While he was gone some young fellows stole a couple of kegs of beer and hid them behind a haystack. During the wedding they had their own party.

Vaclav and Mary retired from the ranch and moved into Stuart. Mary died in 1940, Vaclav in 1944. Both are buried in St. Boniface Cemetery in Stuart. Of their ten children, nine made their lifetime homes in Holt County.

Christine married John Krobot and had seven children. Vencil married Anna Hytrek and had six children. Anna married William Hytrek and had ten children. Frank married Theresa Ziska and had one child. Joseph, a veteran of World War I, died. Edward married Mary Gregor and had two children. Albert married Mary Ziska and had six children. Mary married Albert Ziska and had two children. John married Catherine Jansen and had three children. Agnes married Arthur Ziska and had four children. Joseph Babi, born in Germany in 1858, grew to manhood there and served three years in the German Army. He married Margaret Decker in 1880 and had a two-year-old daughter, Mary, when they came to America, and then to Cass County in 1886. Due to the encouragement of relatives in Holt County, they came on to Stuart in 1900. In 1905 they moved onto a farm at the point where Beaver Creek flows into the Niobrara, a place they always spoke of as “The Hell” because of its rough and rugged land and its terribly isolated location. Here they lived in a log house.

After twelve years they moved to the Winkler place near Emmet, then later bought the Dailey farm, four miles northeast of Emmet. In 1930 they retired and moved back to Stuart. They were the parents of nine children, three of whom are retired and living in O’Neill. One son, John and his wife, the former Lillian Heeb, are still living on their farm near O’Neill. Their five children also live in the O’Neill area.

279 Mike Le Munyan, born in Michigan in 1834, and Phoebe Wadsworth, born in Iowa in 1844, were married in Iowa and lived there until after their four children were born. When Frank the oldest, was six years old they moved to Kansas and “dried out” there. Phoebe’s brother, Albert Wadsworth, lived in Stuart and worked for the railroad. At his persuasion Mike and Phoebe came to Stuart just before election in the fall of 1900.

The Le Munyan family lived with the Wadsworth family until spring, then moved to a ranch twelve miles south and a half-mile east of Stuart, just south of the “correction line.” Mike built up this ranch and finally bought it. Phoebe, an experienced mid-wife, delivered many babies for her Green Valley neighbors. After a few years Mike became restless and moved his family into Atkinson, then bid in the Tonawanda mail route into southern Green Valley.

At this time Frank, a tall, handsome eighteen-year-old, set up housekeeping for himself on a ranch south of Atkinson. He married Victoria Kubart, daughter of Joseph and Anna Kubart of Atkinson. Victoria had been born in Chicago. When only three years old, she came to the farm southwest of Atkinson where her nephew, Charles Kubart, now lives and went to school in the well-known old Dog Town school. When a young lady, she went back to Chicago and worked for a year, an exciting experience for a girl in those days. After her return to Atkinson she worked in the J. M. Gillogly Dry Goods store.

Frank and Victoria were married in 1909 and spent most of the rest of their lives on Frank’s ranch. The Le Munyans were a horse loving family and raised and trained many fine animals. In community service Frank was treasurer of his school district for thirty-five years and county assessor for twelve.

The Le Munyans had four children. One son, Ray, still lives in Green Valley; the other son, Robert, now lives on the home ranch; a sister, Lucille Olberding, lives between O’Neill and Atkinson. Frank and Victoria retired to Atkinson in 1947 and celebrated their Golden Wedding Anniversary in 1959. The minister who married them and both their attendants, James Kubart and Lillian Wads-worth, were all present for the anniversary. Andrew Chenoweth, born in Illinois in 1860, was the youngest of eleven children. An ancestor, Mary Calvert, was the sister of James who received a Maryland land grant from the British Crown. His parents died when he was a small boy and he was reared by an uncle, Jim Johnston. He had some college training at Indiana Asbury College, then received his family inheritance and came to Nebraska where he bought a quarter section near Fullerton, Nebraska, He taught school until 1884, then went to Washington state and worked as a cow hand and sheep rancher. In the fall he bought two mustangs and rode them back to Nebraska (a forty days trip) and built a house and barn on his land.

