Chapter 38: Mineola - Opportunity - Nielsen Family History

← Before Today: A History of Holt County, Nebraska

Mineola— Opportunity Chapter Thirty-Eight Old Opportunity post office was located about nine miles west of Hainesville. Much older Mineola was some six miles northeast of Opportunity and only seven miles from the Niobrara, the northern boundary of the county. Both were once important centers for their neighborhoods. Neither exists today. Romaine Saunders, Holt’s early journalist, wrote that “Mineola, once a frontier boom town, sat like a dog on a treeless prairie.” Founded in 1886 by Charles Lamont, who ran a trading post there, and his partner, Richards, the pair bought a herd of Texas longhorns to range on the grassy pastures that surrounded them on all sides. The following April a Frank Brookwaiter of Springfield, Ohio, came to the spot and acquired forty acres which he platted and sold as lots.

A Methodist minister, W. H. Newman, built a church in 1888 and held services there. With his son, Elmer, he opened a store the next year. Other businesses quickly sprang up: a blacksmith shop, feed and grain store, lumber yard, a hotel and several stores. The Mineola Sun was founded and there was talk of a railroad. A hog buyer bought pigs from the farmers roundabout and hauled them by wagon to O’Neill for shipment east on the railroad. A mail route from O’Neill to Niobrara served the post offices at Star and mineola.

Charles Lamont owned a good share of the town, his father, Elvin, the lumber yard. Then the blizzard of ’88 wiped out the Lamont and Richards herds and effectually put them out of business. The Mineola cemetery began in 1885, ahead of the village, with the burial of a George Hamilton. A number of graves were added in 1895 when typhoid fever struck the community. The Sherman family lost several daughters, and others died of it, too.

Opportunity began in 1911 when a cheesemaker by the name of Cox, from Plainview, Nebraska, noted the wide expanse of pastureland in the area and was inspired to build a cheese factory and store, taking as a co-partner a man named Frost. Frost ran the store and Cox made the cheese. Mr. Cox gave his “village” the name of “Opportunity” because, he said, the manufacture of cheese offered the community farmers an opportunity to get rich off their milk cows.

The business prospered, said Charles V. Cole, until the close of the first World War, when “speculation in high priced land and expansion beyond his income caused Cox to go broke and close the factory.” The store, however, continued to prosper until the drouth and depression of the thirties put an end to Opportunity. Among the early settlers in the Opportunity vicinity were August and Augusta Oberle. Both had come from Germany to Iowa and August was a veteran of the Civil War. With their eight children they homesteaded near Disney, their first post office. Disney was a little more than two miles southwest of where Opportunity was later located.

With his wife’s brother, Rudolph Schimmelpfennig, he came to Holt County in 1882. Both filed claims to quarter sections. August built a two- story board house and laid sod around it, up to the eaves, for extra warmth. He built a barn for his two best horses onto the outside of his bedroom, with a door opening into it from the room, as a precaution against horse thieves. When law and order prevailed he moved the barn away from the house.

Mrs. Oberle kept canary birds and the children loved them, watched the eggs hatch and each claimed and named a baby bird. Josephine Ober-le, a daughter, remembers a kind of a hotel at Mineola. A Mr. and Mrs. Slotherwer ran it, served meals and kept a few people overnight. Mary Oberle worked there one winter for her board and room while she went to school. Josephine, her younger sister and several other little girls went there at times and picked cobs out of the nearby hogpen for Mrs. Slotherwer’s cook stove. They were paid a penny a sack— and their next stop was the candy counter at the store.

The hotel and town lasted only a few years. The dry years came, and sickness— typhoid and diphtheria epidemics. The nearest doctor was twenty miles away in O’Neill. Soon two of the Sherman girls, Henry Schollmeyer, Chester McRoberts, Carl and Ida Plum and Mrs. Bill Wilson were carried to the little Mineola cemetery. Discouraged, the settlers began to move away.

Those who stayed had more range for their cattle and could build up their herds. There were no fences and Josephine and her brother herded cattle and horses all over the neighborhood.

In 1893 the Oberles built a new frame house on their adjoining tree claim. Mr. Oberle bought the shingled roof off a big sod house from a man who was leaving the country and, after the sides to their new house were up, moved the roof on top of them. Then he bought a frame barn from another man who was leaving, moved it against the new house, floored it and made a kitchen of it. Josephine’s brother John was very 370 handy with tools. When a salesman came to demonstrate a washing machine the lad looked it over carefully, then made one like it for his mother. He also built a small machine for threshing cane seed and made violins and dulcimers. He made the family a fancy cutter or sleigh that was the equal of any fine top buggy. The family rode to dances and other gatherings in it, with sleigh bells jingling through the winter nights. The Oberles enjoyed dancing and had several in their own home. They had the last one when the new house was finished. There was a big crowd and a good time until, toward morning, two young men became quarrelsome and started to fight. Mr. Oberle wouldn’t let them fight at the dance, so they went out in the road and had it out. Mr. Oberle had no more dances at his place.

Josephine also remembers the Leonie post office, about three miles from their home, with its letter boxes nailed to the wall. The mail came from O’Neill three times a week by horse and cart. Hi Hodgkin was the postmaster and his ninety-five-year- old mother lived with him. At the Wrede school, where the Oberles attended, the pupils sat on long planks, with other planks for desks. These were placed around all sides of the room and the children sat facing the wall with their backs to the teacher.

Josephine and John Shaw were married in the Oberle home in 1897. They lived on a little ranch on Louse Creek for six years, then moved to Iowa. Seven children were born to them.

Frank Oberle, August’s third son, married Georgia Moser in a double wedding ceremony with his sister Josephine. Frank later told his four children about the dry years on the homestead, how they barely raised enough seed, some years, to plant the fields the next year. He tried raising sheep but had to give up because of the coyotes, so turned to farming, cattle and custom threshing, using a John Deere tractor to power his separator. During the 1930’s grasshoppers ate his alfalfa into the ground and killed it.

The Frank Oberle family was the first in the Opportunity area to own an enclosed car, a 1927 Chevy Sedan, the family pride and joy for quite some time. Frank and Georgia’s only son, Howard, married Hollis Gwinn in 1923, and two years later moved onto the home place when the older Oberles retired to O’Neill.

In 1910 C. J. Taylor (origin not given) came to Mineola and bought the Charles Tullis farm two and one- half miles from the village. The following year he moved his family and belongings to the farm. His children went to the Gibson school, District 122 on the corner of the John Gibson farm, two miles from Mineola. At that time there was a family on nearly every quarter section in the country.

C. J. Taylor’s daughter Ethel married Ray Siders and lived for thirty- two years on a nearby farm which had originally been homesteaded by Richard Tullis. In 1901 Richard had sold the quarter to Ida Trullinger, a daughter of the Charles Tullis who had sold his farm to Mr. Taylor. Mrs. Trullinger had paid $100 for the land, money she had saved from her wages as teacher of the Mineola school. When Mr. Trullinger’s health failed they sold the quarter to Mr. Taylor in 1919 for $6,000.

Ray and Ethel Siders bought the land from her father in 1923 for $6,400. After Ray’s death Ethel sold the same quarter to her daughter and her husband, Gerald Snyder, in 1960, making the third generation of the Taylor family to own the old Tullis place.

In 1890 Christopher and Catherine Berger came from Iowa to a homestead near where Opportunity was later to rise out of the prairie. They were the parents of eight children. Ten years later the two oldest sons, John and Charles, together bought the homestead from their parents. In 1905 Charles married Lillian Brady and three years later John married her sister, Grace.

The brothers raised Hereford cattle and bought the first car in the Opportunity region. Each of the brothers had one son, and when the boys were old enough to go to school their fathers built the old Opportunity school in District 60, just across the road south of the post office. Charles’ son, Kenneth, “met a tragic death on July 7, 1936, while swimming.” Lee Berglund and his older brother John were born in Sweden and orphaned at an early age when their father was killed in a logging accident and their mother died three years later. Lee was only six. John came to Nebraska in 1882 and Lee, twenty-one, followed him two years later.

Lee first homesteaded in Garden County in western Nebraska, then in 1900 traded the quarter off for a calf and came to Holt County. In 1902 he bought 320 acres from Orin Smith for $1,000. Ten years later he married Frieda Hohndorf, a native of Germany. Their first two children rode double on a horse to the Opportunity school two and a half miles from their home. Their first teacher was Rose Coufal of Atkinson.

By then, in addition to the store, the creamery and the post office, Opportunity had a gas pump in front of the store; for quite a few of the farmers were driving cars by that time. The Berglund’s first car was a 1924 Ford, set apart from earlier machines because it had a self starter. Their neighbor, Frank Oberle, had the community’s first radio, complete with earphones, about the same time. In 1936 Lee was thrown from a running horse while trying to stop the runaway team his wife was driving. He died ten days after the accident and was buried in the Mineola cemetery, only three miles from his home. Their son Harold, twenty years old when his father died, stayed on the farm until he went into the Army in 1941. His sister Emma, who had taught school for seven years before her marriage to Harvey Krugman in 1938, then moved in with her mother. Emma and Harvey, who have spent all their married years on farms near Opportunity, purchased the home place from Frieda in 1953. They are the parents of seven children. After his discharge from the Army in 1946, Harold married an Alabama girl, Virginia Booth, and moved to Lincoln. Kenneth, youngest of the Berglund children, served in the Navy from 1946 to 1948, earned a degree in electrical engineering from Iowa State and now lives in Florida. He is married and has five children. In 1945 Frieda Berglund married Peter More of Redbird, who operated the Redbird store and post office. Five years later they moved to Fairmont, where Peter died in 1958. Frieda cared for invalid women for fourteen years, but is now retired and living near Lincoln.

Nine-year-old Ray Siders peered out from under a blanket as the spring wagon came to a stop. A cold north Josephine Oberle Shaw on her ninety- third birthday, December 25, 1973. 371 wind blowing into his face made him wonder why his father had ever left Missouri for this forsaken looking prairie.

Charles Siders, born in Illinois in 1872, had met and married Maggie Gilliland in Missouri in 1895. He farmed there for ten years but yearned for more open country where he could raise cattle. In the fall of 1905 he and his brother-in-law, Joe Gilliland came to Holt County to look around. Charles rented a farm seventeen miles northeast of O’Neill from a bachelor, Joe Carlson, returned to Missouri and shipped their possessions north in December. Mrs. Siders and the three children came a little later on the train and Mr. Siders met them at the station and took them to the new farm. Mrs. Siders was happy with the move. In Missouri some of the family seemed always ailing with malaria and they had lost two little girls to diphtheria and scarlet fever.

After two years on the first place they moved to a better farm, which they rented from a Mr. Henery who was moving to O’Neill. Only two miles from their first home, the new place was about four miles southeast of Opportunity.

Many of the farmers roundabout milked from fifteen to twenty cows by hand and delivered the milk to the cheese factory every morning. Mrs. Ray Siders, writer of this history, attributes the failure of the factory to the fact that the newer generation did not like to milk. However, she wrote, the store stayed open until better roads and more cars gave the people access to the O’Neill stores, after which Opportunity was no more. The Siders home, about halfway between O’Neill and Niobrara, was the stopping place for travelers to feed and rest their teams and get a good meal for themselves, which was fine as the welcome mat was always out. The school house being just across the road, the teacher also boarded with the Siders.

Sylvester Zakrzewski, born in Loup City in 1892, married Mary Wytaska. In 1919 they bought a place about three miles northeast of Opportunity. There were no buildings on the land, so they built a house. When the parents and four children moved into the new house, early in 1920, they brought with them a quantity of very small potatoes, intending to use them for seed. Before planting time came they had to eat them.

During the drouth of the ‘thirties the Zakrzewskis cut everything they could find in the way of forage, the short, spindling corn stalks, tumble weeds, sunflowers, anything, put the collection into a ground or pit silo, sprinkled water over it and trampled or packed the contents with horses. This emergency type feed saved their cattle until the rains came again.

The family milked as many as forty cows by hand and sold the cream. They raised about three hundred head of hogs per year— and one year, just when the herd reached market weight of three hundred pounds, a “sickness” struck the pigs and all but two died. Then Paul, the eldest son, helped a neighbor with some work and was given five turkey eggs for pay. They set the eggs under a chicken hen and hatched them all. They grew into five fine hens. They bought a gobbler and the next year raised two hundred turkeys, dressed them out and sold them to a Sioux City market. Those turkeys saved the farm. Turkeys cost little to raise as they lived off the land, grasshoppers, grass and the cottage cheese every housewife made from the skim milk left from the separator.

The Zakrzewskis had nine children. All received their grade school education in the nearby country schools. In 1948 the parents bought a home in O’Neill and semi-retired, with Mr. Zakrzewski driving his pickup out to the farm every morning to care for his livestock. In 1968 he held a farm sale, intending to get rid of all his chores and go into full retirement.

While chasing a cow that got out of the corral during the sale he suddenly dropped dead. He is buried in Calvary cemetery in O’Neill.

In 1877 John Addison and his family moved onto their homestead near Mineola. John and his wife Sophia were born in England and married in New York. Their five children were born while they lived in Minnesota. They came from Iowa to the homestead, where John spent twenty-six years and Sophia forty. Both are buried in the O’Neill cemetery.

