← Before Today: A History of Holt County, Nebraska
The Agee Neighborhood Chapter Forty The Agee post office, established in 1882, was about fourteen miles north and a little east of O’Neill in a largely Norwegian and Swedish settlement. P. J. Lansworth was appointed its postmaster the same year, and remained in office until his death in 1921, a span of thirty-eight years. The Agee school was organized the same year by Mr. Lansworth, Sam Beaver, John Hopkins and Tom Simonson, in whose home the first term was held. Thomas and Caroline Simonson are the first settlers of record in the Agee vicinity. Thomas, born in Norway in 1841, came to America in 1861. After serving in the Civil War and spending some time in Libby prison, he and his regiment passed in review before President Lincoln before their discharge in Washington. Thomas married Carolyn Lewis in Wisconsin in 1866. He first moved his family to Clay County, Nebraska in 1879, then on to Holt County a year or two later. The Simonsons first lived in a sod house, where the first school was taught. In time the Simonson farms formed a continuous strip three miles long but of varying widths. One of the first telephone lines in the community connected these farms. Carolyn Simonson, who had six children of her own, was a popular mid-wife in the region for a good many years.
Anna Engebretson was born in Norway in 1859. Her husband, Peter Lansworth, whose ancestors came from Norway, was born in Wisconsin in 1852. In the fall of 1881 Peter came to Holt County and took a homestead near his former Wisconsin neighbor, Thomas Simonson. At that time Peter was a young widower with two little girls. The following May he married Anna Engebretson and brought her and his little daughters, his horses, cattle and household goods to the homestead.
The family lived with the Simonsons while Peter put up a small building on his own land. Before the year was out he had built a two-story house three rooms downstairs and one large room upstairs— for their permanent home. Their first child, a daughter Claire, was born there the next May. Eventually their children numbered thirteen, four boys and nine girls. During his first year on the homestead Peter became postmaster of Agee, and after his death his wife filled the position until 1934, when the office was discontinued, making fifty-two years in the same home. The Agee carrier also served Joy, Leonie, Blackbird, Meek, Turner and Maple Grove post offices. Some of the neighbors who picked up their mail at the Lansworths were the Ridgeway, Hodgkin, Hopkins, Martin, McAllister, Curran, Peterson, Crouse and Jacob and Earnest Beaver families.
Most of the Lansworth sons and daughters married in the community: Addie to Charles Wrede, Jr., Goldie to Thomas Liddy, Harry to Marie Grutsch, Nellie to Aaron Boshart, Perle to Carl Widtfeldt and Peter, Jr., to Catherine Morgan. The parents, four of the daughters and two of the sons have passed away. All except Claire are buried at O’Neill.
Richard and Elizabeth Bowden setled very near Agee post office in 1884. Originally of Minnesota, the Bowdens brought five children with them. Five others, victims of an epidemic, were buried in Minnesota. One son, George, married Adelia Burch the day before the family exodus and accompanied the others to Holt County. He homesteaded a mile southwest of his father. George and Adelia had ten children.
Some of George’s children went to the Agee school (District 80) after a school house replaced the space first used in the Simonson home. One of its first teachers was a small elderly man named Whitehorn. This man was so fond of a soup “made with potato water and eaten with dry bread,” that the Bowdens called it “Whitehorn Soup.” The James Mullen family lived two and one-half miles north of George’s homestead and the son, Arthur Mullen, taught the District 80 school for awhile. Awault Spangler, a young German native from the Opportunity community, married George’s daughter Myrtle. The couple had eight children. Another daughter, Lillie Viola, married Andrew Wettlaufer and had five children. Earnest married Addie Hicks and Guy married Audrey Clossen. Clyde Bowden and a neighbor, John Martin, found John (Wooden Shoes) Pierson after he froze to death in his shack. The funeral was held at Lansworths.
Settlers living off to the south of Agee, or anywhere west of Blackbird Creek had quite a distance to travel to pick up their mail at Agee. Then on a summer’s day at C. W. Hagensick’s blacksmith shop the determination to have a post office of their own was born while a group of homesteaders visited as they waited to get their smithing done.
Christopher Hagensick, an Iowan, had moved to his claim, thirteen miles north of O’Neill, in 1884. He soon became the leading smith in the area and there seemed always to be a group of men congregated in the shop.
When some of these men complained of the long way they had to go for their mail, either to Agee or O’Neill, it was suggested that a petition be drawn up and circulated, asking for a post office in their midst. When the petition was granted by the postal department there was such joy in the community that the new institution was so named— Joy. The office was located in the Hagensick home and Mr. Hagensick appointed its postmaster.
The Joy school, organized about the same time, was first held in a small building one mile south of the present building, which was built a little later. In 1890 the post office was moved to the James Mullen home, some three miles north and east of its original site. Mr. Mullen ran a store in his house, making it convenient to have the post office at the same place. Children, walking several miles to the store with a pail of six-cents-a-dozen eggs, could bring home the mail and a little sack of sugar or coffee. Christopher William Hagensick, known in his neighborhood as “Bill,” was operating the Ninth Street Blacksmith Shop in Lincoln when he met Anna Newman who had come to America at age sixteen. They were married in Lincoln in 1882 and moved 400 on to Holt County two years later. Mrs. Hagensick’s sister, Mrs. Beitz, who lived in the same community, was the poor woman who was lost in the ’88 blizzard, drifted into the Mullen shed and was found there by the boys. The Hagensicks moved to O’Neill in 1890, built a home there and were active in the affairs of the town. Bill continued to operate his blacksmith shop, served on the city council and helped formulate ordinances for the management of the town.
The Hagensick home, in the northeast part of town, was built on what was known as “Kid Hill” because of the many children who lived there. Bill and Anna had five, who long held fond recollections of the pleasant days of their childhood in O’Neill. Out on the homestead the Hagensicks had a neighbor who habitually put a large pan of milk in her cave every summer evening— and the next morning hand skimmed off the thick cream. Then, for several mornings in a row, there was no cream. When the neighbor caught the culprit, to her surprise she found it to be a large snake that had developed a fondness for cream.
Although Andrew Johnson and Mattie Jensen were born in Denmark and both came to the United States as children with their parents, they did not meet until they were grown. Andrew was working on a farm near Harlan, Iowa, when he called at the home of the George Hansons, friends of his family. The Hansons had small children and Mattie was working for them when the young man came to visit. It was “love at once,” and they were married in 1881.
The Hansons had heard of the free land to be had in Holt County. When they decided to go west in a covered wagon the young married couple went along. Andrew and Mattie homesteaded in the Joy community and built a one-room frame house. By then their money was gone and no work available anywhere near their home. The solution was for Andrew to go back to Iowa and work while Mattie held down the claim.
