← Before Today: A History of Holt County, Nebraska
Middlebranch and Willowdale Chapter Thirty-Seven Middle Branch, located midway up the eastern border of Holt County, was an early town tucked in at the foot of a hill with the middle branch of the Verdigris Creek winding around its east edge. Probably its first residents were several Stevens families and their friends. Rosco Knapp Stevens, born in Kingfield, Maine, in 1855, was the son of Consider Thomas Stevens and Harriet Packard Stevens. Consider was English, Harriet, too, was English with a wee bit of Scotch and Pequot Indian. Rosco married Louisa Jane Andrews in Iowa in 1878. The next spring they came by covered wagon to a claim on the Middle Branch, just over the line in Knox County.
Their first home, part of which is still intact, was a dugout with a pole and hay roof. At first they did quite well, investing in a herd of cattle and hauling cottonwood lumber from the Niobrara to build a new home. Then they lost all the cattle with “black leg” and had nothing. That winter they were so desperate that Rosco walked to Yankton, South Dakota, and found work sawing lumber with a bucksaw for seventy-five cents a day. He told of carrying his shoes on those trips to save the leather.
In 1890 he sold his farm and moved two miles northwest onto his mother’s place, which adjoined his but was in Holt County. He moved his frame house to the new location and used his mother’s house for his blacksmith shop. He was a fine horse breeder, too, and travelled the area with his stallions. Another of his jobs was that of Justice of the Peace. For many years he was often interrupted at his meals, or his work, to perform a marriage ceremony.
In 1881, while they lived on their claim, Rosco was away from home when Louisa Jane heard a rumor of a planned Sioux Attack on the Middle Branch settlement. She set out at once with her toddler and her infant to walk to Fort Niobrara, but got only as far as her sister-in-law’s (Elethier Allen) at Walnut and stayed there. The rumor was a false alarm anyway. In his early frontier days Rosco came to like to “tip the jug” too well on his trips to the store. One day he came home on his horse, singing gaily, attempted to dismount and “fell on his posterior” in full view of his wife and children. A proud man and a fine horseman, this affront to his dignity was enough to make him strictly temperate thereafter. One day in the early 1900’s Rosco and his son Harry drove the spring wagon up into Cherry County to look at some land. They became lost in the sandhills and wandered into a valley where a man in a little shack invited them in to eat with him. He was friendly and interested in the news of Holt County. His guests watched him spearing his food with the blade of a peculiar knife— pearl-handled with a thin, cylindrical blade.
After the meal he gave them directions to where they wanted to go __ then told them with a smile that when they got home they could tell their family they had had dinner with Doc Middleton.
Rosco’s mother, Harriet Stevens, married Consider Thomas Stevens in Maine in 1854. They had nine children before he died in Iowa in 1870. She then married Peter Hall in Iowa in 1877. With Harriet’s fourteen-year-old son, William Henry Stevens, the Halls came to Middle Branch at about the same time Rosco and his family did. Peter filed on the claim Rosco later purchased from his mother. Harriet had three more children, all of whom died in childhood. Peter died in 1887 and was buried at Grimton cemetery in Knox County.
Two of Consider Stevens’ daughters, Elethier and Matilda, came west at about the same time as their mother, Mrs. Hall, and their brother Rosco. Elethier had married John Allen and this couple stopped at Walnut, some miles east of Middle Branch. Matilda and her husband, Charles McIntosh, had a small daughter. They separated and Charles went back to Iowa. In 1885 Matilda and her daughter, Ella, were living with Peter and Harriet Hall. Matilda later went to California and married again.
Also a part of this migration to Middle Branch was the Andrews family. Henry Andrews was born in Ohio in 1820, his wife Virginia (Polly) Ann McIntosh in New York. They were married in 1843 in Ohio and came with numerous other members of the Andrews and McIntosh families to Iowa in the 1850’s. They were the parents of Rosco’s wife, Louisa Jane, and came with them to Nebraska. They had seven other children, although only a part of their family came on to Middle Branch. Polly died in 1891 and is buried at Grimton. Their daughter Azubah was born in Ohio in 1853 and came with her parents to Iowa when very young. She married Earl Olmstead there and had three children before moving to Knox County with the rest of that early colony. Six more children were born to them in Nebraska.