Their oldest son, John C. Addison, married Rose Duxbury in 1883. They had three children when Rose died in 1889. She was buried in a little cemetery at the west end of Powell’s grove. John’s mother, Sophia, took the baby, Mert; the two little girls were reared by aunts. In 1895 John married Anna Margaret Golden and became the father of twelve more children. The two oldest daughters were married by the time Anna died in 1921, leaving ten children to the care of Margery, the third daughter. The Addison children went to a small school a mile east of the homestead. Their post office was Mineola, two and a half miles southeast of their home. By 1905 the village had shrunk to the post office, the church, schoolhouse and a set of farm buildings. The Massey family had owned the store last. On a Sunday night the family had awakened to find the store in flames and that was the virtual end of Mineola. When the post office, too, was discontinued, the Addisons got their mail at Opportunity.

Although John’s big family was raised in a three-room house, theirs was a happy home, for John loved music and dancing. Kiva, one of the older daughters, played their old piano very well and it was often loaded into the wagon and taken along to neighborhood gatherings, where John called the square dances. Mr. Addison once barely escaped being covered in a well cave-in, but was pulled to safety just in time. Another time while listing corn his team ran away and he was dragged quite a distance with the lister handle caught in his back. That accident laid him up all summer although a lady doctor drove from Spencer once a week to care for him and his wife Anna was a good nurse. He outlived his wife by sixteen years. John, Anna and a daughter, Eva, are buried in the Mineola cemetery.

Nathan (Nate) Butler, born in Ohio, was living in Wisconsin when he met and courted Ella Watson. In the spring of 1880 Nate, with Ella’s brother, Andrew Watson and his wife, and Ella’s uncle and aunt, Mr. and Mrs. Emory Downey, traveled 700 miles to Mineola, arriving on May 5. Nate homesteaded a quarter there and built a sod house. His floor was made of cottonwood lumber, which warps badly. Numerous square dances held in his soddy helped to smooth the floor.

In February, 1882, Nate met Ella Watson at Running Water, Nebraska. They were the last to cross the Niobrara that spring before the ice broke. Driving down to Steel Creek (Dorsey), they were married on March 7 and moved into the little soddy. They had three children, Jay, Andrew and Lyda. After nine years of drouth and crop failures they sold their place and joined Ella’s mother and two brothers, William and Gilbert Watson, in Inman. Four more daughters were born to them after they left Mineola. After working in the hayfields and running a threshing machine and outfit, Nate became an agent for the Union Fire Insurance and Hartford Insurance companies and had an office on Main Street. His son Andrew (Oney) had the barbershop next door. His older son, Jay, was a good mechanic. After Inman began having once-a-week movies, operated on power generated by the old gasoline engine which frequently gave out and stopped at the most exciting part of 372 the show, someone would call out “Is Jay Butler in the house?” Then everybody would anxiously await the reassuring “putt-putt” of the little engine. Jay now lives in Baltimore, where he is vice president of the Maryland Blue Shield Company.

John P. Gibson, born in Sweden in 1842, died on his Mineola homestead in 1928. He and Clarina Svensen were married in Sweden in 1880. They came to Niobrara that same fall, stayed over the winter there and moved onto the homestead in the spring of 1881. Two of his brothers, Swan and Nels came at the same time. Mrs. Gibson’s brother Sven Svensen (his name was later changed to Swan Alm), also came in the same group. All took claims close together. The John Gibsons had two daughters, Addie and Minnie, who went to the nearby country school. Minnie married William Farrand of Dorsey in 1908 and had seven children. Addie never married. The original John Gibson homestead is now owned by a granddaughter, one of Minnie’s daughters.

Although he lived into the automobile era, John never owned a car, preferring his mules to such contraptions. Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Hunter, with their small son Frank, came from Iowa to Holt County in 1884, where they took a homestead and a tree claim four miles southeast of Mineola. Thirteen years later they moved to a farm near Star. From this district Mr. Hunter was elected to the state legislature in 1888 and again in 1924. He died in 1926, his wife in 1941. Frank Hunter married Carrie Carson in 1908. The couple lived and farmed in the Star community until Frank’s death in 1939. Their only child, a son, died at the age of seventeen months. Frank and Carrie were good citizens, friends and neighbors to the people of Star, and were active in the Dorsey Presbyterian church.

Franklin McDermott, born in 1853, was a wealthy Peoria, Illinois farmer when he married Mary Jane Thompson. During the early years of their marriage they moved to California by train, then returned to Illinois three years later. In 1885 they came on the train to Omaha, bought horses and wagons and drove to Mineola.

Mr. McDermott was looking for good farm land. Not finding it in the Mineola area, after eighteen months he moved his family to O’Neill. In 1890 the McDermotts moved on to Inman, where Mrs. McDermott said she had made her last move. As the result of her decision they stayed there for nearly forty years.

Myrtle McDermott Wood, sixth of the McDermott’s seven children, writes that her earliest memories were of the Inman farm where she grew up. She remembers the apple orchard that never bore fruit— until her mother dug around the tree roots and buried scrap iron and rusty nails. They had a telephone but their “democratic restroom” was a short walk outside the house. A Dr.

Simmons was the first medical man she knew in Inman. “He cured every ailment with his Simple Syrup.” Myrtle was proud to be selected as organist of the methodist church. Her father was a Democrat and her mother a Republican, although she only voted once. Myrtle went all through school at Inman, graduating with the Senior class of 1905. Of that class of four girls she is the only one now living. That fall she taught the Wheatland school at Goose Lake, driving a three-legged horse to a buggy from her home to the school. One day the horse fell down and a neighbor had to help her get him on his feet again.

Myrtle had four pupils and the school term was to last three months. She was sixteen and two of her students were older than she was. Mr. Wheatland and another board member wanted to extend the term an extra month. The other two members did not want the extension, so withdrew their two children. The young teacher had only two pupils that last month, the Wheatland children.

Myrtle ended her teaching career with her marriage to John Burk Wood of Ewing in 1909. John was the town barber. When her husband became ill in 1922, she took some refresher courses at Wayne State College and went back to teaching. John died in 1926, leaving Myrtle with three young sons. She continued to teach for many years, part of them in Ewing, the rest in California, where she now lives, the only one of the nine McDermotts still alive.

Charley Spangler, born in Germany, came to America with relatives in 1888. He was thirteen at the time. His father, August, and a grown daughter, Reka, came over two years later, locating south of the Mineola cemetery. Then the mother, Fredericka, and Will, Walter, Lena and Await came to the farm in 1892. Fredericka fell from a load of hay in 1893 and broke her neck. In 1909 August started back to Germany for a visit, took sick on the boat and died in Berlin, where he was buried.

Charley loved horses and owned many good driving teams. Although he lived until 1943 he farmed with horses and never owned a tractor. With his mother and his brother, he is buried in the Scottville cemetery, not far from his home.

Paul Sorensen, born in Denmark, was the first of his family to come to Nebraska. A little later his brother Anton, with his wife and two children, followed. Three more children were. born to them at Osmond, Nebraska. In 1906 they moved on to a farm twelve miles north of Page and seven miles south of Mineola, on the farm now owned by a cousin, Nels Linguist. Mineola by then was no longer a trading point and Page was their nearest town.

Anton and Christine Sorensen’s son, Soren, married Sarah Morgan in O’Neill in 1915 and continued to live near Mineola. Their seven children attended the rural schools near their home and they got their mail at Mineola, which was only a post office, kept at that time by Billy Newman and his son Elmer, and later by the Pillens.

Anton Sorensen, Ben Powell and Charlie Morgan, Sarah’s father, owned the first Ford cars in Mineola. The Morgans lived on Lost Creek, where a man was lost once upon a time. (Whether or not he was ever found is not recorded.) Charlie’s wife, Viola and her son Francis were killed in a car-truck accident on the Danceland Corner, north of O’Neill, in 1948. Alex and Sofia Juracek, born in Yugoslavia in the middle 1890’s, settled in Knox County in 1912. They were the parents of four sons. Vincent Elis, born in Moravia in 1877, came with his parents to Pischelville in Knox County in 1884. Vincent married Mary Slama in 1911 and their daughter, Helen, and Leonard Juracek, eldest son of Alex and Sofia, were married at Bartlett in 1937.

During the first few years of their marriage Helen and Leonard moved from farm to farm— north of O’Neill, south of Ewing, north of O’Neill again, then near Bristow in Boyd County and finally on the farm they now own, eighteen miles northeast of O’Neill. Helen helped Leonard pick corn, those first years, and helped with many other chores until their only child Archie, born in 1938, was old enough to help.

They had two trying experiences on their farm. During the savage winter of 1949, when snow lay deep on the land and the wind blew incessantly, all three, of their stock watering wells broke down and the cattle were suffering from lack of water. Leonard had pump leathers brought in by plane for one well. He put them in and then the well rod broke. Another well froze up, so he ordered two hundred feet of garden hose in order to pipe water from the house well to the stock tank.

The hose didn’t come when expect- 373 ed and he called the supplier again. The second order came on a Red Cross sled, then the original order arrived by ski-plane about the same time that a neighbor got through with another two hundred feet, making six hundred feet of hose on hand.

The second frightening event happened on October 21, 1966, when a fire swept the Juracek cornfield, pushed by a seventy-mile-an-hour wind. A truck, hauling corn from the picker-sheller combine backfired and started the blaze. With a tractor and disc, Leonard had the fire under control by the time the O’Neill fire department rolled four vehicles to the site, after most of the field had been burned over.

“It was a strange sight,” wrote Helen Juracek. “Because of the furious wind the fire burned only the stalks, without damaging the ears so Leonard had 1500 bushels of corn on the ground to pick up by hand. During the years we lost four crops to hail storms, and had some drouth years. But now, with two irrigation wells, things are different. Today we have a large herd of Angus stock cows and now, when they start calving, we truly appreciate all the modern conveniences we have to work with.” In November, 1923, Herman and Alma Eisert, with their three children, Carl, Werner and Ella, arrived on the ship Mount Clay from Berlin. From New York they came by train to O’Neill where Mrs. Eisert’s sister and her husband, Lee Berglund, met them. The Eiserts lived with the Berglund family until the next spring, when they moved to the Schimelphennig place three miles north of old Opportunity. While the family lived on this first farm the boys went to the Opportunity school and, later, the Oberle school. Luella Knapp, teacher at the Oberle school in 1924, “taught me to speak English,” wrote Ella Eisert. “We did most of our trading at the Opportunity store. One time we sent Werner to Opportunity to get the mail. “Mehl” means flour in German, so Werner did not bring home the mail.” The Eiserts moved to the George Rock place, up toward Redbird, in 1937. Mrs. Eisert died there in 1947 and Herman married Marge Fagan of Chambers in September, 1953. Two months later he passed away.

Werner Eisert married Eunice Cannon of Creighton and had four children. After he was killed in an automobile accident in California in 1958, his children made their home with their aunt, Ella Eisert Boelter and her husband, Boyd. After graduating from the O’Neill high school in 1937, Ella had taught country schools until Mr. and Mrs. Herman Eisert. Children are Ella, Werner and Carl. Courtesy Mrs Boyd Boelter.

Benjamin and Rosa Powell who homesteaded one mile west of Mineola in 1882. Courtesy Bob Tomlinson.

374 her marriage to Boyd Boelter in 1945. Ella Boelter writes that the cheese factory at Opportunity closed down because too many of the people who delivered milk lived too far away and the milk soured before they could haul it so far.

Edward Krugman was only two when he came to Knox County from Germany with his parents in 1889. He was one of a family of eight. Hanna Timmermann, also born in Germany, was four when her parents settled in Eden Valley in 1892. Edward and Hanna were married at the Timmer-mann home in 1910. They became the parents of six children while they lived on farms in the Creighton area before moving to Holt County in 1928. Ed had long wanted to operate a ranch and his dream came true in the Mineola – Opportunity region. Their oldest son, Harvey, who graduated from high school in Knox County, in 1938 married Emma Berglund, daughter of Lee and Frieda Berglund of Opportunity and had seven children. The other five Krugman children, Paul, Helen, Fred, Edwin and Harold, all graduated from the eighth grade at Mineola. Paul married Elva Stewart in 1936 and farmed in northeast Holt County until 1949 when he moved to the Moore farm near O’Neill. He has three children.

Helen married Irvin Sander of Verdigre and had two children. Fred served in the Army in World War II and, in 1947, married Lettie Tubbs of Clearwater. Edwin served in the Navy in 1945 and 1946, then married Sarah Kumm of Creighton. After a few years in Atkinson Edwin and Harold Mlinar bought the O’Neill Locker Plant and moved to O’Neill. The Edwin Krug-mans had five children. After two years in the Army, most of it spent in England, Harold married Margaret Judge of O’Neill. They live in O’Neill and have four children.

