Chapter 33: Chambers And The Big Hay Valley

← Before Today: A History of Holt County, Nebraska

Chambers and the Big Hay Valley Chapter Thirty-Three in 1883 R. C. Wry took as his homestead the northeast quarter of the present town of Chambers. Main Street, running east and west, was the south boundary of his land. The section line, running north and south through town, was his western boundary. Wry’s store was the first business in the new town.

Letters could be mailed at the store, to be picked up by freighters coming in from O’Neill or Ewing. The freighters also brought in mail for the settlers round about. By 1885 Mr. Wry thought it best to make his little private post office official, since other business firms had, by then, set up in the village.

With his application for an office, Mr. Wry sent the name “Juanita,” the name of his younger daughter. Since there was already an office by that name in the state, another had to be chosen. Romaine Sanders wrote that “The Chambers Post Office was named by W. D. Matthews of the Frontier Office at O’Neill in honor of his friend, B. F. Chambers, Register of the Land Office at Niobrara.” Burton Kiltz in 1919 wrote that the same story was told to him by John Alderson and Mrs. Frank (Lena) Dyke, a daughter of Mr. Wry. Both Kiltz and Alderson were early settlers of the area.

Mr. Wry served as postmaster until 1911, when he turned the office over to Frank Dyke, who moved it to a corner of his jewelry store close by. It has had numerous postmasters since that time.

Several settlers had homesteaded near the site of the future town of Chambers before the Wrys came to the South Fork Valley. Among them were the Kutscher, Eckley, Alderson and Fluckey families.

Peter Charles Kutscher, born in Germany in 1858, came to this country as a small boy and was raised by an uncle on a farm in Otoe County. In 1879 he married Mary Jane Clapp and settled on a homestead a quarter mile south of the spot where Chambers later stood. The family had five children and the parents lived out their lives on the homestead. After the development of the hay industry in the Valley Pete made many a long trip to O’Neill with hay, and the return trip to Chambers with freight. Pete and Mary Jane were married on December 24, 1879. They both died on December 24, Pete in 1936 at seventy-eight years of age, Mary Jane in 1941 at seventy-seven. Their farm is still in the family, belonging now to a granddaughter and her husband, Mr. and Mrs. Lyle Wright.

John Marr Alderson was born in Wisconsin in 1848. With two younger brothers he migrated to Platte County, Nebraska in 1870. Five years later he married Josephine Eckley, daughter of George and Eunice Eckley. In 1880 Mr. Eckley and his daughter Mary, came on to Holt County and filed on claims a little northwest of the soon to be established town of Chambers. The following year, when Mr. and Mrs. Eckley and their six children moved to their homesteads, John Alderson, with 317 his wife, Josephine, came with them and filed on a nearby quarter of land. Both families prospered. One of the Eckley daughters, Mary, married Benjamin Wood, whose father, B. F. Wood, another early settler, donated a corner of his homestead to the town for a cemetery. Mr. and Mrs. Eckley, who died in the same year, 1908, are buried there.

Within a few years John Alderson owned six hundred acres of land at the site of his homestead. He also owned a quarter section near the settlement of Shamrock, four miles north of Chambers, another a mile south of that one and a third eight miles south of Chambers. John and Josie brought five children with them from Platte County and had eight more on the homestead. Their oldest son, George, drowned in 1884, the next oldest, Jesse, died in 1892 of an unknown illness. Josephine, the mother, died in 1908, the same year as her parents, and is buried in the same cemetery.

Of the thirteen Alderson children, Ned, who married a neighbor girl, Anna Louise Kiltz, was the only one to live out his full life span in the South Fork Valley. He acquired all but eighty acres of his father’s holdings and added several hundred more, making a good sized layout Ned and Anna had eight children, but a grandson, Bill Sammons of Amelia, is the only member of the family now in southern Holt County.

Austin Lafayette Fluckey homesteaded southeast of the site of Chambers in 1882. He then returned to Iowa and brought his wife and four children to the claim in a covered wagon drawn by a mule and a pony, leading a cow behind.

Both Austin and his wife, Viola Robinson, were born in Iowa in 1854. In 1886 twins, Elzetta and Claude, were born to them on the homestead. Claude died at birth and was buried on their land. In 1894 their youngest child, Mary Annella, was born.

About 1886 Mr. Fluckey bought some land just south of the town and set out the first orchard in the area. A little later he platted “Fluckey’s Addition” and began to sell lots. He also moved in two buildings and opened a general store. There he bought and sold cream, eggs, butter, poultry and furs, and repaired all makes of clocks. As time went on Austin Fluckey built several other buildings in Chambers and added jewelry to his stock of goods in the store.

Mrs. Fluckey died in 1916. Her husband sold his business and moved to Arkansas, but came back to Chambers a few years later and made his home on his place south of town until his death in 1934.

Of their six children, three married hometown boys or girls. Luella married Jack Kellar and spent her entire life in or near Chambers. Arthur married Bessie Meyers and lived most of his life on a farm south of town. Bertha married George Anderson and spent all of her married life near Chambers. Her husband died in 1924 and Bertha died in Oregon in 1957. Elzetta married William Blake of Chambers but lived in the Burwell community.

George Jefferson Anderson, born in 1853 in Illinois, homesteaded nine and a half miles southeast of the Chambers’ site in 1882. Three years later he married Myra Anne Compton at Little post office. Myra, too, had come from Illinois two years earlier. Her doctor had advised her to seek a dryer climate— and Nebraska must have been just right as she lived to be eighty-six years of age and was very healthy all of that time. She taught one of the first schools at Ewing, and continued to teach for several years after her marriage.

Always active in Christian work, she helped found the Baptist church at Chambers. Her husband, a chronic sleepwalker, used to get up in the night, harness his horses and plow his fields, unharness and go back to bed. He wondered why he was so tired in the mornings— until his wife followed him one night and told him what he was doing.

George and Myra had two daughters, Florence Smith and Ivy Lienhart. Both lived all their lives in Holt County.

Rufus C. Wry, born and educated in Canada, was a school master in New Brunswick. He was forty-five when he married Diana Wilbur in 1877 in New Brunswick. She was thirty-five and had been educated in a ladies Academy and had studied art at St. John, New Brunswick. When the family came to Macon, Nebraska, in 1880 she brought some of her fine paintings with her.

Rufus and Diana had two daughters, Lena Alice and Juanita, when they arrived on their homestead in 1883. After he had put in his first crops, Rufus opened his little store. He built a house on the present location of Victor Harley’s home, then built a barn, granary and chicken house. The Wry home sheltered many newcomers until they could get located and settled in their own homes. The Wrys planted a great many trees. A large grove of shade trees later became the favored site of the community’s Fourth of July celebrations. With Dr. T. V. Norvell and the Rev. J. L. Coppoc, he helped organize the Chambers Baptist Church, as has been related earlier. Generous and sympathetic in time of need, he was many times asked to offer prayer at graveside rites when no minister was available.

The country settled up so rapidly during the first two years after Rufus opened his store that, on April 9, 1885, he received a carload of flour and sold it all within a week. For a long while he had five teams on the road, hauling supplies for his store from O’Neill. When the first Harvest Home Festival was held in 1866, Mr. Wry offered his pasture for its location. The Baptist church and a nearby building housed the exhibits for those early fairs.

In 1891 Mr. Wry purchased the Chambers Eagle from Earnest Henry and changed its name to the Bugle. His daughters helped him set type during the few years he stayed in the newspaper business.

Lena Alice Wry married Henry Franklin Dyke, the son of a near neighbor, in June, 1898, and became the mother of two daughters. On another June day, nine years later, Juanita married Wood Jarman, a young man who had come from Iowa in 1905 to visit his brothers who were farming west of town. They became the parents of three sons.

Rufus Wry died in 1916, Diana Wry, the artist, died in 1927. Her grandchildren now treasure the paintings their pioneer grandmother brought to the Nebraska frontier with her nearly a century ago.

In 1883 James and Mary Ann Gibson and two of their sons, James A. and Urban, took homesteads about Lee Baker, early Chambers Druggist. Courtesy E. M. Jarman.

318 ten miles southeast of Chambers. Mr. Gibson bought Myra Anne Compton’s relinquishment, as she was soon to marry George Anderson. In 1892 another son, Elmer Gibson, married Katherine Jane Isaacson who had come to a nearby homestead with her parents the year before. Elmer and his bride settled on his father’s claim, where they farmed and ranched for nearly forty years. They raised a family of seven sons and daughters. Elmer served on the Holt County Board of Supervisors from 1922 until 1930, the year of his death. His wife, “Jennie” lived on for another thirty years.

Harrison McClanahan and his wife, Nettie, also came to Chambers in 1883. Their former home was in Wisconsin, their homestead was five miles east of Chambers. Their daughter, Mrs. Lloyd Gibson, has kept some old letters and bills that belonged to her parents. Among them is the lumber bill for their first home on the claim, a fourteen by sixteen foot, two- story house. The total bill was $93.44. Mr. McClanahan had been a drummer through the Civil War. The drum sticks he used all during the war now belong to a great-grandson, Jim Farrier, of Deadwood, South Dakota. One of their sons, John, was thirteen when his family came to the homestead. He grew up and married a neighbor’s daughter, Edith Dyke. They made their home a mile east and a mile south of his father’s place, and there raised five children. Their oldest son, Omer, lives in Chambers, Winnie (Mrs. Lloyd Gibson) lives in O’Neill. One son died very young, two daughters live in St. Paul, Nebraska. Rev. J. L. Coppoc, who helped organize the Chambers Baptist church, came from Iowa with his family in 1884 and settled near Goose Lake, some ten miles southeast of Chambers. A few years later they moved to a farm nearer Chambers and spent the rest of their lives there. Rev. Coppoc also helped organize the Harold church, near his home, in 1894 and served it for several years. A son, Earl Coppoc, born in Iowa in 1880, took over the farm after the death of his father in 1914. He and his wife, Pearl, raised a family of five children. Earl died in 1960, his wife in 1972.

Martin Wintermote, born in Iowa in 1858, married Semira Ann Dorothy in 1879. He brought his family to a claim three and one-half miles north of Chambers in 1883. At the present time (1973 ) the land is known as the “Ned Alderson long quarter.” A small grove of trees still marks the homesite. While the Wintermotes lived there the South Fork Creek flooded, spreading over a wide area of the valley and pouring three inches of water into their house. / Sometime after this Martin took a homestead five miles northwest of Chambers and built a house and barn. While he lived there he farmed, raised cattle, did some auctioneering and carpentering, carried the mail and managed a hotel. The last he built himself in the village of Shamrock that had sprung up north of his farm, only about five miles from the slightly older village of Chambers. In 1888, just before the blizzard, he moved the hotel to Chambers, which had grown more rapidly then Shamrock, which was soon abandoned and its remaining buildings moved away. In Chambers Martin added onto his hotel and ran it for some time. In the 1890’s he sold the hotel to Frank Charles and returned to farming. In 1916 he moved to Wyoming and filed on a homestead.

Lee Wintermote, born in Iowa in 1881, grew up in Holt County and, in 1902, married and bought the buildings, a team of horses and some other property on a school section adjoining his father’s farm. A few trees and some earth mounds where the buildings stood still show that a home once stood here. Lee preceded his father to Wyoming by two years.

Ellsworth Wintermote, born in Chambers in 1888 in the hotel his father built and managed, married in 1910 and lived on a farm four miles north of Chambers. He and his family also left for Wyoming in 1916. Will Wintermote, Martin’s brother, who came to the valley in the ‘eighties, homesteaded near his brother’s place on what is now the Henry Weber farm. The year after the blizzard of ’88 he moved his family back to Iowa, where the winters were less severe.

Mr. and Mrs. John S. Kellar, who moved from Illinois to a homestead near Chambers in 1883, were the family who built the big house with sliding doors that converted their kitchen and living room into a church every Sunday. The Kellars, hospitable, hardworking people, soon built up their cattle herd to two hundred head. Settlers were moving into the valley in large numbers during this period. Among them was the family of John and Leah Smith Hoffman, native Pennsylvanians, who had spent seven years in Kansas before coming to Chambers in 1884. The Hoffmans brought five children with them, the oldest, Jacob, was seventeen, the baby girl was a year old. Their new home was near the Kellar homestead. The father was a carpenter by trade and some of the buildings he constructed in the area are still standing.

