← Before Today: A History of Holt County, Nebraska
North Atkinson Country Chapter Forty-Four When a child, Agnes Hanel often sat on the knee of a young man, Frank Goldfuss, a friend of her parents. Frank, born in Heinzdorf, Germany, in 1844, left his homestead about 1880 and came to Holt County, where he took a homestead five miles north of Atkinson. Agnes was eighteen at the time and Frank was thirty-six. There was probably an “understanding” between them at the time, or between their parents. At any rate in 1885 Agnes came from Germany to Atkinson, where Frank met her train, took her to St. Joseph’s Church and married her.
Frank was able to bring only one horse to Atkinson that day, as his other one had had a colt that morning. So she rode and he walked the five miles to their home after the ceremony.
Eleven children were born to Frank and Agnes, and theirs seems to have been a happy, congenial home, for the family history notes that dances were held in the hay loft of the Goldfuss barn and sometimes in their home. And Agnus often helped Dr. Douglas with the business of delivering the neighborhood babies. Catherine Goldfuss became Hugh O’Connor’s wife and Clara married Stanley Peter. Oswald lives at Page and Rosalie in Atkinson. One of Catherine’s two daughters, Regina, is the wife of Attorney William Griffin. Fred Tesch came from Minnesota to Holt County in 1881. He was a native of Poland and his wife, Hulda Buch- mann, came from Germany. With her parents, she had come to Minnesota as a little girl. There she met Mr. Tesch, but did not join him in Holt County until he had been two years on his claim. When he felt that he had enough of a “start” he sent for her. Hulda came out from town with the mail carrier. Mr. Tesch met her, then took her to town with his ox team to get married. It was one o’clock the next morning before they reached his sod house on the claim. The date was July 7, 1883. Fred worked on the railroad until the tracks reached Long Pine, while Hulda held down the claim. They had accumulated a small herd of cows by 1888, but all were safe in a straw shed. However the winds that accompanied that storm were so strong that they blew a two-foot high snow drift through a nail hole in an otherwise tight frame building.
The Tesch’s had five children and slowly got ahead on the claim. Of course they used horses for many years— and had some interesting experiences with them. On one occasion some of the Tesch young folks and their friends started for a picnic on little Oak Creek, where they were going to pick walnuts and hazel nuts. On the way the team ran away across a dogtown, stringing lunch buckets and young folks across the prairie with each bump over the mounds.
Another time Fred bought five head of horses from a carload of western horses shipped in for the local farmers. These horses weighed about 1200 pounds each, were unbroken and were at least seven years old. Mr. Tesch bought new half-inch rope to use in leading his new property home. One horse jumped a seven-foot high partition while he was trying to catch it. Finally he had them all tied— one on each side of the old team and the others behind the wagon. It was a lively drive home, with the wagon being pulled in all directions.
A team of mules he was driving at another time, frightened by something, ran away. Headed for home, the mules made it across the bridge but the wagon had two wheels over the edge and crashed into the creek below. The mules ran on, held together by the neckyoke, until they hit a tree. There they stopped short around the tree facing each other. Then Fred’s saddle horse fell on top of him, with the saddle horn in his stomach. In spite of all these accidents and his injury, Fred lived on until 1915. After his death Hulda lived with her son Ernest until November, 1931, when she passed away.
Both Fred Jansen and Rosalie Becker were born in Germany. Fred in 1868, Rosalie in 1875/ The Jansen family migrated to Iowa, and then to Holt County, making the latter move in 1886. Rosalie’s family came first to Wisconsin, then to Holt County in 1881. Both the Jansens and the Beckers homesteaded north of Atkinson. Fred and Rosalie were married in 1894. Two acres of Fred’s land, two miles east and five miles north of Atkinson, were used for the neighborhood cemetery. All but three of the graves were later moved to the Atkinson cemetery. The three that are left, surrounded by lilac bushes, have tombstones bearing the following inscriptions: Johann Jansen— Born 1838 Died 1895— Age 57 M. Haack— Age 91— Died April 1, 1891 Neils Madison— Died February 10, 1889 Age 28 Johann Jansen was Fred’s father. Neils Madison married Fred’s sister and died soon of typhoid fever. M. Haack was Fred’s grandmother. Her full name was Margaretha Dorothea Haverbeer Friesman Haack.