Edward and Hanna retired from the farm in 1950 and bought a home in O’Neill where Edward died in 1973. Emmet Wertz, writing in 1973, observed that when his father took the census in Willowdale precinct in 1885 there were more than 600 people there, whereas in 1970 there were less than 100. The Mineola post office closed in 1913, when Opportunity replaced it, and the schoolhouse, the last of the village to go, was torn down in the 1950’s. Nothing now remains of the once lively little town except the cemetery, surrounded on three sides by cornfields. The forty acres where long ago the town of Mineola was platted is now a hay meadow. Opportunity, too, is only a memory today. Elmer Juracek grazes cattle where it once flourished as a trading center for the pioneers. Dorsey, Star and Redbird once throve in the far northeast corner of Holt County. Star was less than two miles northwest of old Hainesville, Dorsey was five miles north and a little west of Star, and Redbird grew up at the confluence of Redbird Creek with the Niobrara River. Old Scottville was about five miles southwest of Redbird and less than three miles northwest of Mineola.

An excerpt from a feature on these neighborhood centers, published in the Norfolk Daily News in 1967, called Mineola’s first ball team, a “bunch of farmer boys who were hard to beat.” Left to right, standing: George Henry, Walt Hudson, Walt Pickering, Bill and Johnny Carson. Seated: George Tomlinson, Earny Henry, Henry Tomlinson, Arch Henry. Although two of the uniforms read “Mineola,” this team was claimed by Dorsey too. Its membership was made up of. men from both areas. Courtesy George Jones Anniversary invitation: 1854-1914, Mr. and Mrs. Emery Downey request your presence at their Sixtieth Wedding Anniversary at the home of their son, Charles E. Thursday, August thirteenth, Nineteen hundred fourteen, four o’clock p.m. O’Neill, Nebraska.

Dorsey, Star and Redbird “historical postscripts to Nebraska’s past.” All of them once appeared on Nebraska state maps, now none of them does. Many years after their demise Charles Cole wrote that, for a few years, Star was a busy village with a store, a drugstore, a lumberyard, harness shop, blacksmith shop and the post office, kept in the Keser sod house. The mail came on horseback from Orchard in Antelope County, up through Mars and Venus in Knox County, then Middle Branch and 375 Hainesville to Star.

The Downeys were probably the first white people to settle where Star was to be. Henry Downey and his wife, Hannah, lived first in New York state and then in Illinois before emigrating to Wisconsin. On the way they passed through Chicago, a village with wooden sidewalks. In 1880, after the death of Hannah, Henry and his son Emory and family settled on a timber claim in Holt County.

Emory, born in New York state in 1832, had been a cooper in Wisconsin, where he married Sarah Cole. They had three children, Charles, Louie and May, when they moved to Nebraska. The story of their big sod house that stood by the freighters’ trail from Neligh to the Niobrara and beyond and became a hotel has already been told.

In 1892 Emory and Sarah moved to Inman. There Emory became a partner in the Watson Hay and Implement Company. Later he ran a general store, then retired and moved to Missouri, where he lived to be ninety- four.

Louie Downey operated a general store in Page, married Bertha Tavener and had three children. He died at age ninety-two. Bertha, at ninety-five, lives with a son in California. Charles, seventeen when the family left Wisconsin, had the honor of naming the Star post office and was one of its early mail carriers. Charles married Minnie Balus of Stuart in 1886. They had eight children. For a time Minnie taught school, taking two of her little ones with her as there was no one to leave them with.

Charles and Minnie often moved the furniture out of their living room into the yard so their neighbors could dance while she played the organ and he played his fiddle. The beds in the bedroom would be full of sleeping children, laid crossways. Sumner Downey, eldest son of Charles and Minnie, married Stella Fouts. The couple built up a successful photography business in Niobrara, then moved to O’Neill and bought and operated the O’Neill Photo Company. Sumner became a master photographer and Stella was three times named Nebraska’s best retouch-er. Their son Charles now owns the Midwest Studio in Scottsbluff and has won many awards, including an International Award in England, for his fine color photography. His son Jim has also won many awards in the business. Charles’ other children have made successful careers for themselves but none stayed in Nebraska. In 1882 the Daniel Ridgeway family came from Iowa to homestead a mile from the town of Star. Mr. Ridgeway, a leather worker, not a farmer, nevertheless wanted some of the free western land. He built a dugout, plastered it, then set up a harness shop in the burgeoning town of Star. Mrs. Ridgeway put a rag carpet on the floor of her hillside home and made it as comfortable as she could— but she didn’t like it.

The Ridgeways had a brown-eyed daughter, Etta. Elvin E. Cole, a young homesteader over on “the creek” was immediately attracted by the brown- eyed lass. By the time the Ridgeways proved up and, at Mrs. Ridgeway’s insistence, moved back to Iowa, Elvin and Etta were married. Young Cole then disposed of his homestead and invested the proceeds in a general store in Star. For a time they prospered and all went well.

Then came the hard years of the ‘nineties. E. E. Cole had let the settlers run store bills. As a consequence he went broke with the rest of the country and joined the general exodus “back east.” The town of Star then disappeared, “like mist in the sunshine,” and only the old hotel or “halfway house” was left.

Of their trip east— and the following thirteen years— Etta Cole wrote, “It was spring and never will I forget that journey: mud, overflowing rivers, and the end at the Coon River (in Iowa). Talk of roughing it on the prairie! I now had the pleasure of roughing it as a renter’s wife. We had two more children, (their son, Charles, was born at Star) girls, one born in June of the ‘dry year,’ 1894. I raised chickens and sold eggs at five cents a dozen, hauled them to town and counted them into the merchant’s crates myself. He said he didn’t get enough out of them to pay for counting them.

“In this way I dressed my children and sent the two older ones to school and church (we didn’t make enough to keep decent shoes on my feet.) I cut up my wedding dress and made my husband winter shirts of the brown treco flannel. We rented forty acres at three dollars an acre, sold corn and oats at fifteen cents a bushel. “Then father died in October, 1895. He hadn’t even been able to give away his Nebraska homestead, though he still had faith in that land in Holt County. He had offered to trade it for forty acres in Iowa, or to sell it for $500. He had kept the taxes paid all those years and had then offered it to his son if he would live on it and promise to keep it until it was worth something. He said he wouldn’t have all of Holt County as a gift.

“The deed was then offered to each of the daughters in turn. All refused, until it came my turn. On his deathbed he deeded it to me, and with chickens and eggs I paid the taxes. I took my two little girls and, with $35 in my pocket book, boarded a train to go see this land I could call my own. I found it just as it was when I was a girl, except that with more rain there was more prairie hay. In the fall of 1902 we moved back to our 160 acres of grass and a half-dozen scrubby, fire-damaged trees twenty-seven miles from O’Neill.” Young Charles, then fifteen years old, remembers traveling from Page to the homestead through bluestem grass four feet tall. The only house they passed was that of Joseph Noble’s. The only boy he met was Charlie Parkhurst, now a resident of Neligh, who came over to help the family get unloaded. “I’ll never forget his friendliness,” wrote Charlie, years later. The family started to build a house, but didn’t have it finished when they felt the “first whizz of winter.” Etta writes that they bought the lumber for the house in Iowa, where it was much cheaper, and shipped it by freight with their household effects to Page. They also brought two horses, three cows, four dozen hens and their savings, $125.00. With this they tackled Holt County for the second time.

Their former bad luck seemed to pursue them. One horse died before they got everything hauled out from Page, and one cow got on her back in the manger, where they found her, dead, on Christmas morning. The house was still unplastered when winter, one of the severest on record, set in. With the one horse, Charles dragged wild plum brush from nearby gullies through the snow for fuel. But the children had to wear their coats in the house most of the time, that first winter, to keep warm.

With a part of the small supply of cash left after making the move, the Coles bought potatoes. As other supplies ran out and, after the death of the one milk cow, the others went dry, Charles Cole said they “lived on potatoes and salt” the rest of the winter. A woman gave them a squash once, and along toward spring another sent them a gallon of sauerkraut. How good it tasted! The first snow fell on December 2, that winter, and by corn planting time in the spring there was still ice on the shady sides of the gulches. The temperature held on 20 to 27 degrees below zero for many weeks and the cow that died on Christmas morning was frozen so solid she could not be skinned until the next March.

A relative gave them an old horse and said they could pay what they pleased for it, if it lived through the 376 winter. It did and they broke sod with it the next spring. The house was plastered, the cattle herd began to grow and AArs. Cole borrowed money for pasture fence so they wouldn’t have to keep their cows on picket ropes.

As the years passed they built new barns, bought more land and generally prospered. The well-improved farm became known as “Sunny Slope” and the Star post office found a home there in 1910, with Elvin as postmaster. In June, 1925, Elvin and Etta’s son, Charles Cole, married Florence Harzke, a young lady from Schuyler, and continued to live on Sunny Slope Farm. Charles Cole writes that, during the period from 1890 to 1900, when so many homesteaders abandoned their dried out claims and moved on, most of their houses were stolen or torn down. Those who stayed, or some from other areas of the county, often took what they needed for their own places, a door, windows, a roof, figuring it was better to make use of the materials than to let them decay or weather away. By the time the Coles returned in 1902 about all that remained of former homesites were the old wooden well casings sticking out of the ground. Such was the case with the dug well that had once stood in the center of the intersection of Star’s two main streets.

Etta Ridgeway Cole died in 1925. Elvin lived on on Sunny Slope farm until 1940. In 1939 his daughter-in- law, Florence Cole, took over the duties of postmaster. After her death in 1947 Charles assumed the postmaster’s chores until the tiny office was discontinued in 1957. Charles and Florence had five children but lost one son in infancy. Their other son, Claude, and his family now own and operate the 400 acre Cole farm. Etta Cole, who often wrote features and articles for the Nebraska Farmer, spent the last few years of her life as an invalid, confined to her room. “Yes,” she wrote cheerfully, “I am a shut-in but I’m too busy to think about it. From my window I can look out at the lilac hedge, fifteen feet tall, that I planted many years ago, and it seems impossible that we have accomplished so much in twenty-two years, but we have a good home now.” She died soon afterward.

In August of 1898 George Thierolf bought a bicycle for $25 and spent a week pedaling it from Plattsmouth, Nebraska to Star. There he arranged with Emory Downey to buy his homestead for his father, Henry Thierolf. Henry was born in Germany in 1846; Wilhelmina Stoll was born in the same country in 1854. Both came to Plattsmouth, where they were married in the mid 1870’s. George, Albert, Rosa, Ona, Mata, Victoria and Sophronia were born there before the family moved to Star in 1900.

The Star post office went with the Downey place and nineteen-year-old Rosa Thierolf became its postmistress for the next nine years. In 1910 Henry and AAinnie moved to Creighton, over in Knox County, leaving their sons Albert and Ona to run the ranch which, by then, included almost one thousand acres.

George, meanwhile, had married AAyrtle Anderson in 1902. They moved an old schoolhouse onto the Thierolf place for a home. Two years later, with his wife and two children, George moved to Canada.

Albert married Catherine Hunter in 1910 and had two children, Albert and Elizabeth. The mother died in 1912 and Albert moved to California the next year. At his death in 1959 he was brought home for burial beside Catherine in the AAineola Cemetery. Ona married Nellie Mills in 1913 and had two sons, William and Ona, Jr. After Nellie’s death in 1918 Ona moved to Creighton to live with his mother, widowed two years earlier when Henry passed away. Ona married a widow, Pearl AAitchell, in 1923. She had two sons, Roy and Clyde, and the couple had three more sons. With his family and his mother, Ona moved to Niobrara in 1923. AAinnie Thierolf had kept the ranch at Star and, at the age of seventy-seven, had driven with Ona from Niobrara to check on affairs there. On the way home the car overturned, throwing her out and into a pasture some nine feet from the highway. Except for a few bruises she was unhurt and, a week later, was riding with Ona again.

Victoria, after high school and college, went back to the Star community to teach school. In 1917 she married Lewis A. Hansen of Creighton and had four children. In the early 1930’s they moved back to the old Thierolf place, where their youngest child was born. All of their children attended the Star school. After AAinnie Thierolf’s death in 1938 Victoria and her family moved to Walnut and Ona’s stepson, Roy AAitchell moved onto the ranch at Star. When the estate was settled and the ranch sold, Victoria and Lewis bought it and put two of their children, William and Doris, there to “batch” for awhile. In 1948 William married Margaret Tharnish of Creighton and continued to live on the Thierolf place, where they reared their seven children.

Three generations of Thierolfs learned their R’s at the old Star school, although it has changed somewhat between 1900 and the present, mainly through consolidation in 1961 with the Cedar Corner, AAineola and Gibson districts. The new consolidated school building stands about two miles south and one mile west of the original Star school. The bicycle which started the whole history of the Thierolfs in Holt County was a mortgaged vehicle. On August 22, 1898, George gave his note for the original $25. With $6.25 down, he agreed to pay W. R. Johnson of Havelock, Nebraska, ten per cent on the balance until maturity on December 10, 1898. Sarah and Jacob Lantz, Pennsylvania Dutch people, settled in Waterloo, Iowa, where their daughter, Katie Ann, married William H. Brown in 1882. With two children, Charlotte and William, they moved to Knox County, where Goldie was born in 1888. While there Mr. Brown worked for Alex Wirtz, near Knoxville, where he milked cows and did general farm work for fifty cents a day.