The young husband had learned to speak and understand English passably well but Mattie could do neither. But, as so often happened in pioneer times, the family across the road from her little shack befriended her and the season turned out well, for Edith Dart, one of the neighbor’s daughters, came often to spend the night with Mattie and teach her English.
Several times that summer there were “Indian scares,” but the Darts always took the young Swedish woman with them when they fled to O’Neill in their wagon. Andrew was home again by the time his first son was born in October of 1882. Four more children were born in the tiny frame house, the youngest a little girl who died at the age of eighteen months. By then an addition had been built onto the house and four more daughters were born there.
In 1887 several members of the kindly Dart family died of typhoid fever, after which the rest of the family sold out and left. John Robertson bought the place and moved into the house. When James Mullen moved to Page Mr. Robertson took the Joy post office into his home and became its postmaster. The Johnsons, who had had to drive about six miles to get their mail could now pick it up just across the road.
Andrew Johnson was the owner of the threshing machine that chewed off his hand in 1902 when John Robertson made the record team and buggy run to O’Neill with him, thereby saving his life. Mr. Robertson had the first car in the Joy neighborhood and often invited some of the Johnsons to ride to town with him, or brought supplies out for them when he was making a trip. In winter the young people of both families skated on the Blackbird, which ran through the Johnson farm.
Cora Johnson, youngest of the family, born in 1903, grew up and married John Claussen. All her older brothers and sisters had gone from home and her parents, now getting on in years, urged her and John to make their home with them. They did so and a son and a daughter were born to them on the old homestead. When Andrew knew that he hadn’t long to live he gave the place, a good two hundred acre farm, to John and Cora Claussen; the only provision being that they care for Mattie as long as she lived.
Andrew died in 1926 and Mattie in 1954, at the age of ninety-four. Thus Three children of Jens Peter Hansen: Peter, Anna and Louis. Courtesy Edith Davidson.
Cora was with her parents as long as they lived. Louise Walters, daughter of Cora’s oldest sister Christina who was born in 1884, married Sam Robertson, son of the neighbor across the road. Her sister Emma married Otto Claussen. John Claussen died in 1958 and Cora married Joe Montange and lives in O’Neill, not far from eighty-nine-year old Christina. The Johnsons and two of their daughters are buried in the Joy cemetery, not far from the old home.
Jens Peter and Johannah Hansen, Danish immigrants who met and married in Chicago, lived a few years in New York State where Jens worked in the soda mines. His health suffered, causing the couple to take their two small children and come west to Iowa in 1883, where Jens was a caretaker on the Ames Agricultural College farm. That same year the Hansens moved on to Joy, took a homestead and built themselves a dugout to live in. After farming there for several years they moved to a ranch in the Amelia area.
At fourteen years of age Anna, their oldest child, worked as a hired girl in several of O’Neill’s homes. She was working in the Henry McEvony home at the time of the Barrett Scott murder, and later worked in the Ed Hershiser home. Her wages were fifty cents to one dollar a week. In November, 1892, she married James Edgar Davidson of O’Neill, raised her eleven children there, and died in the family home in 1957.
During the hard and busy years when her family was growing up it was a rare treat when her father, Jens Hansen, came with his team and wagon to take her and three or four of her younger children to the Amelia ranch for a few days visit. The ride took a full day each way, with a stop at noon to feed the horses and eat a cold lunch.
Hans Peter Hansen, Anna’s brother, married Mary Weber of Atkinson and became the father of seven children. The younger brother, Ole Louis, married Maude Woodgerd in 1914 and lived his entire life on the ranch near Amelia, which is now owned and operated by his sons, Eugene and John. A daughter, Edna Marie, married Ford William Garwood, the son of a neighboring rancher, and now lives on a ranch near Bassett.
William Walters was born in Wisconsin to Dutch parents in 1880. The father died when William was nine months old and his mother moved to Stuart, and then to Joy. In 1902 William married Christina Johnson, daughter of Andrew and Mattie and moved to a farm near Phoenix, ten or twelve miles northwest of Joy. By 1914 the Walters, with their three 401 eighty-two when they died. Their oldest daughter is now ninety-three, the oldest son ninety-one, another daughter eighty-seven and two others past seventy-five.
Edward Boshart, eldest son of John and Barbara, was born in 1882 near Seward. Only two when the family moved to the homestead near Joy, he went to school a mile north of the Boshart home. He remembers Nellie Harris and Hugh Donohoe as some of his teachers. His schoolmates came from the Roberts, McClellan, Erb, Robertson, Killoran and Andrew Johnson homes. Edward remembers the blizzard of ’88 and the drouths of ’94 and 1934. He helped herd his father’s cattle on the open range and remembers that his father was for a time the mail carrier in their region. Sometimes young Edward had to ride two or three miles in the evenings to get a fresh horse for his father to use on the route the next day.
In 1910 Edward and his brother-in- law, George Reichert (his oldest sister’s husband) drove a covered wagon to Meade County, South Dakota and took homesteads. Later Aaron and their sister, Ida, also came up and homesteaded. After fourteen months in South Dakota Edward returned to his father’s homestead on the Blackbird and has lived there ever since. In 1924 he married Minnie Backhaus at Gregory, South Dakota, and brought her to his home, where they lived and raised their two sons. Aaron Boshart, born on the homestead in 1889, also returned to the Blackbird farm where, in 1914, he married Nellie Lansworth. He built a new home for his bride a mile south of his parents’ home and lived the rest of his life there. Their son Donald and their daughter Opal were born and raised there.
The children rode horseback to school, both on old Kewpie. Opal wrote that she was happy when her brother finished grade school; for then she could ride alone and go as fast as she wanted to. On blizzardy days her mother tied a scarf over her face, put her on old Kewpie and turned her loose. “She, (the horse) never missed getting me there,” Opal said.
The Aaron Boshart home was a lively place with friends and relatives always coming and going and a host of nieces, nephews and cousins spending the summer months visiting. Since there were eight children in Aaron’s father’s family and nine in the Lansworth family, there was no lack of cousins for quite a few years. Orlando Ott, born in Indiana, at eighteen came to Iowa with his parents. In 1887 the family moved to children, Louise, Henry and Helen, were living on Eagle Creek.
After Mr. Walters’ death in 1936 Christina married J. Victor Johnson, who died in 1957. In 1973 Christina was still living alone in O’Neill, quite self-sufficient at eighty-nine years of age.