Another Andrews daughter, Virginia, also born in Ohio, married Charles Moore. Six of their eight children were born in Iowa, the last two probably in Middle Branch. Prior to 1917 the parents moved to Sioux City.
Prince Thomas Stevens, the second son of Consider and Harriet Stevens, married Hannah Marilla Jones in Iowa and had nine children, two born in Iowa and the rest in Middle Branch. The family followed Prince’s mother, brothers and sisters to Holt County and homesteaded eighty acres a mile west of the Middle Branch mill. Their home was an old school house that they moved onto their claim.
During the winter of 1879-’80 Moses Bright built his burr mill in the bend of the Middle Branch Creek, a mile and a half from Rosco Stevens original homestead— and this was the actual beginning of the town of Middle Branch. Mr. Bright applied for and secured a post office of the same name, that winter; and in 1881 Charles Finney opened the town’s first store.
During the years between 1880 and 1900 several homes were built in the pretty little town and a doctor, Steven Walker, came, opened a drug store and attended to the peoples’ ills and injuries. Rusey Babcock set up a blacksmith shop and a school began in a schoolhouse nearly two miles northwest of the town. Later it was moved to within a mile of Middle Branch, where it stood until it was closed and sold, a good many years later. The Baptist Church, an important part of the community life, was built in 1903.
Louisa Jane Stevens, wife of Rosco, was active in the church, taught Sunday school and served as Secretary for the North Central District of the Baptist Association of Nebraska. In 1919 Rosco sold the farm and bought the Middle Branch store, operated it and the post office, which had been moved from the mill to the store, for four years, then sold out and moved to Page.— There he did odd jobs: tending the ice house, shoveling grain 366 at the elevator, carpentering and blacksmithing. Louisa died in 1941, Rosco in 1944. Both are buried at Page.
William Henry Stevens, Rosco’s brother, who came with his mother and stepfather to Middle Branch in 1879, left home in 1888 and was never heard from again. His mother, Harriet Hall, was a popular mid-wife in the community. She died in Iowa in 1922 and was brought back to Grimton for burial. Her second son, Prince Stevens, after farming at Middle Branch for quite a few years, sold the farm, moved to Page and repaired shoes and harness. He and his wife are both buried at Page. Bryan and Alva Stevens, Rosco’s sons, married and lived for a time at Middle Branch. When Bryan’s wife, a girl from Little Rock, Arkansas, first came to the little town in 1919 she was amazed at the mailman’s rig, a little house built onto his Model T truck, with a stove in it and a chimney sticking out of its roof. When the weather and roads were bad and the Model T couldn’t “make it,” Bryan and Alva met the rig, when it had come as far as it could, and took the mail on horseback to Venus, over in Knox County.
Prince Stevens children, some of them quite young, made the move with their parents to Page in 1906 and married there. Herbert married Nellie Gray, Leila married Ray Snell, Ralph married Elizabeth Conard, Lula married Clarence Townsend, Florence married Guy Jernigan, Lloyd married Gladys Seiverns and Evelyn, who went to grade school in Page, grew up and married Robert Gray. One of her daughters, Verna, married Cordes Walker of Page.
Other early settlers of the Middle Branch community were the Warings and two of the Bruce families. Ezra Medcalf Waring, born in New York State in 1848, married Ann Eugenia Bruce of Strawberry Point, Iowa, in 1873 in Waterloo. In 1880, with three small children, they came to Niobrara on the railroad, then on by wagon to a claim near Middle Branch. Eugenia’s father, Joseph Bruce, and her brother, Alfred, came about the same time and filed on neighboring claims, all of them about three miles north and a little west of the village.
After nine years the Warings went back to Iowa, stayed only six months and came back to a rented farm. In 1893 they bought a quarter about a mile south of Middle Branch, where they lived until 1905, then built a new home in town and lived out their lives there.