Both families experienced the tragedies of the blizzard of ’88. The Kellars lost most of their two hundred cattle and Mr. Kellar’s brother, Thomas, perished in the storm. Peter and John Hoffman, sons of John and Leah, barely escaped with their lives. The young people of the Kellar and Hoffman families attended most neighborhood picnics and other social affairs together and, in time, romance blossomed. In 1891 Jacob Hoffman and Eva Kellar were married in the Kellar’s big house and went to live on the tree claim Jacob had taken over from his father. A few years later Anna Kellar became the bride of John Hoffman.

William Kellar married Ida Belle Bisbee, daughter of another pioneer family and May, the oldest daughter, married L W. Amlong, a pioneer neighbor. John Kellar married Luella Mae Fluckey in 1898 in the Kellar home. The following year Mr. and Mrs. Kellar sold out to a Mr. Varney and moved to Florida. Their youngest daughter, Bertha, moved with them. Their new home was in Bradenton and the local newspaper in 1901 carried the following news feature, “Cupid had sent the arrow that pierced two hearts ere she (Bertha) came to make her home in the Land of Flowers, and Mr. James Doherty came from their old home in Nebraska to claim his bride.” After the wedding the couple returned to Chambers to make their home.

William Kellar and his wife and May Amlong and her husband later followed their parents to Florida and lived out their lives there. John and Luella Mae Kellar remained in Holt County. After Luella Mae’s death in 1937 John married the former Etta Dyke. Anna Kellar Hoffman and her husband, John, spent some time in Florida but later returned to Chambers. Meanwhile the elder Hoffmans and their younger children had returned to Kansas in 1895. Another romance that began in Chambers culminated in the 1898 marriage of Emma Hoffman and Jacob Maring of Emmet. Although they were married in Kansas, the couple made their home in Emmet. Jacob, the eldest Hoffman son, bought his father’s homestead and built up the place in the years to come, modernizing the house and buildings in keeping with the changing times. There were few Sundays in the sixty-nine years of the Kellar church’s existence that Jacob and Eva did not attend services, first in the Kellar home, later in the church built on the land Mr. Kellar donated for that purpose before he moved to Florida. Jacob served as Clerk of the Session 319 of the church for fifty-eight consecutive years. The Hoffman homestead is now owned and occupied by Mr. and Mrs. Ray Hoffman. Ray is the older of the two sons of John and Eva and is head of the third generation of Hoffmans to live on the same land. The other son, Ralph, lives in Ewing. Lucille Hiatt, daughter of John and Anna Hoffman, and Orville Kellar, son of Jack and Mae Kellar, live in O’Neill. Oliver Maring, son of Emma (Hoffman) and Jacob Maring, lives near Emmet. Fourth generation members still living in Holt County are Bernard and Donald, sons of Ray Hoffman, who live in Chambers; and Wayne, son of Ralph Hoffman, who lives in O’Neill. Fifth generation members are Bernard’s sons, Bruce, Kevin and Brian; and Donald’s children, Randy, Bradley, Craig and Lorie. Nine-year-old J. H. Oetter came with his parents from Bavaria in 1854. The family settled near Joliet, Illinois, where J. H. grew to manhood and married Margaret Reimer in 1870. His wife had come from Germany with her parents at the age of sixteen. She spoke Low German and her husband spoke High. Two children were born to them before they came to Nebraska in 1879. They settled first in Saunders County, then came on to Holt County in the spring of 1883. They shipped all their possessions to Clearwater by train, and from there went by wagon and on foot to the homestead of a bachelor, S. E. Honeywell. Mr. Oetter homesteaded just north of the Honeywell place, on Section 21, Township 24, Range 11. By the time they moved to their homestead they had four children; one, a little girl, was so small at birth that her head would fit in a teacup and a shoebox was her bed.

J. H. Oetter “believed in having all kinds of stock to make a go of it cattle, horses, sheep, hogs, goats, chickens, geese and ducks.” The family lived with Mr. Honeywell until John could buy a barn and move it onto his homestead. He fitted up one corner of it for living quarters and moved his family into it. As soon as he could he built a two-room house, where another son, John G., was born that October. Three more children were born there, but Benjamin died of “summer complaint” at the age of two.

Barbara and John Michael Oetter, born in Illinois in the early ‘seventies, and Emma, born in Saunders County, took homesteads as soon as they were old enough. Barbara’s quarter is now a part of the Hoerle Brothers farm, Mike’s just east of it, was turned over to his father when he went back to Saunders County. Emma’s quarter was a part of the place now owned by Lloyd Knox although, after her marriage to Harry Simpson in 1902, she and her husband lived on it for thirteen years.

J. H. Getter, or “Grosfather,” as his grandchildren called him, was a great lover of trees and flowers. At one time he had fifty-six different kinds of trees growing on his farm, as well as many berry bushes and a fine grape arbor. He also built a fish pond, fed by two flowing wells. The pond, known today as “Getter’s Lake,” was large enough for boating.

Deeply interested in community affairs, Mr. Getter was one of the leaders in organizing and putting on Fourth of July celebrations in the various groves that soon came to dot the country. Mrs. Getter, a quiet home-body, was mid-wife to many of the women of her community.

In the late ‘eighties J. H. bought a well drilling rig from William Jordan. With the help of his sons he put down many of the wells south of Ewing and west of Clearwater. Fred Getter, born in Saunders County, took over the well drilling business in 1915 and moved to Clearwater. He will be remembered as the driller of the first flowing wells around Goose Lake. In 1918 he married Georgia Simpson. In the early 1900’s Mike, John and Benjamin Getter took over their father’s home place. Benjamin died there in 1910, Mike left soon afterward for South Dakota, John lived out his life on the original homestead. He had married Sophia Sprandle, formerly of Indiana, in 1908. When she died less than a year later, he lived on with his parents on the homestead until 1917 when he married Elsie Jordan.

In South Dakota Mike carried mail to and from White River. In 1914 he married Julia Henrichsen and, four j. H. Oetter family. Courtesy Elsie Oetter. years later, brought her back to his Nebraska homestead.

J. H. Getter was one of the first elders of the Emanuel Lutheran Church, better known as the Conley church. The charter members, Adam Roth, Mr. Getter, Albert Ashke, William Lehman, Rudolph Mielke, Fredrick Shroer and Kasper Hoerle, held their first services in the District 121 school house in 1885. Four years later they built a church and parsonage in their midst. A man by the name of Spooler built the parsonage for $30. Rev. Sprandel lived in the parsonage from 1906 to 1911. It was moved into Chambers about 1913. Mr. Getter was a very active member of the church as long as he lived, many times making up lacking funds out of Flowing well on the Oetter farm, 1908. Clay Johnson Collection.

320 his own pocket to keep the church going.

The Oetter sons baled and hauled hay to Ewing in the early years of the industry. Their father, very early, made a water wheel and attempted to run it with water power. It was not a success. Later he concluded he had made the buckets too large. Nevertheless people came from miles around on Sunday afternoons to see the water wheel, and Mr. Oetter, a very hospitable man, asked them one and all to stay and eat. Mrs. Oetter and her daughters spent most of their Sundays cooking for the visitors, and sometimes ran out of food because so many came.

A man from Illinois followed the Oetters to Nebraska, walking all the way. A slightly retarded fellow, he was weak from hunger and almost naked when Mrs. Oetter saw him coming and hurried out to put her apron around him. James Hale was his name and the Oetters helped him homestead on a quarter near them. His mother came to live with him, and when she died Mrs. Oetter took him in and he lived the rest of his life with them.

The Oetters had paid Hale’s mother’s funeral expenses (hers was one of the first graves in the Conley cemetery) and when Hale died in 1926 they paid his funeral expenses and his debts in exchange for his homestead.

Mr. Oetter, with the help of Jim Hale, dug a ditch with spades through Section 20, where now a creek flows. A man by the name of Bowman drowned in a hole in the creek. The place has since been referred to as “Bowman’s hole.” Mr. Oetter remembered two very dry years in Nebraska, 1894 and 1934. In 1934 Goose Lake went dry, so dry that they played baseball in the lake bed, and found countless arrowheads, uncovered by the shifting sands.

In the early days a diphtheria plague swept the community when John G. was very small. Several neighbor children died and little John was very ill. The doctor said there was no hope for him, but his mother had read in a German paper that putting pine tar on top of the stove and letting it burn until the room was full of smoke was a cure for diphtheria. She tried it and John got well. J. H. Oetter died at the age of ninety-three. The homestead is now owned by a grandson, George Oetter, and the house that J. H. built in 1908 is now lived in by the tenant, Ted Tomjack.

Another early settler who homesteaded on the far southern border of Holt County was Charles Stowell. Born in New York state in 1845, he served through the Civil War, then went to law school, worked in the lumber business and later owned a lumber mill. In 1870 he married Irene Austin at Potsdam, New York. With their two children they came to Nebraska and homesteaded just over the line in Wheeler County. There Charles established the Frances post office, named after his daughter, Alma Frances, now Mrs. Charles Farrier.

In 1912 Mr. Stowell retired, moved to Chambers and opened a law office. He and his wife are buried in the Chambers cemetery.

John Peter Johnson and Matilda Louise Swanson were born near Lake Vattern in Sweden. Married in 1874, they lived in Sweden until 1880, when they and their three children came to Princeton, Illinois. A short time later they came on to Genoa, Nebraska, where John left his family while he went on to southern Holt County to file on a homestead and build a one-rom sod house. In 1883 he brought his family to the claim in a lumber wagon.

Leaving the family on their new farm, John drove eighty miles to Albion to work on the railroad with a team of horses and a slip. The older brothers and sisters went to school in the nearest sod schoolhouse. A Miss Vera Burgess is remembered as an outstanding teacher. “She put on programs and, on Washington’s birthday had a beanbake and invited all the parents.” School was held in different places, those first years, one time in the upstairs room of the teacher’s home. In a school a little over a mile northeast of the Johnsons, the blackboard was hung so high that the little ones had to stand on a bench to use A water wheel designed and built by J. H. Oetter. It was probably used to pump water for the sheep in the background. Courtesy Elsie Oetter. it. Schools didn’t have grades then; pupils simply progressed from reader to reader. No examinations were given.

In 1903 the district built a frame schoolhouse, increased the length of the term, finally, to nine months and introduced the grading system. Ten years later Alice Johnson taught her first term of school in this schoolhouse. The Johnsons got their mail at the Frances post office, two miles south of their place. The office was in Charles Stowell’s home and the mail came three times a week. As in most rural post ofices, mail day was a lively occasion, with all the patrons riding, driving or walking in to pick up their mail and visit awhile.

The Johnsons subscribed to two papers, the Chicago Bladet, which was printed in Swedish. The parents read every word of it. The younger Johnsons could read its one page that was printed in English. Their other paper was the Toledo Blade.

The Johnsons did not attend the nearest church, a Lutheran house of worship where the sermons were preached in German, as they did not understand German. When the Harold Baptist church was organized they attended there part of the time. In 1912 they joined the Presbyterian church north of Chambers. The minister from there came frequently to the Stowell schoolhouse to hold meetings. The cemetery established and known as the “Conley cemetery” was legally, by deed, the “Farmer’s Hill Cemetery.” Alice Johnson, daughter of John, who supplied this history, remembers especially the Fourth of July celebrations and the parades. She gives a 321 little more detail on the calli- thumpian” portion of the parade. This, she writes, was a group of people dressed in “corny” costumes and making a great deal of noise. In company with most of their neighbors, the Johnsons feared prairie fires. They made a very wide fire guard across the road north of their house, and many a fire burned to that guard and died. Ahead of extra high winds, however, a bad fire could jump the guard. One time, when telltale smoke signalled a fire, Mr. Johnson and his boys went off to fight it. It was coming straight for their farm from the south. Mrs. Johnson and the girls began carrying things from the house to the middle of the wide guard on the north. The younger girls took their dolls and other prized trinkets. Finally, when they had carried out everything they could handle, they all got hold of a big old trunk full of valuables and drug it to the safety spot. Then they all sat down beside their possessions to wait. The yard was full of smoke and matters looked serious— when the wind shifted enough to take the fire a half mile to the east of their buildings. All they lost was a stack of hay and the haystacker, and Mr. Johnson saved the stacker rope off of that. When the danger was past they thankfully moved all their belongings back into the house.