John and Katherine Boshart came to Canada from Alsace Lorraine when their son John was fourteen years of age. John married Barbara Erb in 1878 and shortly thereafter moved to Seward, Nebraska and then, in 1884, to a farm near Joy, where they lived out the rest of their lives. The Bosharts, of the Amish belief, knew little English when they came to Nebraska. Their first home was a two-room log house on Blackbird creek. They were the parents of eight children.
A carpenter, John later built a frame house, a large barn and many other good buildings on his farm. Although he had very little formal education himself, he served on the local schoolboard for many years, was a road overseer in his district and did much to make his community a better place.
A granddaughter, Opal Hammerlun, writes: “I have many fond’memories of my grandparents. My brother- Donald and I rode horseback,to school and we never missed a day stopping at their home to see them. Grandma always had something ready for us to eat, maybe a sandwich made with her delicious homemade cream cheese, and every time she made a fresh batch she gave us a bowl-full. “Grandpa was a jolly fat fellow. He always had me bring the daily newspaper my parents took. It was a day late but he said he’d rather pay me than the Omaha Bee-News. My grandparents were well-known clear into South Dakota because of the “Boshart Apple Orchard.” People came for long distances with trucks to pick apples. I used to get to help sell them— and what fun it was.” An expert horticulturist, John Bos-hart was constantly experimenting with methods for developing better varieties of fruit for northern Nebraska. He also kept bees and bred horses, including Shetlands that he gave to his grandchildren as they came along. Interested in politics, he took his family to hear William Jennings Bryan when he came to O’Neill and always voted the Democrat ticket. John and Barbara had been married more than fifty-five years when John passed on in 1934, leaving one of the largest farms in the community to his wife. Barbara died eight years later and both are buried in Prospect Hill Cemetery in O’Neill. Both were Holt County, just south of the Joy post office. Orlando went up into Boyd County, proved up on a claim, sold it in 1898 for $4,000 and returned to Holt County. By this time he had a wife, (Norma Robertson) and several children. In 1915, when their son Lorenzo, born in 1889, married Catherine Erb, Orlando and his family moved to Tennessee and Lorenzo and his wife moved onto the Ott farm south of Joy. In 1925 Orlando and his wife, leaving their unmarried sons and daughters in Tennessee, also came back to the farm at Joy.
Lorenzo and Catherine had four children, all of whom obtained their elementary education at the Joy school, the same one their parents had attended. Lorenzo and Catherine’s only daughter, Dorothy, after completing school, taught two years in the Joy school, then married Francis Curran and had two daughters who also went to that school.
Lorenzo sold the old Ott farm to Roy Boshart in later years and moved to O’Neill where he died in 1963. Mr. and Mrs. H. A. Polk moved into the Joy-Agee community in 1891 when their daughter Eunice was three years old. Eunice writes that, when she was a youngster on the claim, they usually walked to visit their neighbors as their team was either in the field or resting. Their nearest neighbor for awhile was a bachelor, Ed Peterson. Neighbors farther away were the Gerrards, Youngs, Hatches and Bergers.
Mr. Polk, a native of Illinois, began with 320 acres of land, then bought more until he had an 800 acre layout. He raised cattle and hogs and was also a carpenter and a good hand at caring for sick animals. Three members of the family (there was another daughter) milked fifteen to twenty cows by hand and sold the cream to the Meek store, delivered it to Harry Spindler who picked it up several times a week. Harry also took orders for groceries and delivered them on his next trip around.
The Polks lived nearer to Redbird Creek and got their mail at Agee, three miles away. Riding horseback after the mail was Eunice’ job, although about all the mail they received was the Christian Herald, the Frontier, a few letters and the Sears and Montgomery Ward catalogs, which they read from cover to cover. The schoolhouse was near the Polk home and Eunice recalls the pot-bellied stove in the center of the room that “roasted one side of you while the other side was cold.” Fern Hubbard-Orme, later a State Senator, was born in the neighborhood and went to the same school before her 402 family moved to O’Neill.
“I never saw a doctor until I was fifteen years old,” Eunice wrote, “and we never had one come to the farm. When my father was thrown from a horse and had some broken ribs, and when a pig bit his legs pretty bad, he went into town to see the doctor.” Mrs. Polk, Mrs. Tom Simonson and Mrs. Peter Lansworth were the midwives for the neighborhood. “In those days we used tea matting for our sunbonnets. It was a fine straw matting that lined tea cartons the store-keepers bought.” In the Polk family the mother repaired the shoes, always the high-topped button variety. She kept extra sole leather and heels on hand, also heavy waxed thread, and could sew up, re-sole and re-heel any worn shoe.
Mr. Polk sold the Redbird farm in 1903 and moved to O’Neill where, seventy years later, Eunice Polk Sanders wrote her family’s history and gave a building by building description of O’Neill as it was when she first lived there as a fifteen-year-old. Eunice married Alfred Sanders in her parents’ home in 1908. Her husband was the son of Mr. and Mrs. B. F. Sanders of Scottville. Of their four sons only one, Bennett Sanders, now lives in O’Neill. The other three are on the west coast.
James Crawford Parker and Luella Anna Pirner were married in Iowa in 1904. His parents had come from Tennessee, hers from Germany. Jim and Luella moved to Lincoln in 1881 and their three children were born there. In 1919 they moved to the Wettlaufer farm near Joy. They left a well improved home, good schools and most of their relatives when they made the move into what seemed to them the “far West.” Jim came on ahead with their livestock and possessions on a freight train. He was four days making the trip from Lincoln to O’Neill, where he was surprised to learn that a former Lincoln friend, Claude Howard, lived only four miles from O’Neill. Mr. Howard furnished a team and wagon and helped unload and haul the Parkers’ effects to the new home, a twenty-three mile roundtrip over snow-drifted frozen roads.
Mrs. Parker and the two younger children came by passenger train on March 22, the seventh birthday of their son, James. They spent the night at the Wettlaufer home in O’Neill and drove to the farm the next day. The house was small, the out-buildings made of baled hay. A windmill half-way between the house and barn supplied water and there were no trees. Their district school was two and a half miles away, the nearest telephone one mile.