The family moved by covered wagon to Norfolk in 1898, spent the winter picking corn for two cents a bushel, then traveled by covered wagon to the home of William Brown’s parents in March of 1899. They lived in a sod house for two years, then traded a horse for an island in the Niobrara River. On the 160 acre island they built a log house, raised a big garden and fished. By selling the fish for two cents a pound they made some money for living expenses. Two years later they sold the island for $400 and moved to a rented place on the Santee Indian reservation.

Goldie Brown married John Wells at Center, Nebraska, in 1904. Their son Lawrence was born in 1925 and their daughter Rosie in 1907. The Wells family lived on various Boyd and Holt County farms. From 1923 through 1928 John and Goldie carried the mail from Dorsey to Knoxville and Walnut by horse and buggy. The route was thirty miles long and the pay was one hundred dollars per month. At this time Lizzie Wiley ran the post office at Dorsey.

Wells retired in 1936, lived on the Red Nightengale farm at old Apple Creek for awhile and then in O’Neill, where John died at age eighty-four. In April, 1955, the Star community decided to build a hall large enough to accommodate its people on the occasions of large gatherings dances, reunions, showers, 4-H meetings and such. To finance such a building the people sold themselves “memberships” in the organization and volunteered to donate all the labor needed. The quonset building, thirty-two by seventy-two feet in size, 377 is located on the same site as the old schoolhouse and bears the same name, “Ash Grove.” It is twenty miles from Creighton, twenty-four miles from O’Neill, sixteen miles from Verdigre and is in Willowdale Township. Men from other townships traveled as far as thirty miles to help put up the building. Then the R.E.A. extended a power line to the hall and a kitchen was installed in the quonset. The new hall was initiated by holding a big dance for all the members and their families on July 4, 1955.

Dorsey was a town of many names. Located on Steel Creek about five miles north and a little west of Star, it was less than three miles from the eastern border of the county. The site was first called Mineral, then Steel Creek and/or Apple Creek. The last name referred to the groves of wild crab apples that lined its banks in that vicinity. After a year or two the clustering settlers desired a more sophisticated name and chose Omeral. That name, too, was short-lived and Dorsey, in honor of George Dorsey, the district’s U. S. Congressman, was the town’s new and final name. The first settlers on Steel Creek preceded the post office by nearly a decade. So far as the records show a Mathias Hrbek of Czechslovakia and four other families, the Baders, Gagers, Evertons and Monroes, of Blue Earth, Minnesota, were the first emigrants to the area.

Mathias Hrbek had a wife and five children, John, Frank, Mike, Adolph and Anna. Two other families either came with them, or shortly afterward. They were the Praseks and Brabenecs. The three families were eighteen miles west of Niobrara, farther west than any other whites had ventured along that section of the Niobrara River. Although they had been warned against unfriendly Indians they had found sites to their liking and built sod and log cabins.

Lacking any kind of farm machinery, these people turned the sod for their first crops and gardens with spades and shovels. The next spring after they settled on Steel Creek the wives and children were spading sod for a potato field while the men were cutting timber near the river. Hearing shots, the men hurried back in time to see Indians riding away over the hill. They found that Mrs. Brabenec had been shot in the thigh and her son in the chest. At first they couldn’t find the Brabenic daughter and they feared she had been taken by the Indians. They found her the next day, also dead. She and her brother were buried near the Hrbek yard. The alarm spread and the settlers were ready to pack up and leave. Then a meeting was held at the courthouse in Niobrara and the decision made to call on the soldiers for protection. Nothing more is told of the Prasek and Brabenec families. The Hrbeks, however, made a success of their homesteading venture. The four brothers and their sister all hunted for the market, hauling their birds to O’Neill for shipment. Mr. Hrbek filed on a timber claim, his son Mike took a homestead as soon as he was old enough. The family pulled young trees on the river bottom and hauled them to O’Neill for sale to the settlers there.

John Hrbek, the eldest son, moved back to Illinois and worked in the coal mines there but all the others stayed near the homestead. Frank became a rancher west of the home place, Adolph took up carpentering and moved over to Verdigre. Anna married John Uhler and lived on a farm southeast of her parents.

Mike married Katie Dobrichovsky in 1899. Katie, also a Czechslovakian, had been in American since she was six. Mike and Katie raised five children to maturity. Their son Charles now runs the home place, Joe lives north of Dorsey, two daughters, Marian and Lottie, live in Verdigre. Martha lives in Norfolk. In 1919 the Hrbeks bought the Charles Michaels farm, north of Dorsey, for $23 per acre and a herd of 160 head of cattle for $3,000. The farm was well grassed and watered, a valuable addition to their other holdings. Holt County has been good to this family from across the ocean, as it has to so many others. The Jacob Davis family came from Iowa in 1875, seeking land they could afford to buy for their four boys. Mrs. Davis’ brother, Milo Pickering, came at the same time and all took adjoining claims near where Dorsey would soon be located. Mr. Davis was a Holt County surveyor until his health began to fail in 1889. He sold out to Newton Carson and returned to Iowa, where he died the following year. Another Iowa family that came to Dorsey was that of Andrew Baldwin. With his wife and five children, Claude, Maude, Guy, Nora and Ora, he settled on Louse Creek in 1878. Mrs. Baldwin was a refined, gracious woman and the children were small. Had it not been for their dreams of good homes, progressive towns and fine schools, these people, like so many others, could not have accommodated themselves to the raw, crude conditions they found in the new land. Another son, Leo, was later born on the homestead.

To be near their daughter, Mr. and Mrs. H. H. Knight located on a claim a half-mile north of the Baldwins. There they lived for many years, although their daughter and her family moved into O’Neill in 1883, after Mr. Baldwin became Deputy County Clerk under Mike Long.

Claude Baldwin stayed on the farm with his grandparents. One winter, while he was still a lad, Mr. Knight was sick and Claude made the long trip (25 miles) several times to get the doctor, then take him back to O’Neill, sometimes through very bad weather. Mrs. Baldwin died in 1888 and her father passed away two months later. Both are buried in the Mineola cemetery. Mrs. Knight then moved into O’Neill to help Mr. Baldwin care for his home and family. For a few years Andrew Baldwin and a cousin, Rube Taylor, engaged in a real estate and farm loan business, then moved away from O’Neill, as did the Baldwin children. None are left in Holt County today. The Billick family came to the Dorsey area in 1879. The father, David C. Billick, dug many wells with a spade in the region roundabout. The older Billick daughter married Norman McNamee, principal of the O’Neill school, in 1888. Nina Billick, born on the homestead in 1881 married Sam Rust and had twelve children. The Rusts later moved to Oregon. Only one of the twelve, the youngest son, Willard, now lives in Nebraska. He makes his home in Spencer.

By 1879 there were doubtless other settlers, too, enough to make possible a post office in the community. W. V. McElhaney, who homesteaded a mile east of the Star cemetery in 1879, or possibly a little earlier, was the man who applied for and obtained the Apple Creek post office and gave it a home. He was appointed its postmaster in 1879. Mr. McElhaney, born in 1838, brought his wife, Jennie, and five children, four daughters and a son, Coral, from Iowa to the Apple Creek homestead. Coral, not quite twenty when he came to Holt County with his parents, married Morna Rosenkrans in O’Neill, where they lived for a short time, then moved to Dorsey. Coral took over the post office and opened a general store in the little town’s third location. The family later moved to Orchard where Coral died in 1912. Coral’s youngest son, Ted, born in Dorsey in 1902, finished highschool in Orchard and went down to the University at Lincoln for a year and took a course in shorthand. In the fall of 1927 he moved his family to O’Neill, where he was appointed District Court Reporter for Judge Dickson. He served in this capacity in six counties under three judges, Dickson, Mounts and Smith. At the time of his death at age sixty-six he was Nebraska’s oldest Court Reporter, 378 having held his office in the Holt County courthouse for forty-one years. He had been active in many other community affairs, the City Council, the Country Club, Lions Club, and had been chairman of the District Music Contest for many years.

In 1961 Ted was appointed a United States Commissioner by Federal Judges Richard Robins and Robert Van Pelt, a position he held until his death. He was the father of four children.

John Emerson, who located at Apple Creek in 1880, had a varied and colorful background. Born in 1829 in New Hampshire, he grew up in Vermont. At age nineteen he married Jan Hanniford. When their daughter Louise was a year old the family moved west and John filed on land where the city of Chicago now stands. He soon abandoned that claim and moved on to Minnesota, took another claim and lived on it for thirteen years. While there his wife died and he married again. His second wife was Eliza Clements.

During his residence in Mankato, Minnesota, he enlisted in the Army for service in the Civil War. Due to poor health he was honorably discharged after serving six months. He then moved to Blue Earth, Minnesota, and ran a store for a few years. He next tried his luck in the Black Hills, looking for gold and operating a grocery store in Deadwood.

On his last visit to his family in Blue Earth he decided to move them to Deadwood. With his wife and six children he sat out in a covered wagon pulled by four milk cows. Each of the children had a tin cup and at supper time each one milked his cup full and was given a handfull of crackers. The noon meals were cooked over campfires. On the way a band of Indians tried to trade two ponies for Jeanette, one of the older girls.

When the Emersons reached Yank-ton rumors of Indian uprisings in Dakota caused them to change course. Crossing the Missouri at Running Water, South Dakota, they drove to Niobrara, arriving in October, 1879. John built a grocery store, with a lean-to for the family living quarters, and spent the winter there. In the spring John bought a preemption from James Bader, also formerly of Blue Earth, and moved to Apple Creek. This land is still a part of the family holdings.

Mr. Emerson moved the lean-to from Niobrara and fixed it up for a home for his family until a larger house could be built. They had been in it only three months when a flood drove them out. The father wakened just in time to rescue the children sleeping on the floor when the water struck the dwelling. The lean-to was then moved to higher ground and John built a four-room house beside it, moved his family into the new dwelling and opened a store in the lean-to, the only store at that time between Niobrara and O’Neill. He soon acquired the post office, too. The following spring he built four more rooms on top of the original house and opened a hotel— the “Emerson House.” He also built and operated a large livery stable beside it. That October (1880) John’s second wife died and was buried on a “The Emerson House” built by John Emerson on Apple Creek in 1880-1881. Served as a Hotel, store and Post Office known as Apple Creek, in turn Steel Creek, Omarel and finally Dorsey. John Emerson was the father of Mrs. Samuel (Annie) Derickson. Courtesy Georgia Butterfield. Apple Creek Mill or Dorsey Mill on Steel Creek in 1901. Moved to Dorsey from Niobrara, Nebraka. Courtesy Mrs. Wallace Lundeen. secluded knoll above the creek. Soon afterward Eliza’s mother and sister Mary came out to live with the family. John and Mary were later married by the Rev. Rosenkrans.

The town of Apple Creek grew rapidly. A drug store, hardware and blacksmith shop opened for business. Dudley Gager operated a harness shop. The name of the town was changed to Omeral, nowhere nearly as fitting and descriptive as the former name, especially when the crab apple groves flaunted their fragrant blossoms along the creek. The name “Omeral” soon proved 379 is located on the same site as the old schoolhouse and bears the same name, “Ash Grove.” It is twenty miles from Creighton, twenty-four miles from O’Neill, sixteen miles from Verdigre and is in Willowdale Township. Men from other townships traveled as far as thirty miles to help put up the building. Then the R.E.A. extended a power line to the hall and a kitchen was installed in the quonset. The new hall was initiated by holding a big dance for all the members and their families on July 4, 1955.

In 1961 Ted was appointed a United States Commissioner by Federal Judges Richard Robins and Robert Van Pelt, a position he held until his death. He was the father of four children.

Letters for Omaha came to Omeral, causing much confusion and delay. All concerned were unhappy and the patrons of Omeral “got up” a petition to have the name changed to Dorsey. The post office department was amenable to the change. A flour mill soon came into being, then another hotel, three more stores, a bank and the Apple Creek Sun.

John Emerson donated the land for the first school and its first term was taught by Mrs. John Downey, who had five pupils, all Baders. Their father paid Mrs. Downey $35 a month, and so Holt County School District No. 4 was established. Sunday school and church services were held in the building until better arrangements could be made. Mr. Emerson also donated the land for the Dorsey cemetery and promoted the town’s first Fourth of July celebration, serving free lemonade all day and constructing the bowery for the big dance that night.

Eliza and Mary, second and third wives of John Emerson had both been school teachers and thirty-five of their descendants were teachers or qualified to teach. One of John’s sons, Roy, had three sons and three daughters, all of whom were in the second world war at the same time: the sons in the Air Force where Clement’s plane was shot down and never found. Both Clement and his brother Warren were distinguished for bravery in the conflict. Of the girls, Mary, a nurse, served overseas for four years, Ruth was a WAC and Ruby was in Red Cross work.