The Jansen children went to the little country school a mile from their home, and then to St. Joseph’s School in Atkinson. The family was one of the first in the neighborhood to own a Model T, one of the kind without front doors. These were added after one of the children fell out of the car onto the road as they were driving by the cemetery.
Rosalie’s parents, Joseph and Katherine Becker, and her brothers, John, Gerhard and Edward, lived neighbors to the Jansens. A daughter, Mary Katherine, and a son, Henry, were born there. Henry died of diphtheria in the next epidemic, then the father died when Mary Katherine was only four years old.
Mrs. Becker stayed on the homestead until her children were grown. To help make a living for her brood she provided board and lodging for the freighters and their teams, engaged in moving supplies from Atkinson to points in Boyd County. On these stop-overs if the freighters found any damaged goods, such as bags of peanuts or crackers, in their loads they dropped them off at the Widow Becker’s, much to the delight of her children and her Jansen grandchildren. 442 About 1909 Mrs. Becker moved into Atkinson and opened a “Hat Shop.” She bought a house on State Street for her home, then built a large stone house across the street from it, where she had “rooms for let.” Later she built another house on State Street. One of the early Atkinson hospitals was housed in the latter building. Her son John married Anna Friedel and lived on a farm west of the homestead before moving to Wyo- ming. Gerhard and Edward lived on the old home place until Gerhard married Susan Winkler and moved to Stuart, and then to South Dakota. Edward moved to Atkinson and operated a meat market, which he later sold to “Spot” Livingston, “Nebraska’s biggest butcher.” Mary Katherine married John Hen-ning and settled on a farm northeast of the old home. John died suddenly of a heart attack in 1931, leaving her with three children. She then sold the farm and moved into her mother’s big house in Atkinson, where she also kept roomers. Mary Katherine died in 1963. Her son John married Margaret Barrett, ran an early radio shop and carried on the ice business until he began carrying mail on the Star Route north out of Atkinson, a position he held until his death in 1969. Her daughter Viola married Gustave Obermire and has lived in Stuart for the past forty-two years. She was the mother of ten children.
Other early settlers north of Atkinson were the Schaaf brothers, Joe and Mike. Born in Alsace Lorraine, Joe, the oldest, settled in David City. Michael, born in 1857, joined him there in the early ‘eighties. The brothers then came on to Holt County and homesteaded ten miles north of Atkinson. Mike and his wife, Mary Schruers, had two children, Rose and George, on the homestead. George and his mother died soon after the baby’s birth.
In 1888 Mike married another Mary— Mary Timmerman— at Atkinson, then moved to Boyd County. Five children were born to them there. Friendly Indians sometimes came by and took their oldest son, Simon, to dance with them on top of Twin Buttes.
In the spring of 1898 they moved back to Holt County and bought the Joe Goldfuss farm, a few miles west of their old homestead. Mike’s second wife, the daughter of Simon and Rosa Timmerman who had come from Holland when they were very young, had six more children, then died in 1916.
Wilmer L. West was five when his family moved from West Virginia to Kansas, where they lived in a dugout beside a river. From there the family came by covered wagon to a farm near Kearney, Nebraska. A diphtheria plague carried off two of the West children, Ella and Freddie. Only Wilmer and an older sister, Bertha, were left to the parents, Albert and Millie West.
Eventually the family moved north and settled on a ranch near Dunning up in Blaine County. Here Wilmer met Ida Gertrude Dunning, daughter of Samuel and Flora Dunning, founders of the little town that bears their name. Ida was born in 1883 at Broken Bow, daughter of a line of English ancestors that traced back to the Mayflower.
Wilmer and Ida were married in Broken Bow in 1902. The daughter, Bertha, had already married Robert O. Clifford and settled on a ranch southwest of Atkinson in 1898. Her parents had followed in 1902, settling on one of the Clifford places. In 1903 Wilmer was called to Holt County to attend Bertha’s funeral. Mr. Clifford and the Wests persuaded Wilmer and Ida to move to Atkinson, too.