The Burival school in 1919-1920 was made up of Conway, Murray, Parker and Burival children. There was no well on the school grounds and Ruth and Katherine Murray usually rode three-quarters of a mile to the nearest well to bring back a gallon pail of water during the noon hour. This was in the Burival yard and the girls were often late returning. It seems that the Burivals had a new phonograph and the water-carriers couldn’t tear themselves away from it. The Joy school was only two miles from the Parkers and the girls went to Sunday school there, driving their horse and buggy. Their mail came from O’Neill on a rural route. After a year on the first farm the Parkers moved to the Joyce farm, four and a half miles northwest of O’Neill. Mrs. Parker went to Wayne State Teachers College summer school and that fall taught school in District 8. Gail, the older daughter, graduated from O’Neill High in 1922 and that fall taught another nearby rural school. Just before Christmas, 1923, the Parker home burned. Jim’s mother had come out from Lincoln to cook for corn pickers, as Mrs. Parker and both girls were in school. Jim was on the way to town with a wagon load of corn when the fire started and his mother was alone in the house. She saw smoke coming out the cracks around the stairway door, opened the door and was burned by the flames. Even so, she ran a quarter mile across a field to the Ritts’ home for help. Floyd Ritts, just leaving for the cornfield with his team and wagon, raced his team to the burning house, where they got the piano out, and the china cabinet, without breaking a dish. Everything else burned. Jim, well on the way to O’Neill, saw the smoke behind him but had no idea it was his house on fire until he got to town and was so informed. The Parkers lived in two rooms at the Ritts’ home until they could move another house to the farm.
Gail Parker, who taught school until 1925, that June married a young neighbor, Homer Ernst. The following year, 1926, Mrs. Parker was elected County Superintendent of Holt County Schools. Edith Sexsmith-Davidson was her secretary during the two terms she served in that office. Ruth, the second daughter, taught school for three years, then married Orville Kemper of the Page community in 1930.
James, the only son, completed a year at the University of Nebraska and was drowned in a boating accident near Lincoln in July, 1930. The parents moved into O’Neill in the early ‘thirties and Jim operated service stations for a short time, then bought the Naughton place, a mile north of the house that burned and went back to farming. James and Luella celebrated their Golden Wedding, and then their fifty-fifth anniversary before James died in 1959. Mrs. Parker then moved back into O’Neill. The couple had six grandchildren, and Richard Ernst, the only grandson, is now a missionary in New Guinea.
Sam Robertson, son of John and Rachel Robertson of the old Joy community, attended the Joy school, as did the girl he married, Louise Walters, a granddaughter of Andrew and Mattie Johnson. They were married in the Walters’ home on Eagle Creek in 1921 and took up their life together in a small new house which Sam and his father and brothers built a little way north of Joy. As time went on they enlarged and modernized the house. Forty years later, due to health problems, they regretfully sold the ranch home they loved and moved to O’Neill, building a new home on a quarter just outside the town in 1962. Nine years later they celebrated their Golden Wedding anniversary. As a young man Sam and his brothers and sisters (there were twelve children in the family) went to Sunday school at the Pleasant Valley church, about five miles from their home. “We had to drive a team but hardly ever missed,” Sam related. He goes on to describe an experience they had one spring when preparing to give a special Childrens’ Day program. “Bessie Roberts was coach for those taking part and all would congregate at her folks place and ride to the church with her in a spring wagon. The back seat had been removed and the endgate dropped so everybody could pack in— some sitting flat in the bottom, some hanging their feet out the back and a few in the front seat with Bessie. “She was driving a nice young team along the side of a listed field of corn and all was going well. We were singing and reciting our pieces when, all of a sudden, a horse switched his tail over the line and when Bessie tightened the line it pulled the team into the field and started a runaway. Before she got them stopped and straightened out, the most of us had been scattered out in the cornfield. No one was hurt and she gathered us all up and we went on to practice but no one got much good out of that practice, as our ride had been more exciting.” There is an old cemetery a short distance west of where that church stood. And another one with twenty- two graves in it a little way east of the Joy school. Although burials were made there as early as 1882, the 403 cemetery was not officially surveyed and platted until 1914. It was then named “Blackbird Cemetery.” The first graves were those of Martha, Alfred, Ida and George Dart, or Dartt, all victims of the 1882 typhoid epidemic. Dick Robertson, Sam’s youngest brother, buried in 1949, was the last burial made in the old cemetery. Two other lonely graves are located about in the middle of 33-31-11 in Paddock Township on land John Robertson later bought. The graves are those of John (Wooden Shoe) Pherson, or Pierson, and his wife. The wife and her baby died several years before her husband and he buried them on the claim. He continued to live in a sort of a cave in the hillside and Mr. Robertson asked his hired man, John Martin, to check on him as often as he could. One very cold morning in 1915 Clyde Bowden and John found him dead in his bed, frozen to death under all the quilts and robes the miserable place afforded. The administrator of the estate insisted on burying old Wooden Shoe beside his wife and child, and when Mr. Robertson bought the eighty he fenced the plot to keep cattle from running over the graves.
Sam and Louise farmed and raised registered Herefords, also Purebred Poland China hogs. The Robertsons did well in the show ring with their Herefords, showing Grand Champion female and Grand Champion pair at the Holt County Association show and sale in 1951 and the highest selling female to date in that sale.
Sam often hired out to shuck corn by hand, earning two to twelve cents per bushel. “I happened to be a pretty good picker,” he wrote, “but felt like I had done a day’s work when I picked and shoveled a hundred and twenty bushels in one day. We didn’t work forty hour weeks in those days, and daylight saving time would not have made any difference as we didn’t have any daylight to save.
“There were about a hundred and fifty acres of cornland on the farm where Louise and I started, and she turned out to be a good corn picker, too, and often helped me when we picked our own.
“In 1935 we bought our first tractor, a used Fordson and an aggravation. It had just enough power to make one think it might do the job but it never did. When in gear it made so much noise it would ring in my head all night. Eventually I traded some horses, cattle and horse-drawn machinery for a new I.H.C. Farmall. From then on I had all the custom work I could handle.
“Many tractors were sold on payments in the ‘thirties, and many were repossessed during the drouth when the owners couldn’t make any more payments.” Off to the southwest of Joy and Agee and some ten miles northeast of O’Neill, the little post office of Slocum stood all by itself. To this area in 1883 came Johann (John) Steskal and his wife Josepha. Both were born and married in Austria. Five children were born to them there and one died before the family came to David City, Nebraska, in 1878. Two children were born there before the family moved to Holt County to file on a homestead. A kind neighbor, John Heeb, took the family in until they could prepare living quarters on the bare quarter. After digging a well, relatives and friends helped Mr. Steskal move a house from Stuart, twenty miles away. Those first years John Steskal broadcast his grain on his fields and cut his hay with a scythe. The children herded the cattle on the open prairie as they began to accumulate a herd. One of the little girls, Josephine, got a cactus imbedded in her bare foot while alone with the cattle one day. Her screams of pain brought a neighbor to her rescue. After that she was given an old white mule to ride. She carried her lunch of bread and lard or pumpkin butter, as she was out on the prairie all day long with the herd.