Besides having several names, Dorsey also had several locations. After the mill was built in 1883 all of the stores, except Emerson’s which remained on the hillside above the flood line, were moved down to the location of the mill. After the mill closed in the early ‘nineties, Will Davidson built a store “on the hill,” which later became the third home of the post office. For many years there were two daily mail arrivals and dispatches from this little country town post office. One mail route came in from Verdigre, southeast of Dorsey, the other from O’Neill. While the mill was still in operation one of its millers was Phil Parker. He and William Davidson had some “differences” and the town split. The location of the split-off faction was “up on the hill in the vicinity of the present site of the Dorsey schoolhouse,” surrounding the Davidson store which housed the drugstore and a hardware department as well. During the years of its hey-day Dorsey had a band of which it was very proud. Known as the “Binkerd Band,” it was made up of James Binkerd, two of his daughters and his three sons. John Emerson resigned as postmaster in 1887 and John AAosher was appointed in his place. Then Samuel Derickson built a grocery store with living quarters in the back and became postmaster. Late in 1890 he resigned and moved to Niobrara. Mr. Davidson then took his turn as postmaster. In 1900 he sold the store to Coral McElhaney, son of the first postmaster. The post office went with the store.

Several other postmasters presided over the little office until 1918 when the Wileys took it over. James Wiley served as postmaster for twenty-five years, his wife for fourteen more. Dorsey post office was phased out in 1957. The forty-three families it had accommodated at the time of its closing then got their mail on rural routes. The postal department claimed that the expense of maintaining the office far exceeded the receipts in its final years.

The hotel or rooming house owned by Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Derickson in 1912 at the” second site of the Dorsey post office is today the only building still standing in what was once the thriving town of Apple Creek -Omeral— Dorsey. John and Judith Binkerd, Pennsylvania Dutch people, their son James and his wife, Harriet, and another son Daniel and his wife, Flora, all came to Dorsey in 1879. Judith Binkerd was a cousin of President Andrew Johnson and John Binkerd’s mother was a Studebaker, of the family that manufactured wagons, buggies and automobiles. The Binkerds came to Holt County from Iowa and filed on claims very near the new town, which was named Apple Creek that year. A third James and Harriet Binkerd, parents of Dena Binkerd Brady. Courtesy Dena Mr. and Mrs. Charlie Downey Brady. Dorsey School— Effie Willows, teacher. 380 son, John J. Binkerd,. married Ada Wonderlich in 1881 and came to Dorsey to join the rest of the family in 1882.

James and Harriett Binkerd had eight children. At one period the family milked fifty cows by hand but had a power separator for processing the milk— a treadmill operated by several hounds. The Binkerd band was much in demand for Fourth of July celebrations and Memorial Day ceremonies, as well as on many other occasions. Both James and his father were carpenters and much of the furniture used by the two families was homemade. James traded his tree claim for the Lynch telephone company in 1910 and moved there to operate it.

James Binkerd’s grandson, Jack Brady, was killed in World War II. John J. Binkerd and his wife Ada had one son, John Benton, born in Dorsey in 1885. John Benton married Winifred May Pine. The couple had six children and two of their sons, John and David, served in the same war. John laid down his life on Omaha Beach.

Daniel, youngest of the three Binkerd brothers, played a prominent part in old Dorsey. At one time he was the hotel keeper and the postmaster. For awhile he and his brothers were in partnership in one of the stores there. He owned several pieces of land near the town until 1890 when he sold all his Dorsey holdings and moved to Lexington, Nebraska. He and Flora had two sons and a daughter.

In the spring of 1880 Joseph Tomlinson and his son-in-law, Will Blubaugh, traveled overland from Gratiot, Wisconsin, to the Dorsey neighborhood. Each took a homestead and a tree claim, hauled lumber from Niobrara and built small frame houses. Joseph’s wife came out in the summer to look the situation over. Her son, Henry, wrote that she was not favorably impressed, for hot winds began to blow on July 1 and did not let up for sixteen days on end. Nevertheless the group headed back to Wisconsin, held a sale, loaded the livestock into two emigrant cars and headed back to Holt County, landing on the claims about October 1, 1880. Two weeks later a three day blizzard swept the country. After three mild weeks the snow began again and lasted all winter. The Tomlinsons had no well as yet and Bob and his brother George remembered that their wash boiler stayed on the stove all that winter, melting snow for the family, their two horses and five cows.

When Johnny Emerson could get supplies for his store through from Niobrara the settlers could get groceries there. But many, Bob said, didn’t stay around too long. They simply loaded up what they could and went east after the October storm and stayed until spring. Those who stayed on their homesteads had tough going.

Mr. Tomlinson had laid in a supply of hay and grain before winter set in. He had also bought three cords of wood from some wood cutters whose wagon had broken down near his place. Milton Paynter, a homesteader only two and a half miles north of the Tomlinsons had hauled several loads of logs to the place, intending to build a log house. Scared out by the October blizzard, he hurried back to Iowa to await better weather.

As the winter wore on and the snows deepened across the land, the other homesteaders became desperate for wood and determined to get the logs for fuel, then pay the owner for them when he came back in the spring. Planning to work together to force a trail through the drifts to the log pile, about a dozen men and six or seven teams gathered at the Tomlinson place on a sunshiny morning and headed for the vacant homestead, two and a half miles away. Mr. Tomlinson, his son-in-law, John Addison, five or six Fuller boys, Andrew Watson and some others, all grim, determined men, sat out to bring home the fuel their families so badly needed. About sundown the cavalcade came trailing back empty. In spite of their best efforts they were unable to get closer than a half mile to the logs.

About three o’clock one cold afternoon a little later two Shaffer boys walked into the Tomlinson place to Henry Tomlinson family in 1912. Mr. Tomlinson holding Isabel, Mrs. Vinnie Tomlinson holding Mildred. Children standing are Alice, Arthur, Glen and Rodney. Courtesy Mrs. Max Grenier.

see if they could get two sacks of ear corn. The Shaffers lived three and a half miles southwest of Tomlinsons. Besides Mr. and Mrs. Shaffer there was a married son, his wife and baby and several grown boys and girls, and they were completely out of food. Mr. Tomlinson and his boys filled the sacks with good ears of corn while Mrs. Tomlinson fed the hungry lads a good meal. While they ate she baked a big “flat cake,” a big dripping pan filled with biscuit dough and baked, and sent it home with them, along with a two-gallon jug of milk. That long winter of 1880-1881 came to an end with a big snow storm on April 22. The following summer was favorable and the settlers raised good crops and gardens. Then came a mild winter and affairs looked good for most of the settlers.

Mr. Tomlinson’s son by a former marriage had come out from Wisconsin to join his father’s family. On February 2 Joseph Tomlinson was working in a dug well up on the flat when a cave-in killed him instantly. There was at that time no organized cemetery and he was buried on the corner of the school section where Mineola was built a little later. The following May the young Tomlinson half-brother, was accidentally killed by a neighbor boy.

Hank Tomlinson gives the credit for the establishment of the Mineola post office to “a local politician named Andy Baldwin, (who) threw his weight around a little and got the post office located at the head of Louse Creek.” Until then all the people over in that direction had had to go to Dorsey for their mail, a long trip for many of them. Andrew J. Little was the first Mineola postmaster and his 381 wife was his assistant.

The odd thing about this was that neither Mr. nor Mrs. Little could read or write. The route ran from Dorsey to Paddock every other day. When the neighbors came for their mail they looked through the box and took what belonged to them, if any. Then Will Blubaugh started a store on his place, which was later a part of the Dishner ranch and, after a year or two, had the post office moved there. Shortly afterward C. W. Lamont came out from Gratiot, and Mineola was on its way.

Hank and George Tomlinson had a good team and wagon and George helped Lamont haul lumber for his buildings from Niobrara. Rising before daylight, George joined a number of other haulers over on the trail and they all went on together. They could make it into Niobrara in the afternoon, load up and drive back six George Tomlinson. Courtesy Mrs. Max Grenier. George Tomlinson Homestead in Scott Township The family of Mr. and Mrs. George Tomlinson; all born in the old homestead house in Scott Township. Left to right, front row: Helen, Ruby, Maude. Back row: Esther, Dick, Walter, Bob and Dorothy. Courtesy Bob Tomlinson. 382 or seven miles to the Verdigre Creek where they camped for the night and slept under their wagons.

Starting again at daylight they drove to the “Gerkas hill” where the road left the river and climbed a high sandhill. There they had to double-team their loads to the top and, if they had good luck, could get on to Mineola in the early evening and George would be home in time for supper. For the two eighteen hour days with his team George was paid $5. Time and a half and portal to portal pay had not yet been thought of.

The people did fairly well for a few years, Tomlinson wrote, and it was no trouble to get a thousand dollar loan, or even more, on a quarter section. The trouble came in paying it back. When the hard times came they pulled out, leaving their land to take care of the debt. The mortgage was one way of selling it.

Henry Mills Coleman was another Louse Creek settler who came in 1880. His son, Frank, also took a homestead. The family came from Wisconsin, as did Celia Nevada Sproul who took a claim two miles west of Frank’s. They were married in Dorsey in 1884 by the Rev. Rosenkrans. Frank died about ten years later and is buried at Dorsey. Elick J. Beeney, a carpenter, farmer and teacher, married Celia Coleman in 1900. Besides teaching at the Redbird, Crowe and Binkerd schools, Elick helped built the Lynch Presbyterian church in 1905. Celia and Frank Coleman had three children. After her marriage to Elick Beeney Celia had another son.

Celia’s daughter, Retta Coleman married Lloyd Phelps, formerly of Iowa, at O’Neill in 1913. She was left a widow in 1948 when her husband was killed in a tractor accident. Of their four children only one, Velma Schultz of Stuart, still lives in the county.

Since the revered circuit rider, David Whitaker Rosenkrans settled in Apple Creek between 1877 and 1881, it is fitting to relate a little more of his background here. Born in New York State in 1826, he married Emily Stratton in Wisconsin in 1853. They had six children. Those who later came to Holt County were Vincent Vergne, Mary Emma and Morna. The family was living in Missouri when Morna was born in 1870. the mother died soon afterward and the following year Rev. Rosenkrans married Sarah Trumbull. Their son, David Lynn was born in 1874.

In 1877 David Rosenkrans was sent by the Presbytery of Omaha to organize church groups in western Nebraska and, sometime in the next three or four years, he filed on his homestead at Apple Creek and brought his wife Sarah, two sons, Vergne and David Lynn, and daughter Morna there to live. They came by train to Niobrara, the location of the Federal Land Office at that time, and walked from there to the homestead. Rev. Rosenkrans’ oldest daughter, Mary Emma, had married Cyrus Farrand and stayed in Minnesota. She died there in 1893 and one of her sons, William Cyrus Farrand, then came to Dorsey to live with his grandfather. Before this David Lynn had died in 1889 at the age of fifteen and was buried at Dorsey, and Morna had married Coral McElhaney.

Vincent Vergne went back to Minnesota in 1883, married Minnie Sunderlin and brought her back to the homestead he had taken two years earlier near his father’s. A school teacher before her marriage, Minnie taught one of the early schools at Dorsey, a roomful of students accommodated in the downstairs room of her home while she and her family Woodman Hall at Dorsey, built by Elick Beeney in 1903. 383 moved into crowded quarters upstairs. Minnie and Vincent had two children, a son and a daughter. The little girl died at age seven and is buried at Dorsey. Their son Harold married Alma Alm, daughter of Swan Alm, and became the father of five children, all born at Dorsey.

An interesting story is told of a cousin of Vincent’s, Martin Stratton, who often visited at the Rosenkrans home. He brought his life savings of three of four hundred dollars in gold with him on one of his visits. Due to a scarcity of banks in pioneer times, as well as a distrust of them, people often buried their money for safekeeping. So Martin went out in the Rosenkrans yard one dark night, took so many steps in a certain direction and there buried his gold. No one else in the family knew what he had done until he went to dig it up and it wasn’t there. They helped him dig then but, although the yard was spaded and respaded, the money was never found. Martin finally concluded someone else had known what he did and helped himself.

On another occasion Rev. Rosen-krans gave lodging to a cattleman who was trailing a large herd of cattle to Omaha. He often did this for ranch-men who were driving cattle either to the railroad or to Omaha. But this time word came back later that this herd had been stolen and its drover arrested in Omaha when he attempted to sell the cattle. The William Cyrus Ferrand who came to Dorsey to live with his Grandfather Rosenkrans had an interesting background, going back to the three Ferrand brothers who came from England to the United States in 1733. Several generations later a branch of the family settled in Little Falls, Minnesota, where Joseph Franklin was born to Cyrus Ferrand in 1832. He married Mary Elizabeth Hamilton in 1856 and had nine children.

The eldest, Cyrus Hamilton Ferrand married Mary Emma Rosenkrans in 1880. They had six small children when Mary Emma died in 1894 and the family was divided up among relatives, with William Cyrus coming alone to Dorsey to his grandparents. As a young man William worked as a hired man for the neighbors until, in 1908, he married Minnie Gibson. The couple made their home on the old Rosenkrans homestead and reared seven children there.