Alice wrote that her mother described the blizzard of ’88 as being so dense that it was as if a barrel of flour had been poured over one’s head. Since melting snow had turned the paths wet and slushy, and since the Johnson children had no overshoes, they did not go to school that day. When the storm struck the teacher of their school dismissed her pupils and all started for home.

A brother and sister started out on horseback. When the horse could no longer face the storm they stopped. The boy unsaddled the horse and he and his sister lay down in the snow, the boy on the windy side, and covered themselves with the blanket. A neighbor found them the next morning. The boy was dead but the girl, though badly frozen, survived and is living today.

Tragedy did, however, strike the Johnson family in 1890. The same diphtheria epidemic that almost killed John Oetter took the lives of Almeda, Ida, Charlie and Ellen, just half the family at that time. Later three more children were born.

During the ‘eighties and ‘nineties the Johnsons took in cattle to herd. Alvin herded four hundred head for the Ditch Company the summer he was ten years old. He also herded some Texas Longhorns, and never let himself be caught afoot anywhere near the dangerous beasts. Several other boys were herding on the same range and the boys spent as much time as possible together. To pass the time away they devised a throwing stick, something like a boomerang, and learned to throw it so well that they could kill rabbits with it. If some of his cattle lagged behind Alvin hurried them up with a well aimed toss of his throwing stick.

Clarence, the oldest Johnson son, worked out in the winters shucking corn. The older girls did housework for families in town. The pay wasn’t much, Alice wrote, but neither did a pair of shoes cost much, only seventy- five cents.

The Johnson homestead remained in the family for eighty-seven years, then was sold to Ronald Haake in 1970. John Johnson died in 1910, his wife in 1931. Both are buried in Chambers. The four children who died of diphtheria and Anna, who died in infancy, are buried in the Farmer’s Hill Cemetery. Three daughters and a son survive.

David Frederick Lowery, his wife Lydia and the four youngest of their eleven children, in 1883 took a homestead three and a half miles west of Chambers. David, one of thirteen children, was born in West Virginia in 1822. He married Lydia Ferguson at New Castle, Indiana, in 1850 and moved to Illinois, where nine of their children were born. In 1868 they went to Missouri. Two more sons were born there but one fell into a boiler of scalding water and died at the age of two.

David’s family was growing up and Missouri was settling up. The older sons and daughters were married, the younger boys liked to hunt, fish and trap. They needed more room for such activities. So the father mortgaged his farm and set out on horseback to look for a location on the Republican River in Nebraska. On the way he was robbed one night while he slept. His money gone, there was nothing to do but return to Missouri. In 1880 he loaded his family and possessions into two covered wagons and set out toward Nebraska. Son John drove one team, son Jim came behind on foot with their cattle. Several of the married children were included in the caravan and the others soon followed.

They stopped at Madison, Nebraska, rented some land and planted crops. While the family looked after them, David and his son-in-law, Joe Richardson went to Goose Lake where David took a pre-emption and timber claim just over in Wheeler County. He moved his family there that fall. The winter of 1880-81 was one of incessant snow, wind and cold. A heavy snow storm started on October 12, turning the waters of Goose Lake to thick slush. Strong winds churned the slush into high waves that deposited windrows of fish on the shore. This proved a windfall for the Lowerys, who gathered a winter’s supply and sold a wagon load beside. Once David walked the ten miles to the store at Deloit, pulling a small sled on which to bring back a sack of flour.

Prairie chickens were abundant at that time and in the spring, when the family was hungry for fresh eggs, they would wait for a still day, then burn off the long grass on a small meadow, exposing the prairie chicken nests. Most of the nests were below the level of the ground and the eggs were not damaged by the fire. They then gathered eggs by the bucketful, although some were unfit to eat. Annually, when it came time to go after a fresh supply of flour and corn meal, David loaded sacks of corn and wheat into the wagon, packed in enough food for the trip, loaded the family on top and drove to Oakdale to the mill. While the family slept David fished in the mill pond all night. Come morning, Lydia went to the store while David had the milling done, then they drove home. One summer while they lived at Goose Lake nine members of the family were down with typhoid fever at the same time.

In 1883 David sold his place to a man named Peters, and so finally came to the homestead west of Chambers. By then he was past sixty years of age. After Lydia died in 1898, David, then seventy-six, sold the homestead to his grandson, Charles Robertson. Thirteen years later he died. He has many great-great-great grandchildren living in Holt and Garfield counties.

Robert LaRue was born to James and Catherine Ann LaRue in Wisconsin in 1872. He was five years old when the family left for Nebraska and located on a Burt County farm. From there they moved to Holt County. Twelve-year-old Robert and an older brother, Leonard, drove the cattle all the way from Burt County, but shipped their hogs by rail to Ewing. They drove the cattle and hogs from there to a farm two miles south of the town, where Robert, his mother and sisters stayed while his father and two older brothers built a shanty and dug a well on their homestead eighteen miles southwest of Ewing, in the southeast perimeter of Chambers. The family moved to their new home on the fifth of July, 1884. Before summer’s end they had built a four-room sod house and two small 322 barns, one dug into the side of a hill. There were ten children in the family. One had died and a daughter, Ida, had married in Burt County. May LaRue married a Mr. Carson that winter and William, the oldest son, went back to Burt County in the spring. That summer of 1885 the LaRue crops were hailed out.

The LaRues lost twelve head of cattle in the blizzard of ’88 and Leonard, the second son, went back to Burt County later that year. Mr. LaRue planted two orchards on the homestead and, in 1893, built a frame home. The girls married and left the county, except for Rose who married a Mr. McGowan and lived in Chambers. Robert married Gertrude Smith, a neighbor’s daughter, and had three children. Their son, Kenneth, married Luciel Lambert in 1939 and now lives on his grandfather’s homestead. Will Holcomb and his brothers, Asher and Hammie, rode horseback to Holt County from southeastern Nebraska in the early ‘eighties. Will and Asher remained in the county, Hammie went to the south during the Spanish-American war and never again contacted his brothers.

Having heard of the treeless condition of the Holt County prairies, Will cut twigs from cottonwood trees growing along the Loup River where he crossed as he rode north. As soon as he had filed on his claim he stuck the cuttings into the ground in rows. They grew, and the tall old cottonwoods today line the driveway on the homestead, five and one-half miles northeast of Chambers. Many other trees that today form the farmstead’s windbreak had their start in the same way.

From Ed Jones, a neighbor on the north, Will secured pits from a small variety of peach. From them he started a number of trees north of his house, and one year gathered seventy-five bushels of peaches from the trees.

In 1888 Will Holcomb and Cora Dorothy, a neighbor’s daughter, were married. The couple had seven children and lived in a two-room frame house until the early 1900’s, when the present house was built. Fred Kiltz, a neighbor, directed the building. In 1906 the Holcomb family began the construction of a most unusual barn. The building was nearly one hundred feet square, the south half being a cattle shed. The north half, built into the side of a hill, was two-storys high. Loads of hay could be pulled right into the huge haymow from the ground level. Below the haymow were stalls for forty horses. The lower wall was six feet high and made of concrete, a mixture of sand from the home pasture and cement hauled by teams from O’Neill. The concrete was mixed by hand by the family. Herman Holcomb who, as a fifteen-year-old boy, helped build the barn, also assisted in tearing it down in 1972. Time had eaten away at the old landmark and Will’s grandson, LeRoy, and his great-grandsons, Gary and Gale Holcomb, replaced it with a modern steel building— with stanchions for a few milk cows and space for grain and machinery, but not a single stall for horses. Will Holcomb’s children attended whichever school was in session and within their travel area. For a time they rode horseback to a school three and a half miles northwest. Then they attended District 156, the “Alderson school,” at the time a Negro girl who made her home with the Farrier family, was a student there. Finally District 212 was organized two miles northeast of the Holcombs and the children went there. Herman Holcomb’s two grandsons went through the eighth grade in the same schoolhouse where their grandfather had studied his three R’s. John Wintermote had been one of his teachers.

During wet years Herman had skated to the Alderson school, skating north to the South Fork River, west two miles on it, then south to the schoolhouse. He told too, of plowing on the quarter west of the house, where the sod was so tough with grass roots that there wouldn’t be a single break in a half-mile long furrow.

By the time Will’s sons were eight and nine years old they were helping bale hay for sale in O’Neill and Inman. The Holcombs lived so far from the shipping points that they started with the loads at two o’clock in the morning and returned home long after dark. At one time Will kept fifty head of horses on his place, all needed in the farming and haying business they carried on.

Elias Dorothy, born in Illinois of Scotch parents in 1840, moved with his family to Iowa, where he married Eliza Barrow in 1860. During the gold rush he and his wife went west. One of their daughters, Laura, was born in Carson City, Nevada, but the family did not “strike it rich,” so returned to Iowa.

They came to their homestead four and one-half miles northeast of Chambers in 1884. There he built the house which still stands on the present Ray Grubb farm. Elias took his cuttings from the “Lone Tree,” a cottonwood that stood twelve miles southeast of his homestead, and planted his timber claim grove which is still growing, a half-mile south of the Grubb buildings.

The Dorothy family was among those who went to church in the Kellar home, a quarter mile west of them. Mr. Dorothy was one of the founders of the South Fork Fair at Chambers. Of his family only two remained in Holt County. Cora married Will Holcomb and Clarabelle married John Wintermote. Charles and John went to Florida, Oscar to Wyoming, Joseph and Laura to Mitchell. Mrs. Dorothy died at home in 1913 and was buried at Chambers. Elias died while visiting in Frazier, Idaho, and is buried there.

John Nichol Summerer, born in Germany in 1856, came to Pennsylvania in 1880. He worked a year there as a gardener to earn enough money to come to Nebraska, where he had heard land was being given away. He spent two years in Lancaster County, then took a homestead three miles south of Chambers in 1884. Two years later he returned to Germany to get his boyhood sweetheart, Anna Elizabeth Wunderlich. His sister Elizabeth came over with them, and John and Anna were married in O’Neill in June.

When John and his wife left the homestead, where they had buried their first two babies, they loaded their one-room house on a wagon and tied their cattle on behind. With their dog following, they came to their new home site, a tree claim near Bliss, and planted trees on the west and north sides of the quarter. There was a cream station at the Bliss post office but no store. During their early years on the timber claim John carried mail from Bliss to Ewing. He drove a team, traveling the twenty-three miles to Ewing, staying overnight and driving back the next day, delivering mail to Little, Bliss and Newboro post offices.

So many of his mail route patrons asked him to bring out groceries and other necessities from Ewing that he later stocked such supplies in one room of his own home. To the store he later added a stock of gasoline and Model T parts.

The original one-room house they moved to the timber claim was added onto as the need arose. John and Anna Elizabeth became the parents of nine children but lost five of them in infancy to the dread disease called “summer complaint,” or cholera morebus. They were all bottle fed babies and only cows’ milk was available. With no adequate form of refrigeration, the milk spoiled. A visit to any pioneer cemetery attests to the fact that hundreds of babies died of the fearful complaint.

Their four children who grew to adulthood all lived near the family farm. Emma married Carl Holz; John Ernest married Julia Primus; Anna 323 Elizabeth married Gustave Daniels; Paul married Anna Primus. Several of their children also married residents of the community.

Ephraim Dyke was born in Iowa in 1851 to parents who came from New York state. In 1872 he married Mary Christena Study, also born in Thurman, Iowa, Ephraim’s home town. They came to a homestead fourteen miles southeast of Chambers in 1884. In 1898 the parents and their three children were baptized into the Reorganized Church of Latter Day Saints. In 1902 the Dykes sold their homestead on Cache Creek and bought a farm one and a half miles north of Chambers, where they lived until Ephraim’s death in 1921. Here Mr. Dyke set out large orchards, raised fruit and made cider with a press. A family of violinists, both Ephraim and his son, Frank, made several violins. The oldest daughter, Edith, married John McClenahan; Etta married Ezra Cooke; and Frank married Lena Alice Wry. Frank spent eleven years as postmaster at Chambers,and after that carried the mail on a rural route for thirteen years. He died in 1933, his wife in 1941. Frank’s mother, Mary Dyke, outlived both of them and died at her home in 1944 at the age of ninety.