Two more children were born on the claim, making eight in all. During the little time they could be spared from farm work, the children went to school in District 90. The Steskals sold the claim in 1910 and bought a home in Atkinson, where they observed their Golden Wedding anniversary in 1911. John died the next year and Josepha in 1925. Both are buried in St. Joseph’s cemetery in Atkinson. Before the Old Timers of the Joy-Agee neighborhood began dropping off in noticable numbers any group that got together and fell to reminiscing were sure to chuckle over the time John Crandall, walking around at a livestock auction with a board in his hand, heard the auctioneer call, “I have a donkey for sale here. Will someone get him started?” Whereupon John used his board on the donkey’s rear and shouted, “I got him started, now you stop him.” Or to remember the prairie fire in which John Lansworth stripped off his outer pair of overalls to beat out the flames— and in his excitment forgot that his watch was in the pocket until both watch and overalls were worn out.
Some five miles to the northeast of Joy, or four miles straight north of Agee, the Blackbird post office came into being in 1881. At little over two miles northeast of Blackbird Turner post office was established the same year at the Nollkamper mill on Eagle Creek.
Preceding either of these post offices by several years were the Bradstreet, Rouse, Bedford and Devall families. Henry Bradstreet, born in Ulster County, New York, in 1843 was a direct descendant of Governor Simon Bradstreet. Henry first came to Iowa, then in 1877 moved his wife and three sons to what was known as the Blackbird country in Holt County. Their neighbors were the Blitzkes, Spindlers, Tom Berrys, Hubbys, Rouses and Bedfords.
Nathaniel Bradstreet, eldest of the brothers, was born in 1863 and married Nettie Jane Hubby. They moved across the Niobrara into Lynch and lived there until 1910 when they moved to Butte, where Nathaniel served as sheriff of Boyd County for twelve years.
William Bradstreet, the second of Henry’s sons, was born in 1867 and married to Bertha Blitzke. He, too, moved across the river and served as postmaster in Spencer for a number of years. Eugene, a year younger than William, married Leona Belle Beaver, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Jacob Beaver. They farmed in the Paddock area until their five daughters were old enough for school, then they moved to Spencer.
Abraham Rouse, born in 1832 and a Civil War veteran, married Elizabeth Van Voorhies in Michigan. With their son, Alphonzo, they came to Seward in 1877. Two years later, when Alphonzo was twenty-one, the two men came to Holt County to look for homesteads. They found land to their liking in the Blackbird Valley and, accompanied by George Dartt and William Bedford, walked the thirty- five miles to Niobrara to file their claims.
The following summer they returned to Seward County and worked their way back to the Blackbird with a horse-drawn threshing machine, threshing grain wherever they found it. They got as far as Ewing when winter snows stopped them and they had to leave the machine there. In 1881 Alphonzo made a little cash to improve his homestead by working on the railroad between O’Neill and Atkinson. In 1882 he married Mary Griffith, who had come to the Blackbird with her parents from Pennsylvania. Nine children were born to them on the homestead.
Their youngest son, Howard, married Addie Hubby, and remained on the homestead. Howard and Addie had three sons, Lawrence, Lloyd and Delbert. Abraham and Elizabeth Rouse and Alphonzo are all buried in the 404 Paddock cemetery, up on the Nio-brara. Of the Bedford family we are told only that William H. was born in England in 1851, that in 1877 he married Miss Lucy Sargent at Seward, Nebraska, and homesteaded in the Blackbird community in 1879. In 1909 they moved to O’Neill where he took an active part in politics and served in the legislature in the term beginning in 1905. The Bedfords had six daughters.
William Sylvester Devall lived most of his life around Meek and Blackbird. He was raised in the Andrew Spindler home with his half-brothers, Jake, George and Frank. The Spindlers had come to Nebraska from Pennsylvania. A popular wit and jokester, it was said that no one could remember a time when Will didn’t chew tobacco. He claimed, himself, to have chewed since he was five. In 1909 he married Mary Storjohann at O’Neill and became the father of thirteen children. In due time he had thirty-eight grandchildren and forty great-grandchildren. He was a farmer and livestock raiser and a part-time mason. A novelty on his farm was the cement fence posts he made to fence his place. Many of them are still in use on the old home place. After the death of his wife he retired to Spencer.
He seems to have been a very popular grandfather. He loved to travel from home to home, showing his grandchildren and his neighbors his tricks of magic and telling amusing stories. The children loved his “Texas Shrew Rat,” a light bulb that lit up when he put it in his mouth, or his pocket knife swallowing act. Indeed, they will long remember the hours of fun they had when Grandpa Devall came to visit. He died in 1970 and was laid to rest beside his wife in the Pleasant Valley Cemetery north of O’Neill.
Born in Prussia, Charles Blitzke came to Wisconsin with his parents when he was twelve. He served for nearly four years with the Wisconsin Volunteers in the Civil War, then married Eliza Jane Sympson of Fond du Lac on Christmas Day. Taking advantage of his Veteran’s Homestead Right, he came, with his wife and son by covered wagon and settled where the Midway garage now stands, a little way west of where the Meek post office would later be located. Later they built their home on the present Drueke place and put out the first successful orchard in northern Holt County.
As their granddaughter, Susan Bradstreet Dresher, observed, they pioneered in Holt County when cornbread was the staff of life, the prairie was broken by oxen and the people lived in sod houses. The Blitskes raised their six children on the homestead, remaining there until the children were all grown and married, then retired to Spencer for the rest of their lives. Today none of the original family is still living. Bertha Blitzke Bradstreet, who died in 1960 at the age of eighty-seven, being the last to go.
Johann and Catharina Storjohann Bay had been dairy farmers in their native Holland. With their three children the Bays came directly from Holland to Atkinson in 1884. The oldest son, George, was twelve at the time and has given us this graphic account of the family’s arrival in the little Nebraska town, that long ago day.
“The train pulled out and we were on the platform by ourselves in a strange country, poodle dog and all. Nobody seemed to care. A section crew came up to the station. The agent said something to them. One of them spoke to us and told my father the place we wanted was Turner post office about 35 miles (from there). “We started out on foot. Got to about 10 miles from Atkinson, following a road or trail. When it got dark we came to a field of rye shocks. We laid around the shocks until morning. We had a little lunch and started out. At about 10:00 A.M. we met an oldish man that talked German. He told us that Eagle Mills or Turner was east but how far he didn’t know. So we went east for some miles where a man was mowing with a team (the first time we had seen such a thing).