In March, 1885, he married Martha Agusta Grace Sessions who had moved from Michigan to Fullerton to teach and practice midwifery. She had earned her midwife certificate at the Battle Creek Sanitarium, operated by the Dr. Post of cereal fame. The couple set up housekeeping on the farm. Andrew did most of the local butchering while “Mattie” presided at the births of most of the local infants. In 1902 the family, including four children, moved overland to Holt County, driving a small herd of cattle and horses. They lived for a year in a house which Andrew built just south of Stuart. He then built a sod house on a homestead in Cleveland Township, north of Stuart. He enlarged his holdings by purchasing the lease on a school section and buying a quarter of tax land. About 1907 Andrew bought an adjoining quarter of land and built a new frame house on it. Most of the lumber and the square nails, used in building the new home, had been salvaged from three old houses. Andrew was elected Justice of the Peace shortly after moving to Cleveland Township, an office he held for most of the rest of his life (he died in 1942) . Glenn, the second son, went to school in Stuart. The seventh and eighth grades were combined in an upstairs room of the schoolhouse and Florence Zink was the teacher. Some of his schoolmates were from the Wadsworth, Dobney, Levi, Gallagher and other families.

Mary Motis Krysl, small and frail but hard-working, guided the oxen that broke the sod on their new land in Holt County. Her father-in-law, Albert, guided the plow. Since her husband, Vaclav, worked for the railroad, he came home only on week ends. Drawn by Marie Krysl, Stuart, Nebraska. 280 After finishing the seventh grade in Stuart, Glenn went through the eighth grade at the Clay Creek school, up nearer the Niobrara. Here his classmates were the Bouchers, McCoys, Lofquests and others. The Berrys, Allyns, Frosts, Demings, Becks, Earners, Brodies, Robertsons and Sweets were their neighbors. A realtor in Atkinson, Hugh Allen put together the big Payne-Sargisson ranch in that area.

Dustin was the local post office and general store. Sophet Earner was one of the storekeepers for many years. Sophet always bought a stalk of bananas every Monday. On Saturday afternoons the young bucks of the area came to town, bought the remains of the stalk and held banana eating contests. The banana eating boys were Glenn, Dave and Jim Deming, Elmer Hewett, a Rumsey or two, Cosner, Richardson, McWhirter and Eby.

It was fifteen miles from the Chenoweth place to Stuart, an all day trip with horses. Glenn was one of the men who helped dig the five and one-half feet deep ditch for Stuart’s first waterworks pipes. He also helped his father build the Krotter owned telephone line from Cleveland to Stuart.

Spring farm sales were quite common at this time in the Cleveland area. O. V. Kenaston of Butte was the auctioneer and a John Flanigan clerked the sales. Flanigan weighed about two hundred and fifty pounds. One day when he was late in arriving Andrew Chenoweth, who weighed more than one hundred pounds less, took over the clerk’s duties. However Kenaston announced, “John Flanigan is to clerk this sale but you won’t recognize him, as he recently took the Keeley Cure (a treatment that was supposed to cure an alcoholic of drinking) and this is all that’s left of him.” Although both of the Chenoweth sons left Nebraska to practice professions elsewhere, the two daughters married local farmers and remained in the home community. Nellie Chenoweth married Charles Mulford and had four children. Lucy married Charles McClurg and had three children.

Anton Wallinger and Grace Babi, both born in Germany, came to America on the same boat and eventually settled in Plattsmouth, Nebraska. They were married there in 1889, two years after leaving Germany. Six children were born to them before they moved to a farm south of Stuart in 1905, where three more children were born.

Anton and Grace had been preceded to the Stuart area by numerous relatives: Joseph Babi had moved there in 1900, as had Mary Babi, who married George Weber. John Braum and Frances Babi, also a sister of Grace, had settled north of Stuart even earlier, 1889. A few years later Grace’s youngest brother, Aloys Babi, also came from Germany to settle near his relatives.

Mr. Wallinger made his living by farming but found time to serve on the Stuart Township Board for many years, and on the board of directors of the Stuart Farmer’s Cooperative Creamery, as well as on the Federal Land Bank Committee.