Arthur C. Hubbard of Rapid City, South Dakota, at the age of ninety- nine supplies the history of his family. His father, H. U. Hubbard, was born in Illinois, his mother, Nellie Bell, in Missouri. Arthur, his brother Hiram and the parents, settled on sections fourteen and fifteen, northeast of Chambers, in 1884. Six more children were born there. One son, Paul, died in infancy.

Nellie Hubbard’s mother, known to all as “Grandma Bell,” took a homestead a short distance northwest of the Hubbard’s. The children rode horseback to the Alderson school, a sod structure two and a half miles from the homestead. Miss Trussel, Miss Stowell, Hattie Doherty and a man, Yumy Coppoc, are among the teachers Arthur remembers.

At school, Arthur wrote, the kids played a rough game similar to hockey. Two teams, made up of any number of players, played the game with homemade clubs, often of willow, and a tin can. “After the can had been hit a few licks, sharp edges protruded. The game was called ‘Shinny.’ After that flying weapon had hit a few shins it was easy to understand why.” Arthur’s Uncle Asa Hubbard was one of the early Chambers postmasters. His “Grandma Bell” one of the community’s mid-wives, who often walked miles to help out where she was needed.

Porter family tradition relates that the first of the family came to America from England about the time of the Pilgrims. The family Bible record shows that the Rev. Nehemiah Porter was born in 1717 and died in 1819. His son Samuel, born in Massachusetts in 1757, was a soldier in the Revolution. His son, Samuell II, was born in 1793 and married Judith Claghorn in 1823, after serving in the War of 1812.

Miller Porter, son of Samuel and Judith, was born in Ohio in 1833. He married Mary Polly in 1860 and had two children, Alma and Edwin. The family moved to Butler County in 1870. Fourteen years later they came on to Holt County, where Miller took a homestead. In 1887 the son, Edwin, returned to Butler County and married Susan Fleek. Two children, Loa and Chauncy, were born to them. Mr. Porter taught school for several years, Mr. and Mrs. J. N. Summerer and John, Walter, Emma and Elizabeth. Courtesy P. W. Summerer.

then moved his family to Holt County to be near his aging parents. After four years on the farm he moved into Chambers and worked at the carpenter trade. He and his father, Miller Porter, furnished the plot of land on which the old Bethany Church was first located, five miles east of town, where now stands a filling station on the “Five Mile Corner.” Edwin helped organize the I.O.O.F. Lodge and the Chambers band. After his election to the office of County Clerk in 1918, he moved his family to O’Neill for the twelve years he held the office. He returned to Chambers in 1932, where he died in 1958.

Edwin’s daughter Loa married one of the Hubbard boys and has lived most of her life in Chambers, as has her son, Edwin, and his family. His son Chauncey served through the first world war and was awarded the 324 Distinguished Service Cross by General Pershing and was twice decorated by the French, once with the Croix de Guerre and again with the Medaille Militaire, one of the most coveted decorations given by the French Government. None of his four sons remained in Holt County.

Frank H. Charles was born in Iowa in 1852 and homesteaded three miles southeast of Chambers in 1884. Two years later he married Amelia Sackett. In 1890 they bought the Martin Wintermote hotel in town and operated it until 1909, when he sold it and his livery barn, located just north of the hotel, to A. C. Colman.

The Charles family then lived in the Sackett home for seven years before moving back to Iowa to take over the old Charles farm. Neither of their two daughters remained in Holt County. Early in 1885 Rev. Edmund H.

Sackett, a Methodist minister, with his wife Matilda, his son William and his two daughters, Amelia and Cora Ann, left Blackearth, Wisconsin in covered wagons with all their possessions. Their destination was Chambers, where they moved to be near their daughter Mary, wife of A. B. Miller, who had come earlier to the community. The minister and his son both filed on homesteads west of the town and built their homes quite close together, for Mr. Sackett was then nearly seventy years old. After getting settled and acquainted, Rev. Sackett began holding Methodist services in the Chambers schoolhouse.

When Amelia Sackett married Frank Charles in 1886, Cora Ann, twelve years old, was left to help care for her parents. In 1891 Cora Ann married B. T. Winchell, who lived two miles east of the Sackett home. A few months later Mary Miller, sister to Cora Ann and Amelia, died. After the Rev. Sackett died in 1893, Will Sackett moved into town and prepared a home for his mother, who lived until 1905. Will, who never married, passed away in 1910.

Dr. and Mrs. T. V. Norvell took a homestead one-half mile east of Chambers in 1884. Having served through the Civil War in the cavalry, he studied medicine at Ann Arbor and graduated with the class of 1867. He married that same year and practiced medicine in southern Indiana. With their eight daughters they came to Holt County, seeking a more healthful climate.

It was in the Norvell one-room sod home that Mrs. Norvell and her daughters took down one bed to make room for the first meeting of the folks who, with W. C. Wry and Rev. Coppoc, organized the first Baptist church in Chambers.

Dr. Norvell cared for the sick in his community until 1900, when he was elected County Superintendent of Schools and moved to O’Neill for the four years he served in that capacity. The family then returned to the homestead until 1910, when the doctor and his wife moved to Norfolk, where they observed their sixty- second wedding anniversary.

Of their daughters, Pauline became Mrs. Nola Beebe; Sibyl Mrs. Guy Alderson and Aletha Mrs. Alva Bowman. The others married and lived in Indiana. Elsie and Sibyl are buried in the Chambers cemetery.

Charles Brachmann left Germany in 1881 at the age of twenty-one years. He lived in Indiana for a time, then came on to Holt County in 1885, settling on a homestead seven miles northeast of Chambers. He married Anezka (Agnes) Jirak in the Kellar church in 1904. She had been born in Czechoslovakia in 1884. At the time Charles first lived on the homestead he could get his mail and supplies at Shamrock.

The Brachmanns had one son, Roudolph, born in 1905. He made his home with his parents and took over the farming. His father died in 1921. In 1933 Rudy married Mary Cermy at Stanton, Nebraska. Mrs. Brachmann lived with them on the home place until her death in 1962. Five years later ill health forced Rudy to sell the ranch, after which he and his wife moved into Inman, where they now live.

John Kiltz was born in Kriegsfeld, Germany, in 1818. Kriegsfeld, a village about the size of Atkinson, is west of the Rhine River and has been overrun by many armies down The John and Louesa Kiltz family. John Kiltz (senior) (picture on wall). Surviving children about 1900, back row: Peter, Catherine, Frederick, Henry. Front row: John, Charles, George, Philip, Simon. through the centuries. The Kiltz family had lived there since 1750. John, however, came to Erie, Pennsylvania in 1839 and married Louisa Gintz in 1844. In 1869 the family moved by wagon, trailing their livestock, to Illinois. They had ten children. One of their sons, Fred, operated a wagon making shop in Union, Illinois. There he married Addie Perkins in 1880, and soon thereafter became interested in the homestead lands of western Nebraska. With other members of the Kiltz and Perkins families he came to Holt County in 1884. Fred built a small frame house on his claim, put down a well and cultivated a few acres of ground. In 1886 he moved his wife, two sons and a daughter there. The original homestead was seven miles northeast of Chambers. He added to it with a timber claim and the purchase of 320 acres, making a total of 640 acres by 1900.

Addie Kiltz’ parents, the Edward Perkins, with some of their children, both married and unmarried, came to a homestead between Chambers and Ewing, also in 1886. Edward and his wife built a two-story frame house and expanded their land holdings. Burton Kiltz, youngest son of Fred and Addie, furnishes a charming account of his family and their life on the homestead. He was with his father a great deal, he wrote, because his brothers were much older and, “as I had to be someplace, Father got stuck with me.” During the time spent with his father, Burton, who was born in 1901, learned much of the family’s early years in the valley. His father told him of a prairie fire that passed to the west of their 325 house at the speed of a trotting horse, traveled on six miles southeastward and burned the Perkins’ barn.

“There is a grove of pine trees, perhaps ten or fifteen acres of them, north and west of the house,” writes Burton. “I claim credit for planting the first six acres, north of the house. I was six or eight years old at the time. It is a fine grove today and I am proud of the results of my vision and untiring efforts. Father helped some with the project. He plowed the furrows at twenty foot intervals, thrust a spade into the bottom of the furrow, wobbled the handle back and forth, pulled the spade out, took a seedling tree from the bucket of thin mud and dropped the roots into the slit he had made, pressed the slit shut with his foot, took two steps along the furrow and repeated the process. He left the rest to me. I carried the bucket.” Burton describes his father as a well built man, weighing about 160 pounds in his prime. He had dark brown hair and a full beard. He was the first to retire at night. His last official act of the day was to wind the old Seth Thomas clock, which stood on a shelf just outside his bedroom door. He had a solid, old fashioned German temper. Frank Jutte, our neighbor on the north, could be heard a good country mile when he lost his temper. Fred’s voice was good for only about fifty yards, but he was convincing enough. It temporarily gave new impetus and direction to the other members of the family, including the cows, chickens and any cats within range. These explosions were infrequent, short lived and soon forgotten. Fred was meticulously honest. A quiet, unassuming man, with easy charm and a tolerance for weaknesses in others. He distrusted prominent men and believed them to be overrated. He had a poor opinion of the Kaiser, and was no kinder to American leaders. Burton remembers him telling a close neighbor, Jake Hoffman, about “fat old Howard (Taft). So fat he can hardly get from one chair to another and probably never did a day’s work in his life. And Woodrow (Wilson), sure I voted for Woodrow. But his head is full of shavings. Did you see all those books behind him in the picture? All he knows is what is in the books! He doesn’t know which tit has the milk in it and the books don’t say, so how can he find out?” Both Fred and his wife had a natural talent for frugality without being stingy. “Mother, I believe, could stretch a dollar farther than Father could, but not much.” Fred objected once to buying a new Sunday suit. The one he had bought ten years ago was as good as new, he said, and it almost was. But he bought the new one.

Of his parents Burton wrote, “I do not know that they loved each other for I never heard either say so. But they depended on each other for their daily existence, and each was in torment when the other was unac-counted for. What other kind of love is there!” Of his mother, Burton wrote, “Addie was the most loyal supporter of the state of Nebraska I have ever known. Nebraska, especially the South Fork Valley, had treated her marvelously and she loved its people, its every season, hill and stream. There was much wickedness on the loose in Europe, in New York City, even in Omaha, and there were a few in O’Neill who would bear watching. But those who lived in Chambers and our Valley were the best of anybody.” Fred sometimes had his doubts about all the good qualities of Nebraska. When the hot winds came and withered his corn and killed his hay crop; when he had to wade through mountains of snow to get to the barn and back; when the South Fork rose to become a mile wide, covering his bottom land; when the wind blew his oats out of the ground the day after he planted the seed, he sometimes wished for a climate with fewer extremes. But he was still a Nebraskan, and proud of it. The extremes were, after all, infrequent, and there was a lot of good living in between.

The main sources of Kiltz income, like those of their neighbors, were cattle, baled hay, cream and eggs. Fred tried various breeds of cattle, including Shorthorn and Galloway. The Galloways became unruly and tore down his fences and he finally settled on Aberdeen Angus. The weekly grocery bills were paid by selling cream and eggs in Chambers, usually on Saturday nights. Fred was a good carpenter. He built all of his own buildings, two of his sons’ buildings and the small Kellar Presbyterian church, to which the family belonged.

Addie was a devoted church worker and taught the small children in Sunday school until she was well along in years. She had five children of her own and raised two nieces, daughters of her brother Clint, whose mother had died.