“There were many cattle at this place and we found it was the Arthur Cruise ranch (Now Hendricks ranch), and he told us to go east. We waded the Brush Creek. Our dog got away but we found it and came to a house. This man showed us a wagon trail which led us to the Greeley store and post office (later the Phoenix post office). A man named Burbank happened to be there and he hauled us over to the Claus Storjohann homestead, being the S.E.% of Section 4, T. 32, R 12W. A little later father homesteaded the N.E.4 of the same section.
“We lived there about a year.
During the winter of 1884 and 1885 my brother and I attended school in the Ralph Hill and Feagles District, 3% miles from home. On foot, no overshoes, no overcoat. I wore an old Prince Albert (coat) which was big enough for the whole family. Why we didn’t freeze I don’t know. The schoolhouse was rough logs with boards bent over for a roof. It was fairly good until one day a whole log fell out.
Mr. Bay later bought another farm, a few miles from the homestead. In 1895 George married Minnie Kaczor at O’Neill. Their only child died at the age of seven months. George and Minnie lived at Beaver Crossing for two years, then came back to the home place, rented it for two years, then bought it.
When Boyd County was opened for settlement Henry, the second son, took a homestead north of Spencer. Later he farmed with George at Beaver Crossing. About 1910 the brothers operated a meat market in O’Neill. Henry married Emma Claus-sen of Elkhorn. The couple reared three children and finished their lives there. Magdalena Bay the only daughter, married Carl Grossman and stayed in the Phoenix community the rest of her life.
George’s wife, Minnie, was the daughter of Frederick and Ernstine Kaczor, Germans who came to Canada in 1869. In 1884 the family moved to a homestead between Joy and Meek on the freight road between O’Neill and Boyd County, only a short distance from the Nollkamper mill. The parents and their seven children did not stray far from their Holt County home and all are buried in the Pleasant Valley and Paddock Union cemeteries, within four miles of their original home.
Solomon D. Gallentine and Martha Jane Huff were married at Marshall-town, Iowa, in 1876. Nine years later Sol and his father-in-law, Elijah Huff, came to Holt County seeking homesteads. Elijah found one but Sol had to buy a relinquishment. Being carpenters by trade, both built frame houses. Sol and Martha had four children when they left Iowa; four more were born in Nebraska. When, after a few years, the Huffs moved away Sol and his family moved onto the Huff place, the “Half-way Station,” where Sol owned and operated the stage line between O’Neill and Butte. The stages from both directions arrived at the half-way house at noon.
Sometimes there were as many as twelve passengers and the drivers. These, with the three or four hired men Sol kept on the place, along with her own family, made heavy work for Martha, who did all the cooking. Sol also ran quite a large herd of cattle. The younger children, of course, did the herding, as did the children of neighboring families. There was a cross bull in one of the neighbor’s herds and the girl in charge of that herd had to follow him when he strayed and try to head him back where he belonged. He frequently charged her horse and chased her back to the herd. One wonders what 405 might have happened had her horse stumbled and fallen.
Later the Gallentines moved a mile north of the Huff place but continued to run the stage route until the railroad came to Butte, after which Sol contracted to carry the mail on the O’Neill – Joy – Agee – Paddock – Redbird – Meek – Turner route. When the route was discontinued Sol asked for a post office in his own area. The request was granted and the new Maple Grove office was established in the Gallentine home. Sol was supposed to be the postmaster but through some departmental error Mrs. Gallentine was named postmaster. Sol was disgruntled— until he saw how much work the little office involved.
The Gallentines lived at Maple Grove until they retired in 1919. They might have stayed longer but Laura and Gertrude, the last of their eight children, were the only ones at home by then— and when Laura married Martin Shelkopf and Gertrude went to South Dakota to homestead for herself, Sol had to give up farming. While Sol operated the stage line he lost two fine teams in livery stable fires in towns away from home. Like show business, stages, too, must go on and the driver had to rent teams to complete his runs.
Clifford E. Thompson, born near Valentine in 1882, came to Holt County as a young man to herd sheep for Frank Griffith. There he met Frank’s niece, Blanch Hodgett, and married her in O’Neill in 1905. With their two oldest children, Clayton and Clyde, the Thompsons left the Blackbird community, Blanche’s home, and moved up into South Dakota for awhile. There little Clyde got pneumonia and no white doctor was available. But an old Indian doctor came, heated bricks and poured alcohol over them. The fumes, funnel- ed over the little boy, broke his fever and saved his life.
Back in the Blackbird community, the Thompsons’ seven children went to the Blackbird sod school and the family raised cane, squaw corn, wheat, sheep and cattle— and cut wood and picked cowchips for fuel. Once, during the early automotive years, Uncle Palmer Van Voris came to stay with them. Blanche tried to drive his car— but went through the hog pasture fence and gave it up. She never drove agoin. Clifford died in 1960, Blanche in 1973.
Clayton, who married Icle Wells in 1928, is the only one of the Thompson children who stayed in Holt County. Three of his sons, Ivan, Leo and Franklin, served in the Airforce and the Navy during the years 1949 through 1953.
Fred Lendt and his parents, Mr. and Mrs. Chris W. Lendt, came to Holt County from Wyoming, Minnesota, in 1904 to purchase the Orlando Blitzkie farm near Meek. Both Mr. and Mrs. Lendt were born in Germany. Their first child, Louisa, was born in New York City shortly after their arrival in the States. The second, Minnie, was born in Chicago where Chris bought some land on the shore of Lake Michigan.
In Germany they had been caretakers of a castle. In Minnesota, where Chris and Sophia finally settled, Mr. Lendt was a farmer and blacksmith. Fred had married in Minnesota and his parents were in their late seventies when he brought them and his wife and family to the Blitzkie farm near Meek. Fred, too, was a farmer and carpenter. Some of the houses and barns he built in the neighborhood are still standing. Also a musician, he formed a community band and gave violin lessons.
Fred and Caroline Lendt had seven children, then Caroline died in 1911 at the age of thirty-six. Their son Orland died in service in World War II. After Caroline’s death the aged parents moved to Wisconsin, then to Virginia, where they died and were buried. Fred died in 1958 at Fort Calhoun, Nebraska, at the age of ninety-two. Michael Hull was no doubt related to the other Hulls, Guy and William, of Holt County but the history does not give the connection. At any rate he was born in Boone, Iowa, where the others came from, and came to the Blackbird in 1899. His wife, Annie Hartland, was born in South Dakota and moved with her parents, the Henry Hartlands, to Chelsea in 1878. Later they moved to Redbird.