Among the anecdotes handed down to his children by Ezra are these: During his first years on the claim Ezra several times walked the thirty-five miles to Niobrara, worked there long enough to earn money for groceries, then carried them home on his back. Later, when he was able to buy a cow, he walked to Ewing, got the cow and led her home. His food on the three-day trip was some bread— and milk from the cow. In 1885 the district paid $38 for a David C. Cook organ for the schoolhouse. In 1896 corn sold for twelve cents a bushel and fat hogs brought $2.80 per hundred pounds.
In 1901 Ezra Waring went to Lincoln as a member of the House of Representatives, a “Fusion” member of that body. He was re-elected in 1903. The Waring’s oldest daughter, Allie Margaret, taught school in Holt County until her marriage to Charles Edward Carter who came to Middle Branch to take over the mill from Moses Bright. They were married in 1896 and had nine children. The eldest oftheir eight sons, Edward, born at Middle Branch, later became Chief Justice of the Nebraska Supreme Court.
Gerald E. Waring, grandson of Ezra, in 1952 was visiting with Bartley Blain, son of the old minister of the same name who had raised his family at Middle Branch. This Bartley Blain was, at the time, a retired Navy officer. Early in his naval career, he said, he had gone into the dining room of a large New York hotel. All the tables were occupied, but a lady, dining alone, invited him to share her table. When she asked him where he came from, he told her Nebraska. When she next asked the name of the town, he told her it wouldn’t mean anything to her. She said she had been to Nebraska and might know where it was. He then told her it was Middle Branch and she stopped him there. She went on to describe the town to him— the store, the mill and The old Middle Branch Dam. Courtesy E. M. Jarman. mill pond, the church. She even told him where his folks lived and recited the names of other people in the town, and where they lived from the store.
She then explained that she was. the wife of Sinclair Lewis and that, when he was gathering material for his novel, Main Street, back about 1915, they had spent most of the summer camping north of Middle Branch, and that the town was in the book, except that Lewis had called it Middle Town.
A most interesting resident of the Middle Branch community from 1889 to 1890 was Cyrus Buck. As a young man he had operated a livery barn and butcher shop at Decatur, on the Missouri, north of Omaha. While there he put together a freighting company and hauled supplies to the Black Hills during the gold rush. As the railroad built west from Decatur he made each “end of track” site the jumping off point for his freighting.
In the spring of 1880 Cy made up an outfit at Oakdale, the end of the railroad, in Antelope County. With forty head of broke cattle, he unloaded and transferred freight from the cars to his wagons. When he had thirty wagons loaded and lined up in a series of three wagons to a hitch, he and his men roped and yoked one hundred head of wild steers. To prevent them from breaking their necks while bucking and kicking, they tied their tails together before turning them loose.
The following day the hitching began, with a pair of broke oxen on the tongue and another in the lead and five pairs of green cattle in between. Each team was attached to a chain running from the wagon tongue to the yoke on the lead team. Each hitch of fourteen oxen was tended by a horseman with a whip. An outrider took care of the herd of 367 spare oxen but Mr. Buck acted as his own scout and wagonmaster. With the 140 oxen hitched into ten hitches the trip to the Hills began. Much of the freight hauled in the wagons was flour and butter, two of the most . wanted items at the mines.
The trail to the northwest ran through Neligh, where a little building used as a drug store was caught by the end wagon on Cy’s train and turned around. The freighters, unaware of what had happened, did not stop. In Holt County the trail crossed John Prill’s farm; and the ruts worn by the passing wagons can still be seen today. The trail passed on across the county a mile and a half north of Page, across the Ralph Prill and Vorce farms northeast of O’Neill, to within a few miles of Bassett, where the train forded the Niobrara.
From there it was upgrade into Dakota gumbo country, where June rains activated the sticky soil until the oxen could make no more than a mile a day. At times it was necessary to use the extra cattle, yoking them into a hitch of twenty head to pull the three-wagon hitches through the mud. The trains that left Oakdale in February reached the Hills in late June or July. Only one trip a year could be made and, from the time they started until they reached their destination, the oxen were never unyoked.