Fred’s deep interests were his farm, his shop, his family and his Model T Ford. Addie’s were her family, her reading and her religion. Fred bought one of the first Fords in the county in 1910. He paid about $900 for it and it had a rosewood dashboard, two seats, but no front doors. He would seize the steering wheel with a firm grasp, look straight ahead and charge through Holt County’s mudholes and sand dunes with the family hanging on for dear life. His speed was fifteen to twenty-five miles an hour. Any slower meant that the family went down on their knees to stuff weeds under the wheels. Any faster meant that the “wishbone got thrown out.” His brother Philip would visit him from Illinois now and then. Philip had a Buick and they would sit by the hour and exchange stories of their automobile experiences. Their brother Peter, in Missouri, had made his own automobile, or motorized buggy. It got away from him when he cranked it up, and circled the yard with Peter chasing it. Then it turned and ran over Peter. Fred and Philip thought this hilarious, and laughed until they had to wipe their eyes with their red bandana handkerchiefs.

When the family rode out, before the days of the Model T, they used the family carriage. For her own use Addie had a single seated buggy powered by a leggy horse, Dan, that sometimes ran away with her. She used her rig a good deal however, as “she kept up quite a social calendar, Ladies Aid, visits to her relatives and friends, WCTU meetings and errands to Chambers that didn’t get done on Saturday nights.” Of his own early years Burton Kiltz writes, “I spent only the first twenty- two years of my life in Holt County (but I do not remember my boyhood as a difficult life). Fred and Addie enjoyed life and did not consider their years in Holt County to be a hardship. My life must have been typical of that of many boys of that period: walking a mile and a half to a one-room school; milking cows before going to school and milking them again at night; turning a cream separator by hand, turning a corn sheller, turning an ice cream freezer; shucking corn against a bang-board on a cold day, chopping sandburs out of corn rows on a hot day; riding a horse to high school (sometimes a horse not willing to be ridden); catching bullheads, mud turtles, and now and then a pickerel in the South Ford with a cane pole and a frog’s leg; pitching hay onto round-topped stacks in the summer and pitching it down again for cattle in the winter, or into a hay baler; getting Sunday suits and shoes from Sears Roebuck (which did not fit too badly), taking baths in a wash tub on Saturday nights.

“We celebrated holidays, of course. There was a Christmas program at the little church, and a tree. At first the tree was a cottonwood sapling with small cedar boughs from the yards of various church members tied to its branches. With paper and popcorn 326 chains the effect was not bad. Ray Hoffman and I went to the Hoppe ranch one Christmas for the first evergreen tree, a jack pine.

“We piled into any vehicle that was appropriate and went to Grandma and Grandpa Perkins for Christmas dinner, where all the clan collected no matter how high the snow drifts. There were no Christmas cards then, but Addie wrote to all her relatives in Illinois that she happened to be on speaking terms with at the time. “In these later years one tries to recall the unrelated, unimportant events that have no real historical meaning. There was the ride with my brother Clarence to the city (O’Neill) on a load of baled hay, starting before daylight so we could get back that night. There were the first meadow larks on the fence posts in the spring; the pineapple sundaes dished out by Gladys Baker in the telephone office on a hot day in Chambers; my brother Clarence playing ‘Red Wing’ over and over on the little pump organ in the parlor; the parade down Chambers’ Main Street on November 11, 1918; the snow storm in 1919 when there was a snow drift in our yard nearly as high as the house.

“And I recall my father shaking down the base burner early each morning in winter. He made a terrible racket, intended, it seemed to me, to waken everyone, including the horses in the barn. There may be no connection, but even now, fifty years later, I do very little sleeping in the morning after it’s time to shake down the stove.” Fred Kiltz died in 1931, Addie in 1949. Of their children, Clyde, born in Illinois, spent most of his adult life on a farm five miles northeast of Chambers. He married Jessie Beck in Illinois in 1908 and had two children. Anna, three years old when the family came to Nebraska, lived most of her adult life on a farm four miles northeast of Chambers. She married Ned Alderson in 1905 and had eight children.

Clarence Kiltz, born in Illinois just before the family came west, spent most of his adult life on his father’s farm. He married Evelyn Landen of Hooper in 1914. They had three children. During the blizzard of 1949 Clarence went out to adjust a windmill. When he didn’t return Evelyn waded through the drifts to learn what was wrong. They died together in the storm.

Burton Kiltz, born on the farm, left Holt County in 1923 and spent most of his life in various states in the employ of the U. S. Government. He married Opal Ott of Amelia in 1927. They had three children and Burton and his wife now live in Richmond, Virginia. Casper Hoerle was born in Germany in 1839. At the age of sixteen he went to Canada, then came on to the United States in 1886. While in Canada he married Magdalena Winter, also German born. They met and married in Ontario in 1861 and had thirteen children before they left Canada. Not all of the family came to Holt County.

Casper was a charter member of the Immanuel Lutheran Church at Conley, helping build the church and its parsonage in 1887, the year after his arrival. Due to his efforts the cemetery was established there— in time for the interment of Carl Frederick Dreher, nine months old, who was buried on July 22, 1881. A month later Casper and Magdalena’s fourteenth child, Paul Hoerle, one month and nine days old, was buried there.

Conrad, the Hoerle’s fifth child, came with his parents to the homestead when he was seventeen years old. He worked out for farmers around Chambers, and for awhile for Martin Wintermote in the hotel at Shamrock, delivering mail from O’Neill to Shamrock and Chambers. Since most of the neighbors called him “Harley” instead of “Hoerle,” the German form of the name, he began to spell it the English way. Conrad Harley married Chlonella Wintermote in 1899. Chlonella was the daughter of Martin Wintermote, Conrad’s former employer, and the couple had ten children. Conrad lived all of his life on farms in the Chambers and Clearwater neighborhoods. He and Chlonella first bought and took possession of a farm three miles south of Chambers. That was in 1899 and they paid $450 for the quarter. Two years later they bought another quarter for $320.

In 1901 they bought a farm two miles northwest of town for $3,000. They sold it for the same sum in 1908. After several other moves they bought a quarter in Shamrock Township in 1916 for $1,400. In 1919 they sold the farm for $7,200 and moved to Clear-water. There they bought a farm for $8,000. Prices were still going up and the farm seemed a good buy. Corn was worth $2 a bushel in the spring of 1920. By fall it was ten cents a bushel, if one could sell it. The price stayed there for three more years and they lost the farm.

In 1923 they bought another farm about ten miles southeast of Chambers. This one cost them $5,600. They bought a second quarter from David Isaacson the following year for $6,000. After Conrad’s death in 1931, Chlonella moved into Chambers, where she died in 1946. The next year Paul Harley bought the farm from his nine brothers and sisters for $15,200. Of the ten Harley sons and daughters, several married in the Chambers or Holt County area. Hazel married John Mohr; Louis married Ruth Perkins; Paul married Letha Isaacson; Lavelle married Thomas Beck.

John Walter, one of fourteen children born to Jacob and Christena Walter in Ontario, Canada in 1866, at age sixteen hired out to a neighboring farmer for $100 a year. His father collected the money, leaving John only enough for necessary clothing. John came to Holt County in 1866 and the next year filed on a homestead thirteen miles southwest of Emmet. While living there he met Mary Spuhler, whose parents had come from Germany in 1873 and filed on a claim seven miles southeast of Chambers in 1882. John and Mary were married in 1888. Three of their children were born on John’s homestead. After proving up and selling out they moved to Oklahoma. Three years of drouth sent them back to Holt County where they bought a farm three and one-half miles west of Chambers. On this place, the Walter home for the next sixty-one years, three more children were born. Life long Lutherans, John and Mary were members of a congregation organized at the Valley Center schoolhouse in 1906, and of the Lutheran church built in Chambers in 1912. That same year they retired to a home in Chambers. Both are now deceased. Icabod and Loretta Brotherton left their farm home at Middleberry, New York, in 1879. Their destination was Creston, Iowa, and the entire family, with all their possessions, including a team and wagon, rode in an immigrant car. Four of their five children came with them and their mother died in Creston and is buried there. Myron Brotherton was nineteen when the family moved on to Holt County in 1886. Icabod, who walked most of the way from Creston to Chambers, took a homestead on what is now the Hugh Carr ranch and built a sod house for his family. Myron worked around Tilden and Oakdale for awhile. Jennie Brotherton married Ed Arno and lived near Chambers for a time, then moved to Atkinson. Adah, the youngest daughter, married Emery Ault and went back to Illinois to make her home.

While working near Tilden and Oakdale, Myron met a pretty girl named Ida Mae Hughson and married her in 1894. They moved out to Chambers to live with Myron’s father on the homestead. Five years later Myron traded a horse for the N. B. 327 Bisbee quarter section. By the time he could deliver the horse AAr. Bisbee had died.

The Brothertons built a new frame house on the property. The ranch grew from Icabod’s quarter and Myron’s quarter to a spread of 1,560 acres, where the family lived for fifty years. Myron and Ida Mae had four children.

James Doherty and Rachel Carleton were both born in Ireland. They moved to Canada in 1836 and on to Illinois in 1864. In 1885 the family came to Norfolk, where they stayed a short time, then came on to Chambers in 1886 and settled on a farm a half mile north of town.

Jimmie Doherty, the youngest of their seven children, was born in Illinois in 1876. In 1901 he married Bertha Kellar, youngest daughter of John and Ann Kellar. A charter member of the Chambers Cornet Band, Jimmie was an enthusiastic participant in all community affairs, church, music, theatrical productions and whatever.

The home talent plays of that period were an important part of the early day community entertainment and the proceeds from them were the means of financing the Band Hall, Chambers’ first town hall. In 1901 Thomas Higgins had built a hall which was used for plays, dances and other entertainment. But the band members, wanting a hall of their own, raised the money and built their new Band Hall in 1910 and 1911. The I.O.O.F. then bought the old Higgins hall, which the Lodge still owns. The new hall was most important to the community, as there was no other place large enough for the various activities. In 1916 the Hall was destroyed by a fire caused by the moving picture machine, which used the volatile celluloid films of that period. “It was a night to remember,” one old timer stated. Except for a rain that afternoon, more of the- town’s buildings would have burned. The hall was replaced in 1917. During the summer Saturday evening movies are still shown there.

Jimmie Doherty was also active in the Chambers’ Literary Society and won several medals for oratory. He wrote many poems that were enjoyed by his community and he was the town barber for many years, retiring to Lincoln about 1922, where he and Bertha spent the remainder of their lives. Both are buried in the Chambers cemetery.

Jimmie’s brother, William John, was president of the Chambers State Bank for years. Another brother, David, died in a hunting accident at Chambers in 1907. Their sister Rachel married W. B. Cooper, Hattie married C. J. Barnum. The other two girls, Anna Jane and Lillie, never married. William Hamilton Jeffers, better known as “Ham,” was born in Ohio in 1858. He made his way west through Illinois and Iowa, where he married Susannah Summers in Eldora, Iowa, in 1877. Ten years later the couple, with their three daughters, moved to a homestead eighteen miles southwest of Chambers.

As soon as he had made his filing, Ham Jeffers opened the first blacksmith shop in Chambers. Through the week he boarded with the Wry family and on weekends walked and pushed a wheelbarrow load of supplies the eighteen miles to his homestead. The family later moved to a place a little over three miles northeast of town, where a son and a daughter were born.

AAr. Jeffers taught the blacksmith trade to numerous apprentices, among them B. F. Hanna, George Lambert and John W. Walters. He also used his skill to build a merry-go- round propelled by horse power, which he operated at the fairs and Fourth of July celebrations for twenty years or more. Mrs. Jeffers made the merry-go-round’s white canvas cover and bound its scalloped edge with a red border.

After many years Ham sold the shop to John Walters. Perhaps he meant to retire, but after a year long trip to Canada he returned to Chambers, moved onto a farm a half mile west of town, opened another blacksmith shop and did some farming. He remained active in his shop until about a year before his death at age eighty-seven.

Amelia Throup was born in Arbour- ville. New York in 1847 to ultra strict AAethodist parents. When she fell in love with Orson Putnam, a young Civil War officer who could work magic with his violin (a sinful instrument in her parents’ eyes) and insisted on accepting his proposal of marriage, her family almost disowned her. Amelia and Orson were married in 1866 and lived in her home town until 1872, when they moved with their three sons to Clarks, Nebraska, and settled on a homestead. Two more sons were born to them while they lived there.

Orson Putnam was much in demand to play for dances and other entertainments. He had to walk to most of his engagements and, in some way unknown to present day relatives, was struck and killed by a train. He is buried in Arlington Cemetery, near John F. Kennedy’s grave.