Michael and Annie were married at O’Neill and farmed on the Redbird for fifty-eight years. During a part of this time they operated a cream station and feed store at Redbird. Michael was always to say that he liked his Holt County home better than Iowa because of the beautiful scenery of the Redbird Valley.
The Hulls had to cross the river to go to Lynch for groceries. Since there was no bridge at that time they had to ford the swift Niobrara and there were times when the month’s food supplies were lost in the swirling stream. Mr. and Mrs. Hull observed their sixtieth wedding anniversary in 1954. Five sons and daughters survived them. At the turn of the century several families came to the Blackbird together: among them Mr. and Mrs. William Buttolph and Mr. and Mrs. Arch Ross, with their families. Mrs. Buttolph was a daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Ross, Mae Hull and her parents, Mr. and Mrs. William Hull, were members of the immigrant party also, and Mae, four years old when the colonists left Boone, Iowa, remembers the covered wagon trip. She writes that these families joined other relatives on the Blackbird.
Charles Ross, a member of the Ross family mentioned above, came from Boone to the Meek area in 1900 to join a sister living in the community. Soon after his arrival he married Mabel Bowden of the Leonie neighborhood. Their son Chester was born in 1903 and grew up near Meek. The family lived in a rock house at the time of the 1908 tornado which blew all the windows out of the dwelling, tore down the windmills and blew away the sheds.
Chester married Mabel Miller, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Bert Miller, in O’Neill in 1926. Chester’s Aunts, Ella Hull and Annie Ross, also Mrs. Lizzie Haynes, were the community mid-wives. The annual Old Settlers’ picnics were the highlights of the years at that period.
In the early ‘thirties, Chester relates, an old man moved in on Eagle Creek and spent the winter in the shelter of a canvas stretched between two trees on Frank Searles’ farm. He lived mostly on raw meat and when Frank lost cattle in the corn stalks the old man cut off meat to eat. His only companion was a big police dog and when the authorities came to take him to a home he gave the dog to Chester.
Harry Fox, born at Elk Point, South Dakota, in 1873, grew to manhood in that region. In 1899 he married Miss Alice Hall, then moved to Denver where a son, Charles Wallace, was born in 1900. Four years later the family homesteaded on the Redbird, where Charles started to school in old District 27.
In 1909 Harry bought the Meek store from Harry Spindler who had started it the year before. The next year the Foxes bought four acres of land across the road from George Bay, a mile and a half east of Midway, and built a fine new store building. The Meek post office was a part of Harry’s operation there. He bought cream and eggs, sold dry goods and groceries and was said to have operated the best stocked store in the state of Nebraska.
Harry Fox was unusually successful and his business grew by leaps and bounds, largely due to his fairness and honesty in dealing with his customers. For several years he had to make two or three weekly trips to O’Neill to haul out goods for his store. He owned his own truck and did his own freighting.
One wonders how he found time to 406 do it all; for, in addition to running the store and post office, he managed two farms which he owned nearby in what was called “the paradise of Holt County.” No doubt his wife Alice was a most efficient silent partner. A family of gypsies visited the store one day— and left with more than they paid for. On another occasion a robbery attempt was made on the store. It was Hallowe’en and several young fellows broke down the back door and came in, only to find Harry sitting inside with a shotgun across his knees. They left immediately empty-handed. In 1917 Harry Fox won second prize at the state fair on a 500 pound hog he had raised on one of his farms. In 1919 his son Charles graduated from O’Neill High, then went on to Wayne State College and later taught in the rural schools of his home county. When Charles married Charlotte Day of Wood Lake in neighborning Brown County in 1932, his parents built an addition onto their house for the young couple, who lived there and helped run the store and farm. The store was robbed on the night of January 22, 1934, while all the family were busy in the home, helping with the birth of Harry and Alice’s first grandson, Harold Wallace. A few years later the little boy helped his grandfather plant a shelter belt, and helped to weed it as he grew older.
A second grandson, Harry De- wayne, was born in 1936, only to be lost to the family twenty-two months later when he choked on a bean. He died in his mother’s arms en route to Norfolk in a speeding automobile. Two daughters were born to Charles and Charlotte before Harry Fox died in 1941, and another son the following year. The winter of 1948-1949 was one long, continuous blizzard and, with the stork expected again at any time, Charlotte decided to get to O’Neill, if possible, and stay with friends until after the blessed event took place. A blizzard was raging but a power wagon owned by a neighbor, almost the only vehicle that could get over the drifted roads at all, made the trip to the county seat where Jimmy Ray was born on April 5, the only one of the Fox children to be born in a hospital.
Charles continued to run the farm (the store and post office had long been closed) and Harold went into the Military service and the girls to Butte to high school. When the younger boys were of high school age Charles sold some of the farm land and moved to Spencer, then renewed his own teaching certificate and went back into the schoolroom. He died suddenly in 1968. Charlotte and the youngest son, Jimmy remained in the family home until 1973 when Charlotte married Ralza Armfield of Burke, South Dakota. Harold married Arlene Hood and stayed on the farm at Meek. None of his brothers and sisters remained in Holt County.
Another of the very early little post offices was Leonie, established on a farm very near the junction of Blackbird and Redbird creeks, between Agee and Blackbird post offices. One of the first families in the immediate neighborhood was that of E. P. Hicks. A son, Steven, was eight years old when the family filed on the claim in 1878. By 1879, when the Hicks built their frame house, there were already twelve log houses but very few of frame construction. Steven was past ten before there was a school in his neighborhood. He went, “off and on,” until he was nineteen. In 1891 he hired out for eighteen dollars a month. His job required the planting and tending of one hundred acres of corn, as well as caring for a hundred pigs. He had to do his own cooking. From the money he earned he bought a two-wheeled cart and a harness for $35. With this fine outfit he went a courting. In 1892 Steven married a neighbor girl, Gertrude Hubby. The couple had three children, Julia, Adeline and Clarence.
Among the numerous families who came to the same area in 1879 were Mr. and Mrs. Frank Osborn in buggy. Frank was born in Portland, Oregon, in 1864. He and a companion drove ninety-three head of cattle from Iowa to Holt County in 1881. In December, 1884, he married Miss Carrie Willis of the Redbird community. They moved to Norfolk by 1936, where Mrs. Osborn passed away. In 1942 Mr. Osborn married Lucille Worford of O’Neill. Courtesy Mary Osborn.
407 the Beavers, Hodgkins, W. E. Mc-Roberts and Sanders. Ernest Beaver, son of Jacob and Louise, was seven years old when the family made the trek from Minnesota to Holt County. Juliette Hodgkin, one day to be his wife, was four when she came with her parents, Hiram and Angeline, to the same neighborhood.