At the mines one hundred head of the poorest cattle were sold for beef. On the return trip with the strongest oxen, Cy bought replacement cattle from Texas trailherds coming north. Wintering the new steers, he broke them for the next trip the following spring. As the railroad pushed on the freighting era passed and Mr. Buck looked elsewhere for a livelihood. For awhile he dealt in cattle, leaving Oakdale in the winter, buying longhorn herds in Texas and trailing them north to sell to the government for delivery to the Indians on the reservations. In 1887 he bought a thousand head of horses in San Antonio. Selling and trading along the way, he arrived in Oakdale with seven hundred head. With his wife, their children, Emma, Hope and Roselle (son), and many of the horses, he moved to Middle Branch where he bought and sold horses. On one occasion he sold a wild saddle mare to a young man, with the warning that she couldn’t be ridden. When the buyer brought the mare back several days later, Cyrus saddled and rode her, but said afterward that she “bucked harder and bellered louder” than any horse he ever rode. The Bucks next move was to a farm four miles northeast of Page. For the next few years Cy was a familiar sight on the streets of that little town. One day, scratched and bleeding and with his clothes in shreds, he drove his team and wagon down Main Street. Tied in the wagon behind him were three deer he had captured alive, and by himself.
George H. Stevens, born in Cornwall, England, in 1851, came to Wisconsin with his parents in 1854. They later moved to Osceola, Nebraska, where George met and married Florence Martin in 1884. The family moved to Middle Branch in 1900 and Mr. Stevens died thirteen years later. Two years after that (1915) the mother died, leaving a family of nine, some of them quite young. A bachelor uncle, John B. Stevens, helped raise the orphaned children, for he, too, had been left to shift for himself at the age of nine when his parents died. John, a brick layer and mason by trade, helped build many of the homes in Page.
Of George Stevens’ nine children, three are still living; two, Leslie and his sister, Mrs. Laura Cunningham, in O’Neill. The parents and John Stevens are all buried in the Lambert cemetery north of Page. In 1902 Charles Finney and his wife, owners of the store in Middle Branch, had a new house built on their farm a few miles up the creek from the town. They had planned to spend their retirement years there, but when Mrs. Finney died in 1910, Mr. Finney sold the farm to David Bowen of Johnson County.
In the spring of 1912 David Bowen and his family were ready to move to their Holt County farm. David had planned to load three box cars at Smartville on a Friday and Saturday, March 1 and 2, with the family belongings. But on February 25 one of the worst blizzards in years raged throughout the area, delaying the moving by more than a week.
Finally, however, the household effects and the livestock were all safely in the cars. With his property, Mr. Bowen reached Page on March 13, unloaded and freighted everything to the farm on the Middle Branch Creek. Mrs. Bowen and her mother followed four days later. Informed that the dry summer the year before had sharply curtailed the production of grain in the Page territory, the Bowens had packed their piano, cherry wood table, pie safe, washstand, grandfather clock, china closet with bowed glass doors and their china and cut glass wedding presents in oats, corn and other grains. Everything came through in good shape and their livestock lived on the packing until new crops could be harvested.