AArs. Putnam, with the help of the hired man, Arthur Noble, kept her family of five boys together and, in 1888, sold the farm and moved to Holt County. The blizzard caught them on the way and she suffered quite a loss in her herd of cattle. They settled on the Ingersoll homestead southeast of Chambers. With the cattle she had left, and with the help of Arthur and her sons, Amelia started over. By then her second oldest son was an officer in the U. S. Navy, stationed at Portsmouth, Virginia. He spent more than twenty years in the service.

Within a few years three more of the boys had married and moved away. In 1891 Amelia and Arthur Noble were married and, with the help of the youngest son, Clyde, managed to make a living on the little farm.

Two of Amelia’s sons, Ben and Fred had moved to South Dakota. During the influenza epidemic of 1918 Ben, his wife and three of their four children died within the same week. A few years later Fred, too, died of an illness brought on by his own serious bout with the flu.

Herbert Putnam and his wife lived in Kearney, Nebraska, where Herbert learned the butcher trade and became part owner of a butcher shop called the “Buck Eye market.” Later he moved to O’Neill and worked in a meat market for several years, then with his family to Chambers, where he operated his own market and store for quite awhile. Two more children were born to them there, making a family of four.

The family later moved to Iowa, where AArs. Putnam died in 1908. The three youngest children, Isabelle, eight; Edith, six; and Earl, four, were then sent to Chambers to live with the grandparents, AAr. and AArs. Arthur Noble. Edith, who supplied this family history, recalls the two-mile walks to the country school and their many arguments that “were concluded with a final bang on the head with the good old syrup bucket dinner pail.” About once a month the grandparents drove to town in the top buggy for supplies, leaving the children at home with strict orders as to what they were to do, or not to do, while left alone. On one of those days the children were out in the yard, watching for the return of the buggy. It was about dusk and off in the distance they saw a line of fire. It looked as if it were coming fast and they knew they could not outrun it, so “we just sat in the yard and cried,” wrote Edith. A few minutes later the grandparents arrived and calmed their fears by explaining that it was not a prairie fire— just some neighbors burning off some old prairie hay.

After a year or two the Nobles sold the farm and moved to another a mile south of Chambers. The grandparents 328 were rather elderly and, as the children grew older, it became increasingly difficult for them to care for the youngsters. Accordingly the two girls were “farmed out,” Edith at nine and Isabelle at eleven, to work for their board and clothes.

A Mr. and Mrs. Ed Porter took Edith. Isabelle went to live with a Mrs. Magnussen on a farm near where the Nobles had lived when they first took the children. Later she worked at the John Bogart home in Chambers, where she turned out to be one of the best cooks in the country. She married Gail McDonald and left Holt County. Edith lived with the Porters until she was fourteen, then left to secure work wherever she could make wages to go on to school. She was soon making “good money,” so dropped out of high school and continued working. When the first world war was over and the boys came home she married Frank Lienhart. The couple moved to Spencer, where Frank was a barber for many years.

Edith’s oldest brother, Harry, fifteen when his mother died, also came to Chambers in 1908 and worked on local farms and ranches. He became a house and sign painter, broke broncs and learned the carpenter trade. In the latter capacity he helped build the Chambers Band Hall, for which Frank Dyke painted the stage curtain and the scenes on the wings of the stage. A musician, too, he played in the Chambers band and was a veteran of World War I.

Harry married Mabel Jeffers. Their son, Virgil, grew to manhood in the Chambers community and married Bernice Holcomb in 1934. A Sergeant in the U. S. Infantry in the second world war, he was killed in action at the battle of St. Lo. Harry, now eighty years of age, lives in Beaumont, Texas, a retired police officer of that city. He is an accomplished player on the electric organ and still entertains with his music.

Clyde Putnam, Amelia’s youngest son, served through World War I, married and moved to Idaho. Earl, the grandson the Nobles raised, was a veteran of both world wars. He lived most of his life in various locations in the West.

Among Edith’s other recollections of her childhood in Chambers is the time she jumped out of the haymow door onto a load of hay. This was a game the children loved to play. “It was forbidden, but we did it anyway. The last time I tried it I got smart and jumped the second time— and over I went onto the ground below, breaking my arm.” When she lived with the Porters, Edith wrote, cars were just beginning to be driven by the braver souls who could afford them. Mr. Porter bought a red R. C. H. and, when learning to drive it, went around the yard several times trying to stop it. Finally he hollered, “Stop me the next time I come around,” so they did. The family usually stepped up on the porch, out of the way, whenever he drove into the yard.

Art Noble, her step-grandfather, was a lover of horses and usually took one to the Chambers’ fair to enter in the races. One year he drove to the fairgrounds with a tired looking, long-haired horse. It stood hitched to the wagon, one hip down, while Art challenged a bunch of men who were warming up a fast little mare. He told them he had “an old plug that could beat their horse.” They took him up and made their bets.

Art pulled the harness off his horse and entered the “plug.” It was a short race. The plug ran like a shot and Art gathered in the money. Art also liked a little “nip” now and then. His wife, of course, would not allow “likker” of any kind in the house. Art liked to play cards, too and one time went with some of his friends to sit in on a quiet little game. They had with them in the car a jug, and on the way Art got sick. At the site of the game his friends left him lying on the back seat and went in the house. A little later someone came out to get the jug and to see how Art was. But he and the jug were gone.

The grandchildren that Art Noble helped raise loved him dearly, Edith said. He always had a nickel in his pocket, ready to trade for a hug or a kiss. The grandmother, too, a strong and quiet soul, was the staff of life to her orphaned grandchildren.

Ben Thomas Winchell was born in Iowa in 1868. He came with his mother, Mrs. Lyman Winchell, to Holt County in 1888 and filed on a quarter four miles east of Chambers. B. T. also filed on a timber claim, and later bought a farm adjoining him on the west.

In 1891 he married Cora Ann Sackett, daughter of the Rev. Edmund Sackett. To their union was born six boys and six girls. Upon completion of the New Bethany Presbyterian Church, a mile from their home, he and his wife became members of the congregation. He later served as an elder and a Sunday school teacher.

After his election as County Assessor of Holt County in 1916 he moved his family to O’Neill. In 1923 he was appointed Deputy County Clerk under Ed Porter, and three years later was elected Register of Deeds, the first person to hold that office in the county. He served eight years, then was elected County Treasurer in 1934. After two terms (eight years) in that office he became Deputy County Treasurer under Ed Hancock, the position he held at the time of his death in 1945.

David Isaacson was born in Salt Lake City in 1870, the son of Andrew and Christina Isaacson who were among a shipload of people from Sweden whose transportation was paid by Brigham Young in 1862 in return for seven years of labor in his desert paradise. A carpenter, Andrew helped build the Mormon Tabernacle. In 1871, their debt paid, the Isaacsons returned to Omaha by rail. By 1891, when they took a homestead thirteen miles southwest of Chambers, Andrew and Christina had ten children. Only two, David and Katherine Jane, remained in Holt County for the rest of their lives. David married Hilda Caroline Johnson in 1901 and settled on the homestead where they raised six children and lived out their lives. Katherine Jane married Elmer Gibson, who farmed his father’s place ten miles southeast of Chambers. Their family numbered seven sons and daughters.

John William Haake, born in Germany in 1859, was the only member of his large family to come to America. He went first to Russel County, Kansas, where some of his cousins lived. Later he went to Omaha and worked in the Rock Springs Dairy. While there a man by the name of Grimm hired him to come to his farm north of Chambers. He made the move in 1889 and batched on the place for awhile.

After getting better acquainted in the community he bought a relinquishment from Henry Harley on a claim six miles south of town, where he batched in a sod house until 1892 when he married Henry’s sister Elizabeth, daughter of Casper Hoerle. The Haakes had five children. One day when they had company a prairie fire was sighted east of their home. The men went to help fight the fire, and while they were gone another fire came from the northwest and burned them out. The women and children saved the house by pouring water on the wooden window and door casings.

The family lost their butcher hog, their cows and chickens in the fire. But their friends and neighbors came to the rescue, giving them another butcher hog, some chickens and a couple of milk cows. In 1901 John built a frame house for his family. On one occasion John was called on to perform an odd service for a neighbor who had a family of girls. A neighbor the father didn’t approve of was interested in one of the girls, so he hired John to haul the girl, hidden in a load of hay, to O’Neill and buy 329 her a ticket to Columbus, where her older sister lived. Since the rest of the family was all at home at the time, the unacceptable suitor had no idea how the girl got away, or where she went.

The Haakes celebrated their Golden Wedding Anniversary in 1942, with a special service at the Immanuel Lutheran Church and a dinner at their home, where nearly one hundred relatives and friends spent the day with them. Of their five children only Walter, who lives on the home place, is still in Holt County.

Thomas Benton Jones came west from Indiana to Mapleton, Iowa where he ran a mill for a few years. His real desire was to raise sheep, so in the late ‘eighties he and his three sons, Cary, Nathan and Edgar, and a daughter Ella, came to Holt County. That was a wet spring and the Joneses passed up the wet hay bottoms and selected higher ground. Edgar was not old enough to file on land at the time but the others did. Disease, bad weather and poor shelter for the animals made the sheep raising venture a failure. When he was old enough Edgar filed on a place of his own, on the South Fork of the Elkhorn. Nathan went to the Black Hills for awhile then returned and bought a farm adjoining Edgar’s. Cary Jones spent most of his life in the neighborhood, then went to Minnesota. Ella married C. E. Martin and lived northeast of Edgar’s on the edge of little Waller Lake, a good fishing spot in those days.

Edgar Jones married Anna Ermer, daughter of another pioneer settler. Edgar and Anna had three children, Lester, Eleanor and Lawrence. Lester now lives in Washington State, Eleanor in Michigan and Lawrence in Seneca, Nebraska. Anna, who loved music, was also determined that her children should have a good education. All three graduated from Wayne State College with AB degrees. Anna’s interest in music was also passed on to her children, who played various instruments. Lawrence played the violin and also a horn. A neighbor, Ruby Holcomb, and Lawrence Jones took trips around the world at the same time in 1969; and Ruby was among those who heard Lawrence play the violin, as guest soloist, with the hotel orchestra in Katmandu, the capital of Nepal. The native musicians knew “Somewhere My Love,” and accompanied him quite nicely, Ruby said.

During his early years in the Chambers region, Thomas Jones used a two-wheeled cart pulled by oxen to haul tree cuttings and seedlings from the Niobrara to supply the holders of tree claims round about him. The Kiltz’, Holcomb’s and others set out many acres of these trees. Mr. Jones also brought enough apple trees from Iowa to set out a two-acre orchard on his own place. The trees, both seedlings and grafts, grew apples of all flavors for all seasons. In winter, when the snow drifted one-half to three-fourths of the way up on the trunks of the young trees, Thomas had to get out his old Spencer shotgun to shoot the rabbits that were barking the limbs. People came from miles around in lumber wagons to haul away apples.

For reading material Edgar Jones subscribed to the Toledo Blade, his wife to the long since defunct Comfort Magazine. One winter their neighbors, the Kiltz family, brought over a big bundle of Youths Companion magazines. Mrs. Jones had heard that the Kiltz children had just gotten over the measles, so she put the papers in the hot oven for a good baking before letting her own children read them. None of them got the measles.

Hunting was a favorite sport as well as a means of supplying meat for the table. There were no bag limits in those days and Edgar Jones shot eight big mallards one Sunday morning. As the Jones were going to the A. L. Lowerys for dinner, they took four of the best to share with their host only to find that Mr. Lowery had killed more ducks than they could use, that morning, and had saved some for the Jones. Edgar Jones told his children of seeing as many as two to three hundred whooping cranes in single migrating flocks.

The last day of school picnics were favorite days for whole communities. After the big dinners and the inevitable ball games, free-for-all foot races were set up. Once, after a game between teams from the Ewing and Jones’ communities, the Jones’ group wanted sixteen-year-old Lawrence to run against a speedy young man from Ewing by the name of Nofke.