Ernest and Juliette had three children, Hiram, Marguerite and Chester, who related the family history. “I attended the Leonie country school on the Blackbird Creek from 1909 until 1916,” he wrote. Some of my classmates were Clarence and Addie Hicks, Marriedy and Virgil Hubby, Fred, George and Mary Henefin and Pearl Harrison.
“Our post office was Leonie, established in the home of my grandfather, Hiram Hodgkin, where my grandfather was the first postmaster. The religious life of our community was centered at the Blackbird church of Marquette Chapel, started by the Baptists. There is still quite a large cemetery there, where my grandparents on both sides are buried. “My family experienced floods, blizzards, electrical storms, droughts, grasshoppers, runaways with horses, and a fire which completely destroyed our home in 1914 or 1915.” The Beavers moved from Leonie to Wyoming when Chester was fourteen, thereby ending the Holt County portion of his life’s history. John Hubby, born in Canada in 1840, was living in Iowa when the Civil War broke out. He served with the Second Iowa Cavalry from 1861 to September, 1865, taking part in several major battles. In 1867 he married Mary Wheeler. Six children were born to their union. The Hubbys moved to Leonie from Iowa in 1879 and lived on their claim until 1905, when they moved to Lynch. Of their many descendants none now live in Holt County.
Thomas Benton Harrison was born in Ohio in 1839, the son of Lorenzo Dow Harrison. His parents died while he was quite young and he came to Illinois with a Captain Mourning. He learned the wheelwright trade, then served through the Civil War. His wife, Mary Elizabeth Clampitt, was born in Indiana in 1844. She married Mr. Harrison in 1866 and had seven children. The family came to Leonie in 1880. A daughter, Nellie Izen, describes their interesting journey west. “There was no bridge across the Missouri between Council Bluffs and Omaha (the family made this crossing in 1876) and our train was run on a boat, one car at a time, and hooked onto the engine when we reached the other bank. We spent much of the day there where our train was made up. The depot was small and the platform and boardwalks were crowded with people sitting and waiting.
“We then headed for a little town just starting, Bellwood (near Columbus). There was no hotel nor any place to stay there, so mother and the children (four of us) stayed in David City until Father could build us a two- room house. In the spring of 1880 we loaded our covered wagon with the necessities and drove to Holt County where Father had used his “Soldier’s Right” to file on a quarter section homestead. As we crossed the Platte River on a high bridge there was a strong wind blowing, something we hadn’t known before, and Mother was afraid we would be blown off, so walked across.
“We were five days making the trip to the homestead. Wagons drawn by horses and oxen were making new trails all over the wind-swept country, and here and there would be a little sod house dotting the treeless, lonely prairie. Father bought a relinquishment from a young homesteader. It had a shanty eight feet square on it and we moved part of our belongings into that. The boys, Orville and Joe, slept in the wagon while father drove to Neligh, sixty miles away, for lumber to build us a sixteen feet square house. We sodded it up on the outside and lived in it for five years, then built a new house.
“In the fall of 1880 they organized School District 16. Each man furnished three or more logs for the schoolhouse. The first teacher, Mary Grif-Wedding picture of Harry Fox and Alice Hall, November 30, 1899. Courtesy Charlotte Armfield.
fiths, later married Alfonzo Rouse. The winter was long and cold, with snow falling in October and lying on the ground until the next April. A baby boy, Edson, was born in our house on January 28, 1881, with a neighbor lady officiating. And no one else even knew it until spring. It seemed that we looked forward to a January thaw’ for months. Then the weather moderated a little and the streams ran a bit, then froze up again until spring.
“A neighbor’s child died of diphtheria and father made a plain little pine coffin for it in our kitchen. We children looked on with frightened faces— until father told us to go in the other room. All seemed so bleak and desolate.
“We had three months of school in the fall and three months in the spring, but Father told us so much about the Civil War and the South, the colored people, rivers, lakes, President Lincoln, the Army and the Generals, that we learned history and geography from him. Mother told us of her three brothers who went to California during the Gold Rush and were never heard of again, and of her church. They were Baptists and cut holes in the ice in the winter time for baptisms but no one ever caught cold from it.
“A singing master spent one winter among us. He gave lessons six nights a week, two nights each week in three different schoolhouses. It was very instructive and furnished social life for us. Father picketed our horses 408 very near the house at night, and often slipped out to look and listen for thieves.” Edson Harrison, born during the hard winter of ’81, married Floy Arison in 1908. Floy, daughter of William and Cora Arrison, born in Iowa in 1888, moved with her parents to Middle Branch in 1905. She was a school teacher there until she married Mr. Harrison. Their four children were all born at Agee or Leonie.
Paddock, the first county seat of Holt County, had its beginning in 1874 when Harry Spindler and Back Barry settled at the junction of Eagle Creek and the Niobrara. The little settlement, first called Troy, was named Paddock the next year in honor of Nebraska’s Senator A. S. Paddock. In a small cemetery near the site of old Paddock is a grave marked with the date 1872. In another corner is a very old stone bearing the name of George Lewis 33-Co. U. S. C. A. (United States Cavalry Artillery) but no date.
J. T. Prouty, becoming dissatisfied with his location at O’Neill, very soon joined the Spindlers and Berrys at Paddock. A number of other settlers came to the Paddock area during the remainder of that year and throughout 1876. When the first county election was held on December 27 of the latter year the tiny town won the coveted county seat position and Mr. Prouty was named county clerk. Tom Berry was elected sheriff, Ed Whiting county superintendent, T. W. Crawford constable and a Fred Torbat surveyor. The Proutys lived in Paddock for twenty-five years. The Crawfords lived out their lives there and are buried in the little cemetery, only a short way from their homestead. According to Mr. Prouty, in the fall of 1877 seven thousand Indians were ordered by the Government to leave the Red Cloud and Spotted Tail Agencies and locate on a Reservation north of the mouth of Eagle Creek, in what is now Boyd County. At about the time of the move there was an earthquake, very, very rare in that part of the country. He described it as sounding “like the roar of cannons and deafening, rushing water rolling down the Niobrara.” It extended as far east as Sioux City and shook the glassware off store shelves. At the same time an extinct volcano up the river became active for a short time. All this, the Indian Chief said, was a punishment on the whites by the A pioneer picnic enjoyed by these people and their neighbors was described as follows in a July, 1881, edition of The Frontier: “The picnic July 4th on the grounds of E. P. Hicks of Leonie was declared a success by all. The forenoon exercises consisted of prayer, singing, reading, etc., after which all were invited to partake of the sumptous feast prepared by the good ladies of Blackbird,
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