They made the move in a covered wagon, with one of Ida’s brothers, Earl, driving the team. Her younger brother Hugh also went along. Ida and Wilmer made the trip on horseback, driving their cattle and horses to the new range. The Wests settled one mile north of Atkinson and lived out their lives there, Ida passing away in 1966 and Wilmer in 1967. Three daughters were born to them there, Ella, Wilma and Gertrude. All the girls graduated from Atkinson High. Wilmer farmed for a few years, worked for Charley Havens in the implement business for awhile, then went into cattle feeding. He was one of the first in his town to own an automobile, a Maxwell, in which he drove cattle buyers out to the ranches to look at cattle. He also worked with Jed Landon for several years, buying horses for shipment back to Vermont, and by the carloads for the Cavalry. With his grandson, Dick McConnell, as pilot, Wilmer took his first airplane ride when he was eighty-five. He gazed with interest at long familiar places around Brewster and Dunning, and recognized many well-known landmarks from the air. Until the very day of his death he was interested in all that went on about him.
Ella West, born at Atkinson in 1906, married Henry C. Zahradnicek in 1936. The couple immediately moved to Scottsbluff, where Dr. Zahradnicek began the practice of dentistry, in which he is still engaged. They are the parents of two sons, Ronald, a Navy career man, and James, of Scottsbluff.
Wilma West, born in 1910, married Eli McConnell of Emmet in 1929. They live on the Wilmer West home place, where they reared their four children, Marilyn, Eilmer (Bud), Dean and Richard.
Gertrude West, born in 1912, married Richard Berry in 1952 and lives in California. The girls remember with amusement the popular Hallowe’en pranks played by the Atkinson youth of their time, such as laboring to put the running gears of a wagon inside the High School Assembly room, (and no doubt laboring just as mightily to get them outside again the next morning). Or borrowing Gib Davis’ donkey and tying it inside the school building, or hanging Superintendent Green in effigy to the top of the school flagpole, where no one but a very good flagpole climber could get up to untie it.
The Miller Skating Rink was the moving picture palace of Ella’s childhood. On the occasion of the playing of the “Assassination of Abraham Lincoln” there, one of the Millers shot a real pistol at the same instant the make believe revolver was fired. That was too much for Ella, a second grader, and she slipped out and ran all the way home, leaving her father hunting the town over for her. The West girls especially enjoyed the Green Valley dances where the Slay makers, and Dvorak brothers made the music. Each summer their Grandfather West raised a huge patch of watermelons, then had the whole community in for a watermelon feed in the fall. Once in awhile some of the town boys attempted a melon feed of their own ahead of time. One night Clifford Purnell left a patch of the seat of his pants on the protecting barbed wire fence when the farm dog took after him and a blast from a shot gun, aimed high, sped him on his way. “I’m sure,” wrote Ella, “that we had more fun scaring them off than they had in swiping melons.” Wilmer West, his wife, and his parents, Mr. and Mrs. Albert West, are all buried in Woodlawn Cemetery at Atkinson.
Frank O. Hanel, born in Germany in 1868, came to the home of his sister, Mrs. Frank Goldfuss, in 1899. The Goldfuss family lived on a tree claim five miles north of Atkinson. The following year Frank married Elizabeth Hettinger in O’Neill. Francis, George, Jesse, Helena, Henry, Alfred and Victor were born to them. Mr. Hanel soon gave up farming and opened a shop in Atkinson where he made and repaired shoes. Oscar Peterson, father of ranchman Charlie Peterson, had all his boots made by Hanel because he couldn’t buy ready made boots large enought to fit him. Frank Hanel’s first car was a Model T pickup. It had no top, just a front 443 seat and a little box in the rear. He had traded four or five pigs and some corn for it. The dealer showed him the pedals— clutch, reverse and brake also the hand brake, the spark and gas levers and the crank, explaining how to use each of them. Mr. Hanel listened to all the instructions, said “yah” to each in an understanding manner, and was left alone with his new possession.