Edgar Jones, then about forty-three, ran with the boys. Lawrence won, the first time he had ever beaten his dad, who came in a close third. At some races an on-looker would pass the hat and the winner took all. Lawrence at one race got “83c, a safety pin and several buttons.” Charlie Barnum, one of ten children, was born in 1879 to T. James and Eunice Barnum at Waverly, Nebraska. As a small boy he moved with his family to Thedford, and then to Chambers about 1900. He operated a livery stable which stood where the old hotel now stands. From 1903 to 1906 he carried mail on a rural route. In 1907 he married Hattie Doherty. After three years in a blacksmith and wagon shop, he went into the furniture and undertaking business in 1911. When he moved to Neligh in 1920 he continued in the furniture and undertaking business.

Always active in civic affairs, he was one of the group responsible for the incorporation of the village of Chambers in 1914. Both he and his wife are buried in the Chambers cemetery.

John E. Lienhart was the second son of German immigrants who settled in Canada, where he was born in 1854. After the death of his mother in Canada in 1861 the family moved to La Porte County, Indiana. In the fall of 1875, at age twenty-one, he came to Hastings, Nebraska, and walked to Minden, where he homesteaded. As soon as he had built a sod house for them, the rest of his family joined him.

In 1880 John married Azora Kronk- right and became the father of six children. He moved his family to a farm some twelve miles southeast of Chambers in 1900. They pulled in to their new home on a rainy night, having come by wagon with all of their machinery and household goods from Minden. When they stopped at the house, all of them wet, cold and tired, they found a sow and her litter bedded down inside. After removing the pigs and cleaning up, the family began moving in while Ray, thirteen years old, walked through the rain to the nearest neighbor to borrow some live coals to start a fire.

Another of the Lienhart boys, Frank, liked to tell in later years of the prank he played on some friendly skunks in the country school he attended. The skunks made their home under the schoolhouse, which had wide cracks in its floor. One day when the teacher left the room for a few minutes, Frank heated the stove poker in the stove, then stuck it through a crack in the floor, touching a sensitive skunk with it. There was no more school for a week or two— and not one of his schoolmates told on him.

John Lienhart kept the farm, but later moved to Chambers where he operated a harness and cobbler’s shop and a cream station. In 1917 he went to O’Neill and worked as a carpenter until Azora died in 1928, after which he went back to the homestead and lived with Ray and his family.

Of the five Lienhart children who lived to grow up, only Ray remained in Holt County. Ray married Ivy Anderson at Harold in 1909, then went to a barber school in Omaha and barbered in Chambers until 1911. Ivy ran an ice cream parlor in the corner of the barber shop. From 1912 until 1916 the Lienharts operated a 330 general store in partnership with a Mr. Bogert.

For a short time in 1915 Ray owned and printed the Chambers Bugle. It was at this time that he acquired his nickname “Scoop.” In 1916 he took up a new career— selling automobiles. He first sold Oaklands for the Jordan Hardware Company of O’Neill. By 1927 he was selling cars with Dewey Miller out of Albion. For many years he also sold Allis-Chalmers and International Harvester machinery for John Walter, and later for Louis and Victor Harley of Chambers.

He was a salesman for the Taylor Motor Company, of Chambers, and for Carl and Tony Asimus of O’Neill and, until he suffered a stroke in 1963, was employed as a car salesman by Alva Marcellus of O’Neill. Many times, while selling machinery in the early years, he brought home a herd of horses, taken in trade for a tractor, as few farmers could pay cash for the machines.

Of Raymond and Ivy’s four children, only Edith, who married Robert Miles of The Frontier and Holt County Independent, is still living in Holt County. Ivy is now living with her daughter and son-in-law in O’Neill. Closs Isaac Blake, born in Sweden in 1848, came to America with his parents at the age of four. One of seven children, he was the only survivor. Five children had died in infancy and little Joe, two years old, died on the voyage and was buried at sea.

When the family got off the boat Closs’ father had just twenty-five cents in cash. They had heard so much about American apples and the father bought what he took to be apples, but they turned out to be tomatoes and none of them liked them.

Closs Blake married Carrie Miner in Sioux City in 1879 and lived at Wakefield for a time. But Carrie’s health was poor and the rent was so high that they decided to come West. They came in a covered wagon in 1900, driving their stock, and moved into a sod house just south of the Lafe Fluckey place.

The Blakes had thirteen children, all of whom lived to grow up. Closs drilled wells and worked at whatever else he could find to do. After a few years the family returned to Wake-field, but in 1915 moved back to Holt County to stay. This time the family, livestock and machinery all came by train. The month was March and they were snowed in at O’Neill for a week, which ran up quite a bill at the hotel and the stockyards.

In spite of all their hardships, Closs lived to be ninety-eight and Carrie ninety-two. As long as he lived Closs was proud of the fact that he was one of the first three depositors in the new bank at Chambers.

Edwin Fleek was the son of Henry and Rebecca Fleek. Born in Wisconsin in 1855, he later moved with his family to Iowa. In 1877 he married Lucinda Hummel and moved to Brain-ard, Nebraska, where they made their home until 1900. When they came to their farm two and a half miles southwest of Chambers that same year, they built a granary and lived in it while they built their house. The Fleeks farmed their place until Ed’s death, eighteen years later. Mrs. Fleek then lived in Chambers for several years, and after that with different ones of her seven children. Both she and Edwin are buried in Chambers.

German born Joseph Myers came to Nebraska in 1860 at the age of eight. His wife, Emma Blair, was born in Butler county in 1871. The couple was married at David City in 1890 and had five children.

The Myers, with their first three children, came to Chambers with the Fleek family. They stayed with the Pete Kutscher family while building a sod house on their land. In 1908 Joe bought a frame house and moved it to his place. Three years later it burned down.

To help support the family Emma Myers worked for nearly every family in Chambers, house work, washing, cleaning, papering, Emma did them all— for a dollar a day. Joe helped other farmers stack, bale and haul their hay and worked at anything else he could get to do.

The Myers had a pond by their place, fed by a flowing well. They fished in it, swam in it, and skated on it. Boys and girls used to come out from Chambers to enjoy the pond with the Myers. The children grew up and Joe and Emma sold the farm in 1918 and moved into Chambers. Joe went blind two years before his death in 1934. Emma then moved to the basement of the Chambers school and took over the janitor service for quite a few years. She died in 1947. Harry Simpson lived with his parents on land now owned by Hoerle Brothers. After working in Chicago for awhile he came to Chambers about 1900 and worked for G. L. Barney who had just opened a second store in the town. In 1902 he married Emma Oetter. The couple lived on her homestead and bought more land adjoining it. A carpenter, Harry helped build the Hoerle house, and a big barn for S. E. Honeywell, which was only recently torn down. About 1915 the Simpsons moved into Chambers and Harry opened the town’s first cream station. Later he went into the South Fork State Bank with R. J. Starr, C. H. Stowell, William Lel l and D. L Johnson. The Simpsons had two sons and a daughter. In 1926 the family left Holt County. The sons predeceased the parents, who died at advanced ages in Norfolk. The daughter, Meta, married Rev. Shleep, a former pastor of the Chambers Lutheran church who died in Fort Smith, Arkansas. The widow still lives there. William Gleed, born in 1860 in Erie County, New York, went to Wyoming and the Dakotas to work on cattle ranches. He was foreman of the Lovell Cattle Company of Lovell, Wyoming, for ten years and knew Theodore Roosevelt personally. He settled six miles west of Chambers in 1890 and built up a fine Shorthorn cattle ranch.

In 1894 he married Mary Jean Higgins, daughter of Thomas and Rose Ann Higgins. Mary Jean was a school teacher in the Chambers area before her marriage. They were the parents of a daughter, Edna, who married John S. Crow; and a son, Lloyd, who married Leona Adams. Charles E. Farrier, son of Calvin and Cynthia Farrier of Iowa, was born in 1861. Orphaned at an early age, he attended school in Crete, Nebraska, and taught school for several years before coming to Holt County in 1891 to file on a homestead a mile and a half northwest of Chambers, where he spent the rest of his life. He married Abbie Kindblade at Rayner, Iowa, in 1892 and brought her to his homestead. Their son was three years old when Mrs. Farrier died in 1895 and was buried at Chambers. Two years later Charles married Alma Frances Stowell, a local school teacher. Seven children were born to the couple. The family belonged to the Kellar church and Charles was president of the Chambers Cemetery Association and a member of the South Fork Fair Association. Both Charles and Almo are buried in the Chambers cemetery.

Winslow Z. Watson and Mary Elizabeth Dominy were born in New York State. After service in the Civil War Mr. Watson was a lumberjack. He and his wife and a crew of men spent their winters in the woods, where Mary Elizabeth cooked for the men. The only times she saw a women’s face were when she looked in the water barrel.

With their son Fred, the Watsons came to Doniphan, Nebraska in 1887. On Christmas Eve, 1892, Fred, then twenty-four years old, arrived at the home of his uncle, Will Dominy, west of Chambers. His parents followed him in the spring and homesteaded south of Amelia. Fred bought land 331 and built up a 2400 acre ranch just north of the C. N. Thompson place. In 1896 he married Frances Elizabeth Thompson.

Fred Watson helped organize the South Fork Telephone Company and installed one of the first telephones in the neighborhood in his own home. John Wintermote, youngest brother of Martin and Will, came to the South Fork Valley some seven years after Martin settled on the Ned Alderson quarter. He taught school for awhile, married Clarabelle Dorothy in 1898 and bought a farm the next year, only a mile and a half from the Dorothy farm.

In those days there were holes in the South Fork deep enough for swimming and fishing. Clarabelle, an avid angler, took her baby son Gaius with her in his buggy one day when she went fishing. A sudden gust of wind sent the buggy down the sloping bank into the water. The buggy floated long enough for the mother to wade in and rescue her baby.

Later Ida and Zelta Wintermote went wading in one of the holes and got in beyond their depth. Will Holcomb saw them go down for the second time, jumped in and pulled them out.

Grandma Bell’s homestead adjoined the Wintermotes on the south. Her home was two rooms, completely separated from one another. One cabin was her bedroom, the other her kitchen. Now and then a neighbor gave the old lady a fat hen to cook. Since she had no pen or coop for the hen, she kept it staked out by a string around its leg until she was ready to dress it.

When John and Clarabelle retired in 1946 and moved into Chambers their only son Gaius bought the home place, where he now lives. All of the Wintermote daughters became teachers. The youngest, Eula, after serving in the Women’s Air Corps in World War II and becoming a first lieutenant, took her degree at the University of Nebraska and entered the field of extension service. Her career took her to Tehran in Iran for four years, and eventually around the world.

Charles A. Fauquier was born to Ephriam and Margaret Fauquier in the village of Fauquier, County of Fau-quier, Virginia. He was two when the family moved to Iowa, where his father enlisted in the Union Army, then died of fever in Little Rock, Arkansas and was buried in the National Cemetery there. His uncle, his mother’s brother, returned from the war and helped care for the widow and her three small children. They moved to Merrick County, Nebraska, in 1872.

In 1881 Charles married Emma Jane Pemberton in Central City. In 1899 he bought a half section of land about six miles south of Chambers and moved his family there the following spring. Charles and Emma Jane had six children. The Lienharts, who settled half a mile from them that same year, also had six children. The fathers, John and Charles, being the same age always celebrated their birthdays together. Bliss was their post office.

Several families came from Butler County to Chambers about 1901. They included Grover and Margaret Disney, their daughter May and her husband, Charles Fleek, and the Edwin Porter family. Charles’ brother, Edwin Fleek and his family, had settled near Chambers the year before. The Disneys took a farm about three miles northeast of town. Their son Grover, better known as “Moke,” accompanied his parents and later married Minnie Majors, daughter of George Majors. Her mother was an early day mail carrier to the post office at Frances, a few miles to the south of Chambers.

In 1903 Charles Allen and his young wife, another daughter of the Disneys, followed the little colony to Chambers and settled about three miles east of town, near the Disneys. Three years later Charles moved into Chambers and ran a barber shop and candy store. The family moved several times in the next dozen years, but never left the Chambers neighborhood. In 1912 Charles bought a gray Oakland, which the family dubbed “Old Gray.” Being a good mechanic, he got a good many years of service out of Old Gray.