Four of William’s children still live in the Lynch area, across the Niobrara from old Redbird. A son, Irvin John Ferrand, lives on his great-grandfather Rosenkrans’ old homestead. Mina Bader was the daughter of the Bader family of Blue Earth, one of Apple Creek’s pioneer settlers. Her sister Nancy married Charles Ansders and lived out her life south of’ the Dorsey cemetery. The Bader boys went to Wyoming. Mina married Alonzo Gaddie. Born in Missouri, Alonzo at the age of twenty-one drove a team and wagon to Holt County for a neighbor, Jim Pinker- man, in 1881. He stayed and worked as a hired hand on the Pinkerman place until he married Mina, after which they lived on the old Fred Pine place.

Alonzo made extra money carrying the mail to Scottville and Blackbird. Later the family moved onto Mina’s father’s homestead on Steel Creek, where they farmed until 1917. That year they moved to a home above Redbird. Of their twelve children eight are still living. Alonzo and Mina and a son are all buried in the Dorsey cemetery.

Elza Wiley, an adventurous young man, was born in Ohio in 1833, a time when adventure beckoned from many directions. Coming of age at about the time of the passage of the Kansas- Nebraska bill, he chose Kansas for his first adventure, settling near Lawrence. Soon he went on to Colorado to look for gold on Cherry Creek. Then came the Civil War and he walked back to Kansas as fast as he could to enlist in the Kansas Volunteer Cavalry. He spent four and a half years in the service and was discharged in 1866 in Ohio.

He then went back to Kansas, met Martha Ellen Crance and married her in 1870. They had two children, James and Emma, when they moved to Iowa, where Arthur was born. Two children died in infancy. From Iowa the family came to Dorsey in 1882, where Mary and Robert were born. A great lover of flowers, Martha beautified her prairie home with Wedding picture of James E. Wiley and Elizabeth Binkerd June 12, 1901, Dorsey, Nebraska. Courtesy Mrs. Howard Marston. them, and the lilacs that still bloom each spring on the old homestaed are those she brought with her ninety years ago. Elza was commander of the G.A.R. post at Dorsey and was elected a trustee of the Presbyterian Church in 1884, two years after it was organized.

James Wiley, nine when the family moved to Dorsey, helped develop the homestead as he grew up. In 1901 he married Elizabeth Binkerd, a neighbor’s daughter. The couple had six children. None remained in Holt County. Emma Wiley married William Ellis at Dorsey in 1895 and had five children.

Arthur Wiley married Pansey Erskine in 1906 and fathered four children. Mary Wiley married Harry Ferguson in 1904 and also had four children. Robert lived most of his life in Holt County, except for the time he spent in the service in World War I, most of it overseas. He now lives in the Nebraska Veterans Home in Grand Island.

James and Elizabeth are the couple who, between them, tended the Dorsey post office for forty years on their homestead. Besides her work in the post office, Elizabeth was the telephone switchboard operator in Dorsey for thirty-three years, while James kept up the lines.

Elza and Martha Ellen lived out their lives on the homestead, as did their son James, who had lived on it seventy-seven years when he died in 1958. Of the Wiley family Elza, Martha Ellen, James and Elizabeth are all buried at Dorsey. Emma lies not far away, at Star.

The Samuel Derickson family was another that came to Dorsey in 1882. Samuel’s homeland was Pennsylvania and he left it at the age of twenty- three, bound for the gold fields of 384 Montana. It was winter and when he got as far west as Minnesota and was told the weather was even colder in Montana he headed south and wound up in Niobrara, where he met Charles Lamont. After a year with Mr. Lamont he went down into Holt County and stopped at Apple Creek, where he stayed for awhile at the Emerson House.

As soon as he could, Samuel bought a pre-emption from Amos Damon and built a cabin on the land. Early in 1886 he and Annie Emerson, daughter of the hotel owner, were married by Rev. Rosenkrans. Two years later the couple moved to the second site of Dorsey and built a store. In 1889 Samuel was appointed one of Dorsey’s numerous postmasters. Beginning with the fall of 1890 the family made several moves: to Niobrara for ten years, then to Hainesville and back to Dorsey again. After seven years they tried New Mexico for a month, then came back to Dorsey in 1909 and bought the John Darr place.

The Dericksons had eight children. The youngsters were able to help out the scanty farm income by picking and selling wild fruits, especially gooseberries, which they picked, stemmed and sold for ten cents a quart. One of the best things in Georgia’s young life was the music lessons she took from Mrs. Fred Pine, thirty of them, which she paid for with the berries.

Sadie Derickson, born in 1889 at Niobrara, was the first woman to cast her vote in Steel Creek Precinct. Of the eight sons and daughters, Edward, Sadie and Jeanette never married. Edward served in the first World War. Sadie and Jeanette were school teachers.

Georgia married Clarence Butter-field; John married Pearl Mitchell; Marion married Oral Pickering and Olive married Wallace Lundeen. William married an Iowa girl.

The John Moser and John Reynolds families came to Dorsey in the spring of 1883. John Cassender Reynolds was born in Ohio in 1857 but grew up near Des Moines, Iowa. John Moser, too, was born in Ohio in 1844. He grew up there and married Barbara Sprildenner who was born in France in 1843. They were married in Fremont, Ohio, in 1865. Their daughter Cecelia was born in 1867 and shortly afterward the family moved to Des Moines, where John ran a cigar factory. Annie was born there in 1868 and the family later moved to Mitchellville where Georgia was born in 1880.

John C. Reynolds and Cecelia Moser were married in Mitchellville in 1882, about the time that Cecelia’s father decided to move to Holt County and take up some free land. With their daughters, Annie and Georgia, and Cecelia and her new husband, the group set out for the West. John Moser, a salesman and merchant rather than a farmer, wanted land close to Dorsey. Since all the close-in homesteads were already taken, he bought a release on a claim just east of town.

Mr. Moser planted six acres of fruit trees on his land and sold trees, nursery stock and fruit all over the region. He also planted a large vineyard and was well-known for his fine grapes. The Moser’s youngest daughter, Lily was born at Dorsey but died in childhood and is buried in the Sod house built by Samuel Derickson in 1901 Courtesy Georgia Derickson.

near Steel Creek, Dorsey, Nebraska. The Binkerd School, District No. 100. Teacher, Georgia Derickson-Butterfield. Pupils, Leslie Wade, Rose Novak, Leia Pilger and Fay Dailey. Courtesy of Georgia Derickson.

cemetery there.

After two years at Dorsey, John and Cecelia Reynolds moved back to Iowa. When they came back to Dorsey in the fall of 1888 they had two little sons, Charlie and Frank. Another son, Arthur, was born there in 1890 and Barbara in 1892. The family lived in a sod house near the Moser home. In 1893, however, John Reynolds again moved his family back to Iowa, all except nine-year-old Charlie who stayed with his Moser grandparents. Mr. Moser continued to urge his son-in-law to come back to Dorsey and in 1896 the family drove a covered wagon back to the little town. Three years later Cecelia’s mother, Barbara Moser died on the 385 home place at only fifty-six years of age.

In the meantime Annie Moser had married young William Hudson of Dorsey and Georgia had married Frank Oberle and moved to a place south of Scottville. In 1900 John and Cecelia moved again, to a farm over near Mineola, and had another son, Adrian, the following spring. Adrian died of measles early in 1903 and in June Charlie died of bone infection, the result of a fall. Another daughter, Martha, was born the next spring. Within a year’s time Frank Reynolds married Zona VanDover, Arthur married Ruby Ide and Barbara married Harry Renner. Zona and Ruby were neighborhood girls, Harry, of Boyd County, took Barbara to his farm there. Four years later he was killed by lightning, leaving Barbara with two small girls. Frank and Arthur later moved their families out of Holt County.

John and Cecelia Reynolds moved back to Dorsey in 1911, to live with Grandpa Moser who was getting on in years, although he still worked in his orchards and vineyard. When Cecelia fell ill in 1918 the widowed Barbara, with her two young daughters, came to care for her. After her mother’s death in December Barbara stayed on to keep house for her father, grandfather and fourteen-year-old Martha. In 1920 Barbara married Ernest Richter of Scottville, John and Martha moved to McCook, Nebraska to live with Arthur and his family while Martha went to high school, and Grandpa Moser moved in with Georgia and Frank Oberle until his death the following year. Annie Hudson died that same year, leaving her husband and four sons, Frank, Lee, Mrs. John Reynolds and sons: Charlie, seated, Arthur and Frank, standing. Taken about 1898. Courtesy Mrs. Francis Pribil. Stanley and Fred.

John Reynolds had moved back to Scottville to make his home with Ernest and Barbara Richter. Martha married Joe Schollmeyer,.Jr., in 1923. They lived at Scottville, Mineola and Dorsey at different times and had four children, Irene, Carol, Wayne and Darrell.

John Reynolds died in 1932 and is buried at Dorsey beside his wife, Cecelia, her parents, John and Barbara Moser, and Annie Moser Hudson.

Two other families that came to Dorsey in 1883 were the Frances and Wilsons. Hosea France, born in Ohio in 1830 moved to Illinois when quite young. He married Becca Ann Snyder in 1860. Their three children were Zack, Albert and Jennie. Becca Ann died while the children were very small. Hosea then married Mrs. Juda Brown, widow of his cousin. Juda had a daughter, Rilla. Eight more children were born to the couple.

Reynolds, Oberle and Hudson families. Standing, back row: Arthur Reynolds, Frank Hudson, William Hudson, Frank Oberle holding Velda Oberle. Front row, seated: Barbara Reynolds, Mrs. John (Mary Cecelia) Reynolds, Mrs. William (Annie) Hudson, Mrs. Frank (Georgia) Oberle, Grandpa John Moser. Standing: Lee Hudson, Martha Reynolds, Stanley Hudson, Tina Oberle, Howard Oberle. 386 The France family had moved to Dorsey in 1883, as their youngest child, Floyd, was born there in that year. The family had moved on to Lynch by 1910, as the family history states that Floyd had one of the first cars in that town, a 1910 Hupmobile, in which he hauled the local band to fairs and celebrations. He met his wife-to-be, Bessie Higgins, when he picked her up on the road, after she fell out of her brother Ben’s buggy when his team ran away with it. One wonders if the runaway was caused by the horseless carriage.

Of Hosea and Juda’s twelve children, Zack settled at Redbird, Alma married Dan Krame of Lynch, Vinnie married Hank Tomlinson of Star and Elizabeth married Bill Wilson of Redbird and died there in 1901. The others scattered to several different states.

William Wilson was born in Iowa in 1861. his first Nebraska home was a claim in Cherry County. In 1883 he married Elizabeth France and moved to Dorsey. Later he bought the farm near Redbird. Six children were born to this union and Ray, the youngest, was a very small child when his mother died. He was raised by a married sister. Only one of the family, Mrs. Fay Kreger of O’Neill, is now living.

Rilla Brown, step-daughter of Hosea France, had married John K. Connelly in Iowa in 1877. They came to the Dorsey area in 1884 and lived on the J. P. Anderson place. Mr. Anderson had a crippled daughter whom Mrs. Connelly cared for. In return he gave the Connellys the land. They first built a log cabin on it, then added a frame structure to it. The Connellys at one time also operated a general store in Dorsey.

Rilla and John had six children. Their son Carl was the winner of the July 4, 1888 baby show, topping fourteen other babies entered in the show. One of their daughters. Pearl, married George Binkerd. Myrtle, the oldest, married William Pickering and settled near Redbird. They built their holdings up to a good sized farm and retired on the place in the 1940’s. Their youngest son Claude then carried on the farming operation. The Pickerings had five children. Oral served in World War I, then came home and married Marion Derickson. Harold, who was killed as a child when he was run over by a wagon; Wilna who taught in the Dorsey and Lynch region, married and moved to Iowa; and Vera who taught neighborhood schools, then married and went to live in Spencer.

Claude married Zelda Pinkerman and farmed the home place until their son Victor came home after eight years in the Air Force, married Irene Boelter and took over the home place. Their son Dean is the fourth generation of Pickerings to live on the original Pickering farm.

Claude and Zelda still live on the home place beside Victor and Irene. William Pickering’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Milo Pickering, lived about a mile and a half west of his place in the early days. Milo was killed while trying to stop a runaway team in the streets of Lynch. Rilla Connelly’s stepbrother, Zachery France and his wife Rachel lived a half-mile west of the Will Pickering place and were known to everyone as Uncle Zack and Aunt Roch.

When the Suffragette movement became active in the Dorsey neighborhood, Myrtle Pickering, Anna Car- son, Dena Brady, Lizzie Wiley and others campaigned for Womens’ right to vote. Often they paraded in their husbands’ hats and coats, but always in their own long skirts.

John Connelly and his son Carl died in the 1918 flu epidemic. With Mrs. Connelly, they are buried in Dorsey. William Pickering died in 1949 and Myrtle in 1960. Both are buried in the Dorsey cemetery.

Sidney Ellis, born in 1832 in Ohio, married Naomi Hall in 1867 in Iowa. They came to Dorsey in 1884 with their two children, Eunice and William. The boy was only twelve years old and when his father died two years later he had to help support the family. His parents had sold their land in Iowa to buy the Holt County farm.

William Ellis married Emma Wiley in Dorsey in 1895. The couple had five children. William worked for Coral McElhaney in his Dorsey store for four years, attended Gates Academy in Neligh for awhile and later taught school. He also farmed for several years before selling out and moving to O’Neill.