Most of his farm work was done by “Tom and Ginny,” a team of old mules that only Mr. Wallinger could handle. Very early, however, he bought a Ford car. The elder Wal- lingers were members of the St. Boniface Church for as long as they lived in the community and Mr. Wallinger not only helped build the second church but had a big hand in furnishing it.

In April, 1910, Mary Wallinger, Grace and Anton’s oldest daughter, married Fred Goebel in the presence of many friends and relatives in the St. Boniface Church. The fifth child in a family of nine, he had farmed with his father in Cumming County, Nebraska, until 1906. Then, at the age of twenty-seven, he came to Holt County and bought a farm four and a half miles southeast of Stuart.

Six children were born to Fred and Mary on the farm. One of the sons, Andrew, tells the family story. The Goebels farmed and raised hay and cattle. Very early Fred built his own hay stacker and put up countless tons of hay with it. In 1924 he installed an electric light plant in the basement of his eight-room farm home. Two years later a tornado and hailstorm swept through the community southeast of Stuart.

Laying the corner stone for the new St. Boniface Church in 1911. The first church, built in 1896, was by this time outgrown. Courtesy Dwaine Lockmon. When it was over all of the Goebel buildings except the house were gone, their car had been flattened to the ground, the windmill was bent over, with its wheel and motor on the ground, livestock and chickens were dead and injured, the garden was bare and the trees stripped of their foliage. The telephone lines between Stuart and all towns east were down. About a month afterward the trees put out new leaves, but the next spring they were bare.

Disaster struck again, two years later, when fire totally destroyed the big farmhouse, the only building the storm had spared. The family lived in the garage until, with the generous help of kind neighbors, a new house could be built.

On one occasion Mary Goebel butchered one of her chickens and discovered a tiny gold nugget in its gizzard. She took it into town and had it examined by Mr. Chittick, the jeweler. It weighed twenty grains, but where the chicken picked it up remained a mystery.

About 1930 Mr. Goebel dug an irrigation well west of his buildings. From it he pumped water into a barrel, from which it was piped into a corn field, the first such system on the farm.

January 20, 1942, Andrew Goebel married Viola Stracke of Stuart in Our Lady of Sorrows church in Chicago. He went on to serve in the U. S. Army until 1945 then, with his wife, returned to Stuart and opened a locker plant and grocery store. Across the street his cousin, Anton Kaup, son of Aloys and Bertha (Wallinger) Kaup, operates a similar plant. The Stuart community keeps them both busy, butchering and processing meat. Viola and Andy have six children. Three are married, Ritch helps in the store, Linda and Patricia are still in school.

281 The Frost ancestors came very early from England to America. One, first name not given, was born in Ohio in 1791. In 1812 he married an Ester Miles. The fifth of their eight children, Luther Frost, married Elizabeth Ogg and had four children. Later he married Zilpha Duer and had nine children. Samuel Frost was a son of this second marriage.

Samuel married Drusilla Harvey in Iowa in 1883 and had five children. Following the passage of the Kinkaid Act in 1904, Samuel moved his family by covered wagon to Holt County. Drusilla asked only that he find a place with streams on it. The ideal spot was ten miles north of Stuart on Cedar Gulch Creek which flows into the Beaver. There they lived in a corn crib while they built an adobe brick house, a rarety in Holt County. They moved into the new home on Thanksgiving day, 1905. One of the Frost sons, Adolphus, was one of Stuart’s earliest photographers. He served his country in World War I, then returned to Stuart. Adolphus, as well as his brothers and sisters, was a teacher. When he taught the Gravel Ridge school (District 223) some eight miles north of Stuart, his younger brother Waldo was one of his pupils.

Mr. Frost died in 1909, leaving Drusilla to raise the family and keep the ranch going. Her son Waldo, after teaching one year, made the ranch his life’s work, raising purebred registered Herefords and becoming a member of the Nebraska Hereford Breeders Association. A happy man, well-known for his sense of humor, he enjoyed working in his garden and “even helped with the canning.” The temperance movement was strong in Stuart in its early years and Waldo became a member, signing the pledge and living up to it all his life. Neither did he smoke. In 1938 he married Grace Kissinger at Lake Andes, South Dakota, and brought her home to the ranch. His mother had died three years earlier and Waldo, who took over the ranch at that time, lived there until his death in 1960. His daughter, Ellen Frost Tunender, writes that most of the Cleveland community took part in dances and other festivities held at the old Payne- Sargesson ranch, managed by the Stewarts during the late ‘eighties and early ‘nineties. There were even a few rodeos in the community in those early days and Waldo was a good bronc rider. The most famous horse he rode was named “Midnight.” Among their neighbors were the Becks, Lofquests, Jamisons and Mc-Coys. The Jamisons and McCoys were Frost relatives, as Mary Frost, half- sister to Samuel, had first married a Jamison and, after his death, a McCoy.