Shortly after his arrival, Mr. Bowen helped organize the Page Cooperative Grain Company and the Farmers Union Store. He served as chairman of the Board of both companies for several years and also was a member of the school board in District 55. A charter member of the Holt County Farm Bureau, he helped organize the Extension programs in the county and was a 4-H club leader for a number of years. In 1942 he was appointed Supervisor of the State Conservation committee and carried out many of the duties of the first Soil Conservation District established in the county. Dave and Anna had two sons. One died in infancy, the other, Roger, still lives on the farm where he was born in 1912. He married Eugenia Luben of Emmet in 1937 and has two sons. In 1911, while David was making preparations to move to his new farm, his brother Charles and his bride, Florence Roberts of Tecumseh, lived on the place while their own new home was built two miles east of the Middle Branch schoolhouse. In 1923 Charles, with his wife and daughter, left Holt County for Chicago, where he worked for the Post Office Department for many years. A disastrous flood, caused by ten inches or more of rain, hit the Middle Branch in May, 1935. Two upstream bridges were slammed into the trees seventy-five feet from the Bowen house and the water rose to within eight inches of their door. David raised fine purebred Herefords and very early bought outstanding bulls in Denver to improve his herds. He worked both mules and horses and drove a fine buggy team of Hamble- tonians. He was a charter member of the Holt County Hereford and the North Central Hereford Associations at Bassett, serving as a director in both. Willowdale Township is located directly north of Iowa Township, the locale of old Middle Branch. Hains- ville post office was five miles directly north of it. To this area in 1881 came Alexander Wertz. His wife Althea followed in 1882. Their home was quite near the post office. A brother, John Wertz, homesteaded nearby, called his valley “Willowdale,” and taught the first school in the Township (that came to be called by that name) in his sod house.
Alec and Althea had nine children. Emmet, the oldest, who never married, was treasurer of School District 49 for fifty-four years and was also noted for his herd of good Black Angus cattle.
Emmet Wertz recorded that land was taken up so fast from 1879 to 1884 that the last full section in the Township was filed on by Henry Dorcher in the latter year. Emmet, born in 1886, wrote that the first 368 bicycle he ever saw was ridden in Middle Branch by the miller, Ed Carter, father of Judge Edward Carter. The Mohr family, one of the most prominent in Willowdale in the early times, ran the old Hainesville post office for years, Emmet recollected, and Frank Damon, the blacksmith at Star, a few miles north, had a family dance orchestra “that was claimed to be the best west of the Missouri River.” On June 30, 1886 Alonzo D. Swank came from Indiana and bought the rights to a Willowdale homestead from A. G. Watson. He built a sod house on the eighty acres, then returned to Indiana to get his bride. She refused to come back with him, so the place stood vacant over the years, although Mr. Swank kept the taxes paid. After his death his children paid the taxes.
In the fall of 1949 a son, Alfred Swank and his wife came from Houston, Texas, to see the land. William Murphy of Willowdale Township helped him find the old claim. It was all hayland and someone in the vicinity had been haying it without the owner’s knowledge. In 1952 Murphy got a fifteen year lease on the place. Thomas Zakrzewski now owns the eighty.
August Smith, born in Fall Creek, Wisconsin in 1882, married Bab Brady in Eau Claire in 1903. Four years later they moved to Omaha where August was a salesman for the Nebraska Clothing Company. In 1919 they bought a home in Willowdale Township and came there to live. Their son, Leslie, married and moved to Ains-worth. Bab died in 1960 and was buried in O’Neill. August lived on alone on the farm, planting all the cultivated land back to grass and raising Hereford cattle.
August’s brother-in-law, John Berger, lived just across the road from him and John’s Collie dog spent as much time with August as he did with his owner. On March 14, 1962, the dog went over to August’s, then came running back, barking to attract the attention of John and his wife. He did this several times until they got the message and went across the road with him. They found August lying dead in the snow on the far side of his house, apparently the victim of a heart attack.
Clarkson Young and his brother Orton filed on Holt County claims in 1883. Clarkson’s was in the southwest corner of Willowdale Township, Orton’s just west of it in Shields Township. Orton, a bachelor had to give his up because of poor health, but Clarkson married Maggie Long three years later and attempted to make a home of his homestead.
The hard times of the ‘nineties came and Mr. Young gave up, loaded his wife and two small sons into the wagon and drove east to the Lincoln area where he worked on the section . and on a farm. After the birth of a third son he decided to move back to the homestead. Four more sons were born there.
The boys went to school in the District 62 schoolhouse and the family attended church at the Eden Valley schoolhouse. The highlight of the boys’ lives was an occasional ride on Marion Whaley’s merry-go-round. The family got its mail at the old Parker post office.