Thomas Hudson, a Civil War veteran, and his wife Loretta came James Brady, pioneer settler. Courtesy Dena Brady. Elizabeth Brady, wife of James Brady. from Kansas to Niobrara in 1883. After helping build the railroad through that area Thomas brought his family down to Dorsey in 1885. At that time there was only a dugout on the place. Later Thomas moved a frame house onto the site for a home for his wife and eleven children.

For many years the Hudsons farmed and also drove the mail route between Dorsey and Niobrara. The children all went to the old Dorsey school house when it stood down by the creek. Their school mates were the Newman, Wiley, Emerson, Bader and Connelly children.

In 1900 Thomas Hudson deeded his farm to his son George, with the stipulation that George care for his mother as long as she lived and for the three youngest Hudsons until they were eighteen years of age, then entered the old soldiers’ home at Leavenworth, Kansas. Wesley was accidentally killed after the family came to Dorsey and Walter had a leg crushed by a horse that fell on him. As a result he had to wear a wooden leg.

Of the others, Albert married Lucy Alder, Ella married William Sarchet, Nellie married Thomas Alder, Elmer married Amelia Pinkerman and Grace married D. E. Alder. William, born in 1870, married Annie Moser. Two daughters married and lived in other states.

George and Edith, who owned the farm, had three children and lived on the old home place until 1916, when they sold it to Grace and her husband, D. E. (Edward) Alder. Thomas and Loretta, their sons Elmer and Wesley, and their daughter Grace Alder and her husband are all buried in the Dorsey cemetery.

John Novak, born in Czechoslovakia, came to the United States with his parents, three brothers and a sister. His father was killed by runaway horses. John later married at Howells, Nebraska, and moved to Wisconsin where he worked in the 387 woods, cutting timber. A falling tree smashed his leg and left him partially crippled.

The Novaks had three daughters by the time they moved to Verdigre, where their son Frank was born in the sod house on their farm. They then moved to Dorsey and John worked on the roads with mules. Four more children were born in Dorsey, where Mrs. Novak and her daughter Tillie died of flu on the same day in 1918. John then sold the Dorsey farm and moved to Lynch to put the younger children in school. Frank, the oldest son, married Elna Anhorn in 1932 in Herrick, South Dakota, and moved to Verdigre, where he died.

Newton Carson was born in County Antrim, Ireland, in 1846, and came to New York at the age of twelve with his family. There he met and later married Isabella Brady, the daughter of James and Elizabeth Brady, also of County Antrim. Her father and his brothers, John and William, came to America first. As soon as he could James sent for Elizabeth and the baby Isabella.

On the way over Isabella was three times dressed in her christening robe when her mother was sure the ship was about to be wrecked. James had a home ready for them at West Hebron, New York, where three more children, Eliza Jane, Mary Ellen and John Alexander, were born; the latter in October, 1861.

Newton and Isabella were married in 1868 and their first son, William was born in 1871. James followed in 1873 and the twins, Mary and Lizzie in 1875. Fourteen months later John came along. Isabella was always to say that John, Mary and Lizzie were like triplets.

Both James Brady and Newton Carson moved their families to farms near Wilber, Nebraska, in 1879. While they lived there Eliza Jane Brady married William McWhorter, Mary Ellen married his brother James and John Alexander Brady married Effie May Turner.

Effie, born in Iowa in 1869, had come as a small girl with her parents, her brothers, Lee and Arthur, and her sister Mary Emma, to Wilber. John and Effie were married in the late ‘eighties and their first child, Clarence Lee, was born January 12, 1888 during the blizzard.

James and Elizabeth Brady moved to a farm three and one-half miles west of Dorsey in 1889. They were soon followed by the Newton Carson, William and James McWhorter and John Alexander Brady families. The five households were located within a two mile area. Death broke this close-knit family group when Elizabeth Brady died in 1893 and was buried in the Scottville cemetery. James died ten years later and was buried beside her.

John and Effie Brady bought the Ellison Carson farm and lived on it the rest of their married life. Their second son, William Lloyd, was born in 1894 and a daughter, Hazel Marie, in 1897. Their last child, Effie Fay, was born in 1902. All four of these children graduated from the eighth grade in nearby District 32.

The family had used horses for all transportation until 1916. On April 5 John Brady had planned to go to O’Neill to purchase supplies, take care of some business, attend the Masonic Lodge meeting that evening— and then drive home in the new car he was buying that day. Instead, Dr. Gilligan was called to the home, thirty miles northeast of O’Neill, that morning.

The doctor diagnosed Mr. Brady’s illness as blood poisoning and sent to Omaha for a specialist and a registered nurse. In spite of Dr. Gilligan’s ten trips up to the farm and all that the others could do, John Brady died on April 14 and was laid to rest beside his parents at Scottville. There were two processions for his funeral; one for teams and one for cars.

Effie and the three youngest Bradys stayed on the farm. Lee had married Nellie (Dena) Binkerd three years earlier and lived on a farm three miles southwest of his old home. Newton and Isabella Carson had bought the Jacob Davis homestead for their Holt County home in 1889. The farm remained in the family for the next seventy-six years. Another daughter, Carrie, was born while they lived at Wilber and a son, Edward, was born on the new home place. William Carson, Newton’s eldest son, was eighteen when the family moved to Dorsey. In 1901 he married Effie’s sister, Emma Turner. Emma had taught school for several years before becoming secretary to the Saline County Judge in Wilber, where she was working at the time of her marriage. William and Emma made their home on a farm a half mile east of John and Effie’s home for fifteen years. They had a son and a daughter before moving to Norfolk, and then to Lincoln.

The Carson twins, Mary and Lizzie, were identical. In their youth they amused themselves by changing seats in school, partners in square dance sets and confusing their boy friends. In 1901 Mary married Floyd Wolfe and lived for many years on the Wolfe farm just north of the Carson place. Floyd Wolfe, born in Iowa in 1874, lost his mother when he was five. He lived in the homes of various relatives until he was twenty-one, when he came to Dorsey to visit his sister, Ella, who had married Lester Emerson of the John Emerson family. He worked for awhile on the J. B. Anderson ranch near Star, then bought a farm of his own one mile north of the Newton Carson place.

Floyd and Mary had two children, Clifford and Neva Isabella. Mr. Wolfe built his holdings to a total of more than one thousand acres, owned and leased, and became quite prosperous. The son, Clifford, has vivid memories of some horses they used on the ranch. The buggy team was a pair of Morgan geldings, Rueban and Madge. “In emergencies,” wrote Clifford, “We also rode Rueban. This was not too satisfactory because he imagined he was a pacer, or singlefooter, in addition to the regular trot and gallop. Every time he tried to change from a trot to a pace or singlefooting he got his big feet tangled up and almost fell down. This was disconcerting to his rider, who never knew when he was going to try the change. “We also had a regular saddle pony that my sister and I rode to school. Every so often she would balk, either at the bridge about a quarter mile from Grandfather Carson’s or at a little ash grove a quarter mile from home. When it happened at the bridge on the way home Uncle Edward would come down, get on her and whip the daylights out of her. That would last for about a month. “When she tried it at the ash grove on the other end, Dad would administer the same treatment. She also made it interesting for me when I had to ride her after the cows. We had a hundred acre cow pasture on Louse Creek, with lots of oak and ash timber. She knew at least a dozen places where she could go under low branches and rake me off— which meant walking home.” After graduating from high school in 1923, Clifford taught neighborhood schools for three years, then went down to the State University and studied electrical engineering. In 1930 he began working for the Interstate Power Company in O’Neill, worked with the same company in South Dakota and Iowa, and retired in 1970. He now lives in Arizona.

Lizzie, the other Carson twin, never married but remained at home and cared for her mother, Isabella, as long as she lived.

John Carson married Anna Ladely in 1905 and took his bride to his farm just west of that of his parents. A good farmer, for eight years he was also a Supervisor for his Second District and succeeded in getting a number of good roads built in his district. With his family, his brothers and sisters and their families, he took an active part 388 in the many affairs of the Dorsey Presbyterian Church. Both John and William were members of Dorsey’s crack baseball nine.

Edward, youngest of the Carsons, farmed with his father and brothers on the home place until 1923 when he married Pearl Carson, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Robert Carson. Pearl’s father, born in Wisconsin, had grown up in Illinois before coming to Bennet, Nebraska at the age of twenty. There he met Amelia Spaulding and married her in 1885. The family moved to Holt County in 1917 and settled on the place now known as the Harry Carson Ranch.

Edward was a member of the Farmers Union Elevator, the School Board and the Township Board. After his father’s death he stayed on the home place, farming it until his own death in 1965. Pearl then moved to Lincoln and made her home with their only child, Beverly, until her own death in 1970.

John and Effie Brady’s second son, William Lloyd, married Iva Butterfield in 1924. Their seven children were all born on the old home place and the five who grew up went to school in the District 32 schoolhouse where their parents had gone. Though now retired in O’Neill, Lloyd and Iva still own the farm.

Hazel Marie Brady married Guy Johnson in 1921. Guy, born at Walnut in Knox County in 1891, grew up on his family’s farm a half mile east of the Holt County line. The newly-weds spent three years on a valley farm just north of Guy’s parents’ home, then bought the William Osborn farm, where they lived the rest of their lives— which was not to be long for Hazel Marie.

The couple had four children, Marcella lolene and Geraldine Fay, who lived, a son, Richard Guy, who died at birth and a daughter who died with her mother on the day of her birth in April, 1935.

Effie Fay Brady, Hazel Marie’s sister, had married Guy’s brother, Harry Johnson, in 1926 and had made her home on his Knox County farm. After Hazel’s death they moved in with Guy to help care for his little girls. The grandmother, Effie Brady, also made her home with them. In 1935 a daughter was born to Harry and Fay. They named her Hazel Marie in memory of Fay’s only sister. The three girls, double cousins, grew up as sisters on the ranch where the Johnson brothers farmed and dealt in cattle and horses.

At times the brothers had more than two hundred horses on the place and the Johnson girls always had ponies to ride— their favorite pastime. Geraldine especially liked to be around the horses. She often used to slip into a corner of the barn, behind a cluster of pitchforks and other tools, to watch her father and uncle work with the animals.

“We used to have our own private rodeo,” one of the girls wrote, “watching them break the horses to ride and drive, and in the summer after school was out, we went to town with our dad every time it was convenient for him to take us. The summer after our mother passed away we went to Page with him almost every Wednesday to the cattle sales.” In the mid 1930’s Guy and Harry contracted with the Government to furnish one hundred horses to construct the State Park at Niobrara. With the horses, fresnos and manpower furnished by the Civilian Conservation Corps boys the beautiful park came into being near the confluence of the Niobrara with the Missouri.

“As a little girl,” wrote Marcella Johnson, “I remember sitting behind the cabinet as close to my mother as possible at the far end of the kitchen, when Dad brought in horse buyers and traders, both whites and Indians, for dinner. They were always welcome, for Dad and Uncle had many customers who always came back because they were treated fairly. They didn’t need contracts for Guy always said, ‘My word is as good as a contract.’” In March, 1943, the chimney of the Johnson home caught fire and the house was completely destroyed. The neighbors and relatives came with all speed but within two hours the house had fallen into the basement and all was gone. The family moved at once to Harry and Fay Johnson’s home, for this was war time and everything was rationed and in short supply.

Effie Brady passed away in 1951, thirty-five years after her husband’s death. Marcella married Robert Sholes and had three daughters. All of them live within thirty miles of their old home, where their parents live. Geraldine married John E. Babi, lived in O’Neill for a time then moved to the farm less than two miles south of Geraldine’s birthplace. They have two daughters and a son.

Hazel Marie married Bruce McEl-haney in 1956 in O’Neill and lived in Lincoln for twelve years. In 1969 they moved to Hazel Marie’s old home when her parents retired to O’Neill. They have four sons.

Guy Johnson died in St. Anthony’s hospital in O’Neill in 1970 and his brother Harry died in the same hospital the following year. Both were buried from the O’Neill Presbyterian Church and both are at rest in the Star cemetery.

Lee and Dena Brady were the parents of two sons, Clarence Lee, Jr., and Lloyd George, better known as “Jack.” The family lived three miles southwest of the old Brady home. Jack married Florence Schindler and had one son, Albert Lee. The baby was sixteen days old when his father went overseas in World War II. A ball turret gunner on a B-17, Jack was shot down over Belgium in April, 1944, at the age of twenty-two. Albert Lee grew up, married Rose Sinclair in Lynch and joined the Air Force. He and his family spent three years in Japan and are the parents of three children.

In death the Brady family are as close as they were in life: besides James and Elizabeth, their son John and his wife Effie, their grandson Lee and their great-grandson Jack are all buried in the Scottville cemetery. There, too, lies Hazel Marie and several of the family’s infants and young children.

John B. Dailey, born in Iowa in 1862, with his brother Tom rode from their Iowa home to Harrison, Nebraska, on their bicycles. He married Matilda Rebecca Goodwin of Paddock. Matilda, born in Platte Center in 1876, moved to Paddock with her family while a young girl. The Goodwins were very poor and Matilda and her sister went to a country school with their feet wrapped in paper and gunny sacking instead of shoes.