At the age of eleven George Pongratz of Germany, accompanied by an aunt, Carrie Weber Peterson, came to the United States in 1893. He was to stay with an uncle, George Weber, until his father could make arrangements to bring the rest of the family to America. In the meantime his mother died and his father stayed in Germany.

George had gone to school in Germany and had finished the Seventh Book there. In America he had to work for his board and room until he was fifteen, so went to school no more. While working as a hired hand at Humphrey, Nebraska, he became acquainted with Mary Babi, daughter of Joseph Babi. Not long afterward the Babis moved to Stuart but George kept in touch with Mary by correspondence. When they became engaged Anton Wallinger, Mary’s uncle, encouraged George to come to Stuart and buy land on which to make his home.

In 1906 George took the train to Stuart and married Mary there on February 26 in the St. Boniface Church. The land he bought was north of Stuart. The frame house had three tiny rooms and it took only $25 to furnish them. On this farm their son Joseph was born the next year, with Mrs. Chenoweth in attendance. In time, four more children were added to the family. One of the daughters, Teresa Pongratz Givens, writes that the family seldom got to go to church in winter, but “in spring and summer driving to church in a horse drawn buggy wps pleasant and memorable. “There was time to breathe the fresh air, listen to the meadow larks, watch for wild flowers and sing praises to the Creator.” Traveling in a buggy behind a pair of spirited horses was fine, but not to be compared with making the trips in their first Model T, purchased from Mort Gill in 1916. In 1919 George Pongratz sold the Cleveland farm and bought a larger place five miles northeast of Emmet, where another daughter was born in 1921. Thirty-six years later George and Mary retired and moved into O’Neill, where they now live. Their daughter Alda, and her husband, Art Givens, now own the farm.

Hans N. Bogue, born in 1853 in Denmark, came to Mapleton, Iowa, while still very young. He met Elva Mae Porter, a native Iowan, and they were married in Sioux City in 1894. With their ten children they moved to Stuart in the fall of 1907, traveling on the train and shipping their livestock, machinery and household goods. The family lived in the Stuart Hotel for three months while Mr. Bogue built a frame house on his Kinkaid claim in the Stuart vicinity. The children went to the district school, a one-room frame building with one teacher and all eight grades. Over the years the teachers were Julia Murphy, a Mr. Wilson, Nellie and Bessie Coats, Myrtle Cosner, Eva Robertson, Mrs. Golder, Mrs. Fred Zink, Grace Keyes and Frances Ullrich Hitchcock. The Stuart post office at that time was housed in Ralph Chittick’s drug store and Ralph was the postmaster. In 1916 a severe blizzard killed many cattle and left drifts as high as the telephone poles. Of the many prairie fires, most set by lightning, the one that harmed the Bogues most was set by two boys who had come out from Stuart to visit their brother. The brother was raking hay on the quarter south of the Bogue place and the fire burned their hay crop, their corn fields and fences, and was extinguished just south of the hoghouse and farm buildings.

Neighbors came with plows, with cream cans of water and gunny sacks. A new wagon was burned and a horse had to be killed because of its burns. “There was no crop for us, that year,” wrote Winnie Bogue Hupp. Another bad year was the one in which a hail storm took the crop, leaving only stubble, and the accompanying high wind moved the house two inches off its foundation. However, the family had an Edison phonograph with morning-glory horn and cylinder records. The only one around, it brought many neighbors to their home to enjoy the music with them.

Freight wagons from Stuart, hauling supplies to Sophet Earner’s store in Dustin, regularly passed the Bogue place, and Gypsies came now and then, helping themselves to garden truck, chickens and eggs.