Of the seven sons, Roy became a minister, Orton served in the Army in World War I, married Helen Cannon of Creighton in 1935 and spent most of his active life on farms in northern Holt County. Guy married Edith Rouse in 1916, and farmed all his life in Willowdale Township. The couple had six children but lost two sons in World War II, Lester on Okinawa and Richard on the Anzio Beachhead. A third son was in the service but came safely home from England in 1945. Both Guy and Edith are buried in O’Neill. Ralph Young married Alma Rouse, sister of Edith, and farmed in Shields and Willowdale Townships. Both of their sons served in World War II. Both of their daughters taught school, Helen until her marriage in 1959, Thelma for fifteen years, after which she retired and moved into O’Neill with her widowed father. Paul married in 1932, lived on various Willow-dale farms and had seven children. He and his wife now live in Doniphan, Nebraska. For a few years he carried the mail on the Opportunity Star Route. His children attended school in District 127 for awhile where, in the early 1940’s, the five pupils were all cousins: three of Paul Young’s children, one of Walter’s and Schoolhouse in District 127. Organized in 1884, dissolved 1959. Courtesy Mrs. Wm. Murphy.
one of Ralph’s.
Walter married Amelia Milne and set up housekeeping on his father’s homestead. There his five children were born and raised. All five finished the eighth grade in District 127 and high school in O’Neill. Two of their sons, Robert and Marvin, were in the armed services in the 1950’s. Walter, Jr., a rodeo fan, became a rodeo clown for fun, married Charlene McCart in 1972 and lives on the farm where Ralph Young lived from 1941 to 1958.
Walter’s daughter Alice went to Belgium as an International Farm Youth in 1958, married in 1960 and went to Montana. Robert married Nancy Devall and farms northwest of O’Neill on the land that belonged to his uncle, Orton Young, years ago. Marvin and Esther no longer live in the county. Walter and Amelia are still on the old homestead.
William Joseph Murphy, his wife, the former Martha Bruder, and their five children moved from a farm in Shields Township to another in Wil-lowdale in 1940. William, born in 1900, had grown up near O’Neill, as had his wife. In 1943 they bought the original Henry Bowerman homestead for their permanent home. They farmed with horses until 1945 when they bought a second-hand Farmall and converted their horse machinery for use on the tractor. In later years they bought a new tractor and machinery made to use with it. The four Murphy brothers served through World War II in the Army and Navy, their sister worked through the summer in the Ammunition Plant at Hastings and taught school in the winters. During the shortage of school teachers that occurred during the war Martha, who had taught two terms of school before her marriage, was asked to renew her certificate and teach again.
369 Intending to help out only on a temporary basis, Martha taught for the next nineteen years in neighborhood schools. In the fall of 1959 REA came to the Willowdale area and the Murphys were able to modernize their farm and replace the old windcharger outfit with power from the lines that criss-crossed the country. Three years later they installed their first telephone. In 1958 William put out an apple and cherry orchard, three shelter belts and a bird refuge on his farm. He also seeded the cultivated land back to grass and alfalfa, as many others were doing, tying the soil down with a permanent plant cover.
Joseph Dietsch and Cecelia Mary Hipp, both born and reared in Germany, were married in Roseland, Nebraska, in 1910. Three years later they came to Willowdale Township to manage a farm for Joseph’s uncle, Anton Dietsch, of Chicago. Anton had bought the farm for an investment and engaged Joseph to improve and farm it.
Joe, with his brothers-in-law, John and Alfred Hipp, constructed all the buildings on the place. In 1936 he arranged to buy the farm from his uncle. By then they had some fine groves growing around the once bare and treeless yard, and the pine trees among them were Cecelia’s especial pride and joy, for she had carried many a pail of water to keep them growing.
Joe and Cecelia and their four children loved to play cards.
“Schafskopf,” (Sheepshead) a German card game, was a favorite, and even their Irish neighbors learned to play and enjoy it. Their son Frank served in the Army during World War II, but none of their children now live in Holt County. Both Joe and his wife are buried in Calvary Cemetery in O’Neill.
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