Charles had played for the semi-pro league in eastern Nebraska, so was a valuable player on the Chambers Nine, and every summer Saturday afternoon found the whole Allen family rooting for the home team. “Sundays after church were for visiting,” wrote Faye Allen Good, years later. “Several families would get together— as many as 30 or 40 people, as most of the families were large. The ladies would cook beans in a wash boiler for these gatherings, and I can remember my mother making a flour sack full of cookies to take along.

“Charles was noted for his watermelons, so in summer melon feeds were the regular thing. He took many prizes at the Chambers Fair on his melons. A Negro family lived south of town. His last name was Dixon and I remember him as a white-haired old gentleman. My father had several dealings with him.” Frederick Guy Calhoun came to Nebraska in 1902, after serving through the Spanish-American war in the Philippines. He settled first at Spencer, where he married Coril Bishop that same year. After several moves the family came to the place four and one-half miles northeast of Chambers where Ray Grubb now.

lives.

During some of his years on the farm Guy worked at the valley’s main industry, baling and hauling hay. Part of the time he walked as far as five miles in the mornings to bale hay all day for a wage of fifty cents— and considered himself lucky to have the work. His dinner would be a sandwich, frozen in his pocket long before noon. Of the Calhoun’s six children only Helen (Ermer) of O’Neill remained in Holt County. One son, John, now living in Oregon, served four years in the Navy in World War II.

Wood Jarmin, son of Mr. and Mrs. William O. Jarmin, was born at Nodaway, Iowa, in 1882. He came to Chambers in 1905 to visit his brothers, Odd and Jim, farmers west of town. He took a job in the Charles Barnum livery stable for a time, then attended a barber school in Omaha.

In 1907 he married Rufus Wry’s daughter, Jaunita, barbered for awhile in Omaha, then moved to Chambers and operated a shop of his own for several years. After he sold the shop to J. E. Doherty he went to farming for himself. The Jarmins had three sons, Clifford, who married Arelie Lowery; Richard, who married Lenora Smith; and Stanley, who married Reva Gaddy. Wood Jarmin died in 1967, his wife in 1968. Both are buried at Chambers.

Odd Jarmin, Wood’s older brother, was born in 1877 in a cave on the banks of the Solomon River near Kirwin, Kansas. At one time they were unable to come out of their cave for three days because of a buffalo migration. While living in Central City in the ‘nineties, Odd came through Chambers on his way to South Dakota and was so favorably impressed with the country that he decided to make his home there.

Odd married Elva Onita Childers, a grand-niece of Robert E. Lee. With their year-old daughter, Vera, they moved to the South Fork in 1902. The next year their son, Everett, was born. A rancher, he bought cattle to ship to Omaha. From 1912 to 1923 he served as sports manager of the South Fork Fair. In 1956 he was honored in Omaha as a fifty year shipper to the markets there.

Charles Tangeman, an Iowan, married Jane Anderson in 1892 and lived for a time in Cuming County, Nebraska, where their first daughter was born. Their other four children were born in Knox County before the 332 family moved to the “Ham Jeffers farm,” three and one-half miles northeast of Chambers in 1905. The Tangemans raised cattle and milked forty cows by hand. They hauled their cream to the station in Chambers in twenty-gallon wooden cream cans. Not long after coming to their new home the family was quarantined for scarlet fever and a twelve-year-old son, Glenn, died from after effects of the disease.

Charles Tangeman was proud of his horses, especially a driving team he called “Button-Wood” and “Speedy.” He drove them with white leather, chest-type harness and check reins holding their heads high. His buggy was equally stylish. But man must change with the times and in 1914 he bought a Model T. It was quite a change, but not as fast as his team, due to deep sand in the high places and mud in the low spots. In 1919 he bought the Joe Kline place, five and a half miles southeast of Chambers. His son Alvin still lives there.

Edward Dexter married Lizzie Gumb, daughter of William Gumb, in 1903. In 1905 they took a homestead in the south edge of Holt County, living in a ten by fourteen foot claim shack for a few years. Ed’s brother William came a few years later and bought the Fred Dawe place. Lizzie and Ed later bought the Jack Gumb place and established a good cattle ranch.

Ed and his cousin, Dexter Burch, went to Omaha and bought a bunch of all sizes of rough Texas steers. As one neighbor remarked, “Those steers were all colors of the rainbow,” and the ranch has ever since been known as the “Rainbow Ranch.” Good new buildings, cattle sheds and fences improved the ranch and eventually registered Herefords replaced the early mixed cattle.

Before he died in the Atkinson hospital in 1957 at the age of seventy- five years, Ed told Lizzie to stay on the ranch— and she is still there, raising commercial Herefords, more than one hundred head of them, in 1973. But with good help so hard to find she may not be able to hold out much longer.

Magdalene Bott of Illinois was united in marriage to Fred Jungbluth of Schuyler in 1905. A year later they moved to Chambers, where Magdalene owned a quarter of land about four miles north of the town. They bought another quarter south of it and lived there for many years. They had six children.

A daughter Violet married Arthur Carrol, Chief photographer for the U.S. Navy at Norfolk, in 1932. Seven years later he left on the Byrd expedition and returned in April, 1941. Alda married William Steskal and lives near Atkinson on a ranch. Ernest Jungbluth married Gertrude Jones of O’Neill.

While the children were growing up they went to the Valley Center school, where at one time forty pupils were enrolled. Someone usually mowed the schoolyard in the fall before school started. Since most of the children went barefooted when the weather was warm, the stubble and sandburs were pretty hard on their feet until the traffic wore them smooth.

Their mailman, Frank Dyke, drove his route in an enclosed carriage. The family subscribed to the Omaha Daily News and often read of murders in other places, but it came as a severe shock to them to learn that a Chambers husband had shot his wife in the Golden Hotel in O’Neill. The Jungbluths went to her funeral. Every summer bands of Gypsies camped on the roadside near the Jungbluth home and carried their water from a well there. Mrs.

Jungbluth always gave them potatoes, carrots, food from her cave and a fat hen. Because of her generosity, wrote Alda, “they never bothered us or stole anything and we (the children) always looked forward to the coming of the Gypsies.” Guy Beckwith, who lived through the 1913 tornado and the 1914 prairie fire and hail storm, had one more soul trying experience ahead of him. In December of 1914 he married Ethel Johnson of Emmet and moved into the little house on the quarter he bought with his insurance money from the cyclone. That winter was a bad one, with lots of snow and high drifts.

In February his young wife became very ill with appendicitis. When the appendix ruptured and she knew she was dying, Ethel begged to see her mother. Guy rode horseback through the drifts to Chambers and telephoned a neighbor of his parents who lived at Emmet. It was night then, and early the next morning his father and mother and Mrs. Johnson set out with a team and surrey from Emmet.

If they could have come straight across country it would have been only about twenty-two miles, but the roads were blocked and they had to go to O’Neill, then to Chambers and then to the farm, a total of forty miles and much of it through deep snow, although the road from O’Neill to Chambers was partially cleared by men from Chambers who had made a snowplow from bridge planks, pushed from behind by horses. Even so, the road crossed fields and meadows, wherever a trail could be made. The travelers arrived about five that evening. “Ethel knew her mother, but died a couple of hours later.” Mr. Barnum, the Chambers undertaker, came out with a casket and a bobsled and took the body away. The next morning Guy and his family headed for O’Neill (by way of Chambers), where the casket was put aboard the four o’clock train for Emmet. Guy Cole met the train in Emmet with a team and sled and took the casket to the Johnson home. Two days later he took his sad burden to Atkinson for the funeral. By the main road it is only ten miles from Emmet to Atkinson, but by the road Cole had to travel it was nearly fifteen— and breaking trail most of the way. He said afterward that his team (and he had a good one) was about all in when he got to Atkinson. So he put them in the livery barn for the night and stayed at the hotel and went home the next day.

A Mr. Huff ran the Chambers livery barn at that time and his twenty-two year-old son, Leo, drove a good deal for Dr. Oxford. Leo brought him to see Ethel Beckwith, late one afternoon, and when he had done all he could for the sick woman, he still had to make another call, some fifteen miles on northwest. It was about ten that night when they left the Beckwith place; six miles on they got a farmer out of bed, borrowed a fresh team and went on. They made the call, came back, changed back to their own team and drove on to Chambers, arriving about noon the next day. “My father,” Guy said, “had driven livery teams a lot and could get a lot of miles out of them without hurting them. He had two good teams at the home place and I wondered which one he would pick to make the trip to our place in the snow, the blacks or the grays. I was surprised when he came, driving one black and one gray. I asked him why he had split the teams and he said he took the two that had the biggest feet. Everything else being equal, that makes quite a difference in snow, as the larger hoof doesn’t sink as deep— the same principle as a man wearing snowshoes.” In the spring of 1913 B. B. Gribble sold his general store in Hubbard and bought a ranch a few miles southeast of Chambers, where Mark Gribble now lives. He made the move because he had three teenage sons and there were not enough jobs available for the lively boys where they were. Loading his cattle and three or four Hambletonian horses into two boxcars, Mr. Gribble and the three boys rode with them to O’Neill, then drove the stock on out to the ranch. Mrs. Gribble and the younger children followed by passenger train. 333 The Gribbles fitted right into the Chambers way of life. Most older boys in the region had their own saddle horses and it was the usual thing on Saturday evening to see fifteen to thirty horses at the hitching rails in town, and there was always a stack or two of hay that could be baled by any lads short of spending money.

Elizabeth Gribble, the oldest daughter, had finished the eighth grade in Hubbard that spring. That fall, with no one to go to school with her in Chambers, she had to stay at home and take the ninth grade from the district school teacher who had never taken the ninth grade herself. She made it however, took the tenth at Meadow Grove and the last two in O’Neill, where she graduated in 1917. After teaching for several years, Elizabeth became Mrs. Dewey Schaffer in 1923 and moved to the McCaffrey ranch south of Emmet, where they still run a large and important cattle outfit. Bernard Gribble, who had dropped out of school after the eleventh1 grade, two years later went down to Lincoln and took both his twelfth grade in high school and his freshman year at the University in one year. Upon graduation from college he became the first State Actuary, an office that had been set up but not filled until he applied for it. This led to a successful career in the insurance field for him.

Harry Gribble spent most of his working years in the automobile business. Both he and Bernard served in World War I. Mark took over the home ranch. The twins, Ralph and Ruth, married and went to live in Washington.

Nebraska born Lois Whitaker and Everette Miner were married in O’Neill in 1935 and began their life together on a farm three miles southwest of Chambers. Six years later they moved to the Starr Ranch east of the Martha school, then to a farm one mile north of Chambers where they went into partnership with Leo Adams in raising Angus cattle. In the fall of 1947 they bought the Wolfe place southeast of O’Neill becoming the fourth owner from the date the homestead patent was issued to Samuel Wolf(e). His son, Elmer, was second; Elmer’s son Gene was third, and then Everette and Lois Miner, who added another quarter to the 536 acre ranch on the Elkhorn by purchase from the Gallagher estate in 1973.

The Miners have two children, Russell and Sharon. Both attended country school and graduated from O’Neill High. Russell went down to the University for two years, then served two years in the armed forces in Germany. He is married to Ethel Oeltjens of Palmer. They live northwest of O’Neill. Sharon grew up on a horse, broke her wrist in a fall from a horse, and owns a goodly number of barrel racing trophies. In 1956 she was named Nebraska High School Rodeo Queen at Harrison, as well as all-around cowgirl. She has won rodeo queen contests at Genoa, O’Neill and Broken Bow. She married Norman Klasna of Spencer and has four children. The Klasnas live in Denver.

Starting their married life in the “dirty thirties,” Lois recalls that she and her little girl each had only one good dress. Hers cost seventy-nine cents, Sharon’s twenty-five. Lois has undergone major surgery thirteen times but is presently the hired man on the ranch and able to handle most of the machinery, as well as to keep the books for Miners’ Inc.

A final note on Chambers reveals that the garage and light plant burned down in December, 1925, leaving the town without electricily until the next May, when William Reninger put in a plant in the east part of town. He sold the plant to Kenneth Werner in 1946, who operated it until the R.E.A. took over in 1951-’52.

← Chapter 32: Echos From Emmet | Table of Contents | Chapter 34: Page And Pleasant Valley →