Matilda first married a man named Wolfe and had a daughter, Mae Elizabeth. The baby was only a few months old when Mr. Wolfe died of quick pneumonia. Matilda then married John Dailey. The couple took a homestead in Boyd County, just below the Redbird bridge. In later years they lived in O’Neill, where Mae Elizabeth was one of the young baby sitters who was burned to death in the home of Dr. Flynn one winter’s night in 1913.

After awhile the Daileys moved back to Dorsey and bought the Fred Pine farm. There Matilda had a large two-story home. The Daileys had twelve children. In his younger days John Dailey played baseball and often walked eight to ten miles to the games. He also fiddled for dances around the countryside. His sons, Jim and Bill, at one time played on the Dorsey ball team.

James H. Wade married Grace Curtis in Verdigre in 1895. Soon afterward they moved to a farm between Dorsey and Opportunity, where they farmed on shares with an unnamed partner. The couple had eight children, none of whom now live in Holt County. The children attended rural schools in their immediate area and 389 in winter when it stormed or the snow was deep Mr. Wade transported his children to school on the “giggle sled.” A homemade affair, constructed from a large V-shaped tree branch with boards nailed across it to make a platform, the sled was quite efficient for breaking a trail behind a team. The Wade children and all the neighborhood youngsters who lived along the way enjoyed the sled and frequently fell off in the snow, giggling as they climbed back on the slow-moving vehicle, hence the name of “Giggle” for the sled. “It is one of our fond memories of our father,” wrote his daughters, Myrtle, Iva and Minnie. In 1918 the family lost a sixteen-year-old son, Leslie, to the flu epidemic.

Thomas Davis was born in Iowa shortly after his parents arrived there from England in 1859. He married Martha Tullis and moved to Plainview, Nebraska, in 1893. Ten years later they moved to a ranch near Dorsey. After five years on the ranch they took a covered wagon trip to Salem, Missouri, where Thomas died. Martha came back to Holt County in 1913 and moved onto a farm with John and Glen Davis, relationship not given. She became the Dorsey postmistress sometime before 1918 and also tended the telephone switchboard, both located in her home on the third site of Dorsey.

Martha belonged to a club, organized in 1904, named the “Wmodasis,” (wives, mothers, daughters and sisters). Thomas and Martha had five children, Alvie, Eva, Bessie, Jennie and Fern. At sixteen Bessie taught the Alder school, later known as the Gibson school.

Another Plainview family that came to Dorsey was that of Roy and Myrtle Pilger. Roy and Myrtle Aby were married in Plainview in 1900 and their son Waldo was two years old when they came to Dorsey in 1905. Cecil, Leila and Bernice were born there. Roy’s brother, Fred Pilger, Jr., ran the Dorsey bank from 1909 to 1911. Roy bought a quarter section and leased a school section.

In 1914 Roy bought a used Model T and drove it to the Black Hills to visit Myrtle’s two sisters at Rapid City. A motor trip of that distance, over the roads of that time, was a novelty. After thirteen years on their Dorsey place the family moved back to Plainview.

Delos D. Miles, born in 1875, and Amanda Conkle, born in Iowa in 1871, were married in 1899 at Peru, Nebraska. With their two little sons, Ian and Lawrence, they came to the Joel Yocum farm near Dorsey in 1905. Delos and his father, R. C. Miles, and his brother George had bought the farm from Joel. The place had originally been homesteaded by John Binkerd, who sold it to Martin Stratton, who sold it to Yocum. For a few years R. C. Miles and his wife lived on the place with Delos and his family, then moved on to Lynch.

D. D. and Amanda had four children, Herschel, Wayne, Theodore and Roscoe. Every Sunday the family drove two miles to the Presbyterian church in Dorsey, with the boys, dressed in their Sunday best, sitting on boards laid across the wagon box back of the spring seat. “As a fun sort of thing,” the father named their milk cows’ calves after his sons, irregard- less of sex. Lawrence always thought it was funny to be milking Herschel. Delos was one of the first in his community to raise alfalfa. He began with forty acres and, along with his neighbors, was pleasantly surprised when the new crop turned out to be a success. In 1909 the Miles house caught fire and one end was burned off it before the bucket brigade brought the blaze under control. Lawrence remembers the fire particularly well because he pumped water with all his strength, and because his new coat burned up with the closet in which it hung. The family lived in what was left of the house until a new one could be built in 1913.

Herschel Miles took over the home place in 1931. He bought the farm in 1941 and five years later began to practice contour farming. He also planted twenty-one acres of the place to shelter belts. Prior to coming to the farm, Herschel attended college for awhile, married Wilma Bivens in 1928 and lived in Chicago where he worked for Westinghouse. Their daughter Janis was born there. After returning to the farm they had two sons, Buddy Wayne and Benny Delos. The children went to school in Dorsey and to high school in Plainview. Janis Miles married Donald Jenkin-son in 1949. He was called into the service ini 952. Buddy Wayne married Donna Weinrch in 1953 and entered the service the week he was married. Benny married Thelma Schmier in 1957.

While Janis’ husband was in training at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, his wife, her mother, Wilma Miles, and Mrs. Joe Jenkinson drove down to spend a weekend with him. On their way home they ran into a bridge railing, killing Mrs. Miles and seriously injuring the other two women. In 1955 Herschel married Mrs.

George Kruse, the former Leta Coak-ley. The couple continued to make their home on the old D. D. Miles place and Herschel took up flying, which he thoroughly enjoyed until his health began to fail. He underwent heart surgery in Omaha on January 30, 1957 but did not survive it. He was buried beside his first wife, Wilma, in the Plainview cemetery. The farm was then sold to William Dufek, who still owns it.

Benny, his wife and two sons, however, live in the house on the old home place and his wife Thelma teaches school in Dorsey.

Charles Marston, born in Iowa in 1859, married Ella Haddon and had four children. In 1907 the family settled on a section of land on lower Steel Creek. Mrs. Mary Impson and her son Rueban had homesteaded the land thirty-four years previously (1873 ) and Mrs. Impson had then remarked that it was a poor man’s paradise— plenty of wood, water, wild game, fish in the stream and wild fruit along its banks, a beautiful valley in which to make a home. Mrs. Impson was the first person to be buried in the old Apple Creek Cemetery, later the Dorsey Cemetery. Incorporated in 1882 as the Apple Creek Cemetery Association, the village hard by was called “Omeral” in the old Association book in 1884, but “Dorsey” in 1889. Although there are some earlier dates on some of the stones there it is inferred that these refer to bodies that were moved in later.

Dave Boyington and his wife, a sister of Charles Marston, and their two daughters then lived on the farm for a time, followed by Charles’ brother George and his family. In 1897 at Montezuma, Iowa, John Slack married May (Fry) Phelps, a widow with four children. Mr. and Mrs. Slack then had five children before moving to the Postelwaite ranch five miles from Dorsey. A relative had been urging John to come to Holt County where low priced land was available and he had bought the Ben Postelwaite section and one hundred head of Black Angus cattle. With his family, five head of horses, a milk cow and a dog, he came to Dorsey in the spring of 1911.

During their first summer on the ranch scarlet fever smote the community and John and May lost their son George. Four years later they had another son, Forrest. The Slack children walked to school in the old District 32 building, two and a half miles from their home.

One by one the children grew up and married. Elsie Phelps and Guy Wilson were married by Justice of the Peace John Carson. Martha Slack married Jack Savitts, Lloyd Phelps married Retta Coleman, Howard Slack married Amy Maddox, Maude Slack married Thomas Huber and Forrest 390 married Marie Irish. Lloyd Phelps was killed in a tractor accident in 1948. Howard Slack bought the ranch after his parents’ deaths and still lives there, though his son-in-law Lyle Wells farms the place. John and May Slack and their son George are all buried in the Dorsey cemetery. This ranch, too, was a beautiful piece of land. Little Louse Creek, which never goes dry and does not freeze over in the wintertime, flows through the place, a constant source of water for livestock. One of the many tales as to how it got its peculiar name is that it was a favorite spot for the Indians, who washed the lice out of their hair there.

Louisa Bohac, born in Czechoslovakia in 1873, came to South Dakota with her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Bohac, in 1885. A few years later they moved down into Boyd County. John Cihlar, also born in Czechoslovakia in 1873, came to New York when he was eighteen. Two years later he came on to Knox County and worked on the George Butterfield ranch near Creighton. Following his discharge from the Army at the end of the Spanish American War, John and Louisa were married in 1899. They lived on their homestead near Lynch until March, 1912, when, with their four children, they moved to a farm three and a half miles west of Dorsey which they had bought from Moses Elliot. Of their four children a daughter, Harriet, married Emil Klasna and lived at Spencer and a son, Joe, lived at Verdigre until his death in 1969.

Around the turn of the century Joseph Bohac heard that John Moser of Dorsey had a team to sell. From his farm in Boyd County Mr. Bohac went down to look at the team. Joseph Bohac had not yet learned to speak English, so tried to talk to Mr. Moser in his native Czech. Mr. Moser carried on his end of the conversation in English and the pair were having heavy going until Mr. Bohac, in desperation, tried German, which he spoke fluent- ly- To his amazement John answered him in kind. They then had a lively and pleasant visit and happily concluded their deal for the horses. The Henry Heuermann family moved from Boyd County to Dorsey in 1913. At this date the town had a general store, post office, blacksmith shop, meeting or dance hall and a bank. This latter facility, a branch of an O’Neill bank, was operated by John and Phoebe O’Donnell. The two homes in the village were occupied by the O’Donnels and the Heuer- manns, who took over the store and post office, with Mrs. Heuermann appointed postmistress.

Frieda, Rhea and Beatrice Heuer-mann attended the aged schoolhouse down by the creek. Among the teachers presiding over the forty or so pupils enrolled during the six years the family lived in Dorsey were Ray Emerson and Sadie Derickson. The district built a new building a few years after the Heuermanns moved back to Lynch, following Mrs. Heuer- mann’s death in 1919.

Three Star Routes converged at Dorsey at this time. Every week day carriers from Lynch, O’Neill and Knoxville met at Dorsey. The O’Neill carrier stopped at Opportunity and Star; the Lynch carrier at Redbird, before meeting at noon (if they had no delays) at Dorsey. On the way back the carriers traveled different loops, delivering mail to rural boxes along the way.

John Riley Wells, born July 4, 1870 in Iowa, came to Knox County with his parents, brother and sister in a covered wagon. After his marriage to Goldie Brown he moved to a farm eight miles northeast of Lynch in 1904. Eleven years later they moved down to Dorsey to the farm owned by John’s brother, Lee Wells. There John farmed and carried mail on one of the Dorsey routes. During the years he lived there John raised the finest of watermelons— and only once had his patch raided and destroyed, a rather remarkable record.

After the Lee Wells farm was sold John and his family moved to the old townsite of Dorsey, where they lived until 1944, then moved to O’Neill. Goldie helped with the family income by picking wild fruit for sale and by such chores as cleaning and papering for others. She also crocheted and sold exquisite lace by the yard. The couple had two children, Lawrence, born in 1905 and dragged to death by a horse in 1931; and Rosie, born in 1907, who now lives in Lincoln. August F. Treinies was born in 1855 at Linwood, Nebraska. He worked out on neighboring farms for awhile, then took up carpentering and helped build some of the buildings of the University of Nebraska complex before going over seas with the 91st Infantry Division. Upon his return in 1919 he went to Knoxville. After his marriage to Louise Schreier in O’Neill, the couple lived at Knoxville, operating a big general store and the post office. The store was owned by Louise’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Vincent Schreier, who had come to Knoxville by covered wagon from Chicago and lived in a log cabin.

In 1921 August and Louise moved to a ranch near Dorsey. The owner, Arnold Kurz, had arranged with them to live on and manage the property. They had some good years and some bad ones, the latter when they lost most of their cattle herd to anthrax and their hogs to cholera. The depression years were tough ones, too. Their two daughters, Elva and Vera, went to school in District 4 at Dorsey, four miles from their home. Their transportation varied with the seasons, a wagon, a sled, or, when conditions were favorable, a car— even a truck “built high enough off the ground to hurdle snowdrifts.” After graduation from the Lynch High School Elva became a cosmetologist and Vera in 1945 joined the Women’s Marine Corps. Upon conclusion of her service she took up photography and now lives in Denver. Beginning in the ‘thirties a great deal of conservation work has been done in Steel Creek precinct. Numerous dams were built on Steel Creek and its tributaries. Some were established on the Revell, Butterfield, Spangler, Moss and Alder farms, all now owned by Dave Nelson. The oldest dams, begun back in 1930, are on the Revell farm.

These obstructions to heavy runoff, after big rains or deep snows, have preserved countless tons of topsoil, relieved farmers of the necessity of repairing fences across creeks after every flood and have made it possible to reseed waterways through fields.

← Chapter 37: Middlebranch And Willowdale | Table of Contents | Chapter 39: On The Redbird →

Chapter 38: Mineola – Opportunity

Search by Name

Recent Comments