Herds of cattle were frequently driven across the Bogue place to the Payne-Sargesson Ranch farther north. When this was to happen the drover put out a general ring on the telephone line, asking all the people on the trail to shut their gates along the road, get their children in the house and tie up their dogs.

The Bogue family moved from Stuart to Atkinson in the fall of 1919 and, during the early ‘twenties, operated the Atkinson garage— in the building presently occupied by the bowling alley.

Beatrice Iverson Nelson writes that her parents, Albert and Nellie Iverson, came to Stuart in the spring of 1909 and lived on one of the Payne-Sar-gesson ranches (known as the Boucher place) at Dustin until fall, then moved into Stuart. The next spring they moved to another of the 282 Sargesson ranches at Carnes, west on the Niobrara. They remained there until 1911, then moved back to Stuart and built a house south of the railroad tracks.

Two years later they moved into the Bigelow Hotel, which they operated for three years. In 1916 they moved to the Hank Jennings farm, where a son, Forrest Iverson still lives. Two years later the rest of the family moved back to the hotel for another two years, then back to the farm.

Frederick and Anna Batenhorst, with their six children, left Germany in 1876 to settle in a German colony in Cumming County, Nebraska. Anton, one of the sons born in Germany in 1862, had been apprenticed to a baker in the old country. He married Gertrude Kaup in 1891 in Monterly, Nebraska.

When Gertrude’s parents, Herman and Sophie Kaup, moved to Stuart in 1911, she and Anton decided to move there, too. Gertrude, who had been in failing health for some time, went on ahead with her parents. Anton and the children followed on the train with their household goods and livestock. They arrived in Stuart on March 6, 1911, only a few hours before the mother died.

The family settled just west of Stuart, where a son, Robert, still lives. Of the nine Battenhorst children, another son, Herman, married Lucy Shold. Johanna married Joseph Ramm. Widowed in 1934, she still lives in Stuart. Sophia married and moved to Iowa. Alfons married Eleanor Baum and farmed south of town. They now live in Atkinson. Frank died in infancy. Robert and Joseph married sisters, Mary and Alice Hoffman, daughters of Garhart Hoffman of Stuart. Mathilda married Frank Flannigan of an early day ranch family. Monica married and moved out of the county.

Today’s Stuart is still a busy little town. It has, of course, changed through the years, meeting the demands of its people and its trade area. During the 1940s there were ten grocery stores in the village. There are far fewer today but they have been enlarged and converted to “supermarket” type establishments. The oldest firm still doing business in the town is the Krotter Lumber Company. As of 1973 it has been in operation by the Krotter family for eighty-four years. The second longest lived firm was that of W. N. Coats. Mr. Coats opened his furniture and hardware store in 1891. After his son Norris came into the company they added cars, farm implements, paint and Skelgas to their stock in trade. They also published the Stuart Advocate, operated the Coats Funeral Home and Ambulance Service and ran a silver fox farm north of town. Seventy-seven years after opening the first store, the last of the Coats’ business interests were sold in 1968. Three of the original eight or nine Stuart hay barns are still standing in the town. Ben Engler, Bob Greenfield and Garry Lockmon still sell feed, Greenfield, Bill and Lonnie Wewel are still in the hay business. Shearer opened the first harness shop in 1890, ran it until 1920 and sold it to Frank (Shorty) Root, who kept it open until 1954. Two years later, with the revival of interest in horses, especially riding stock, Wes Cobb opened a tack shop. Wes sold out to Don Bouska in 1970. Don is still running the shop.

Makes of cars sold in Stuart since Mort Gill started selling Fords in 1910 include names that have long since disappeared into the mists of history. Names such as Maxwells, Hup- mobiles, Studebakers, Willys Knights and Whippets. Mr. Coats at one time owned a Gimmel and a Dolly.

The first filling station was a Standard Oil concern, selling gas and kerosene. William Krotter at on time owned a station, as did John Chaney. W. R. Cobb, Sr. in 1933 sold gasoline for seventeen cents a gallon at his station, and oil for twenty cents a quart. Those truly were the good old days.

← Chapter 29: Inez Valley | Table of Contents | Chapter 31: Stafford Through The Years →

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