At the urging of his two youngest sons, they cranked up the car, all got in and started off— as soon as Mr. Hanel removed his foot from the clutch pedal. The car was in high gear and everything was full speed ahead as the machine jumped a small culvert, leaped an irrigation ditch and tore madly through a fence into the poultry yard, with chickens and ducks squawking and flying for their lives in all directions. A final collision stalled the engine and brought the expedition to a halt. Through it all, of course, Father Hanel was pulling back on the wheel and shouting “Whoa.” One day George was chasing a horse out of the barn, just as his brother Hank stepped into the doorway. Hank jumped aside, but the horse kicked its feet into the air, with a twisting motion, catching Hank in the mouth with a hoof and knocking his front teeth out. For some reason Frank got the blame for that, and the “licking” that went with it.
Later Frank escaped the blame for something he DID do. Hiding in the outdoor toilet he was smoking corn- stalks. Since he didn’t dare be caught at his nefarious occupation, when he was done smoking he threw the lighted material down the toilet hole. The papers down below caught fire and burned down the “john.” The reason Frank escaped punishment for that was that his father had been smoking a cigar in the old outhouse just ahead of Frank— and took it for granted that he was the one who had started the fire. And Frank gratefully never told him any different.
After the death of his wife and his son Jesse in 1918, Mr. Hanel moved to Bayard, Nebraska, where he and the other boys farmed until 1932.
Joseph Hendricks, the son of Hiram and Sicily Hendricks, was born in Iowa in 1853. He was three years old when his parents brought him to Otoe County while Nebraska was still a Territory. Occasionally they drove to Salt Creek, about thirty miles from their home, to scrape up salt where the state capitol now stands.
In 1872 Joseph married Miss Sophia Livingston. The couple had three children, Oscar, Leona and Nellie. In 1900 Oscar came to Holt County and settled on a ranch sixteen miles north of Atkinson. The following year his parents joined him there and he and his father were partners in the ranch business until Oscar’s death in 1931. In 1903 Oscar married Edna Alberta Cannon of the Celia community. They became the parents of seven children. Over the years the two Hendricks families added to the ranch, making it one of the best in their section of the state.
Mark Westlake Hendricks, born on the ranch in 1906, has spent all but two years of his life there. He went to school in the little one-room home schoolhouse and had two years of high school, after which he came home to help out on the ranch. The Hendricks specialized in Black Angus cattle.
“Back in the days when the Seger Brothers started their Ford car dealership in Atkinson,” writes Mark Hend-rick, “I was about six years old. One day in the spring of 1912 Paul Seger drove into our yard in a new Ford car, or Tin Lizzy, as many called them. After a little persuasion Paul got Grandad to get in and go for a ride. “When they came back Gramp was driving and I can still hear him hollering “Whoa” when he tried to stop, but Paul reached over to the left side, pulled up the hand lever, which put the gears into neutral, and they coasted to a stop. Boy! was that car ever a beauty. It had a brass radiator and lights, and a rubber horn to squeeze. There were long brass rods from the top of the windshield to the frame and you could either put the top up, or fold it down.
“When Paul left, the Joseph and O. N. Hendricks Ranch had a new 1912 Ford. There were lots of thrills after that, with Grandpa learning to drive— and for two years he was the only one who did drive it. But the moment I remember best was one day when Gramp and I had been to the west pasture. We were about a quarter of a mile from the home gate when he stopped, got out and came around to the other side and said, “Slide over behind the wheel and drive it down to the gate.’ Boy! Oh Boy!
“When it began to turn cool in the fall the water was drained out of the radiator every time we used the car. After the first real freeze it was put into the shed, the wheels jacked up— and there it stayed until warm weather again.
“Not long after we got the car, Grandpa, Grandma and my Aunt Nellie and Uncle Harry Prouty took out across the sandhills to Seneca, Nebraska, where my Uncle Tom and Aunt Leona Webber lived, seven miles south of the town. At that time, when it wasn’t too wet, there was a fair dirt road as far as Ainsworth, where the trail took off through the sandhills. To make a long story short, there were a hundred gates, give or take a few, and a blowout in each gate.
“It took two days to make a trip that only takes three hours now. Where the road came into Seneca from the north there was a long steep hill that was so sandy they had to keep it well hayed just for wagons to travel over it. About the first place of business they came to as they pulled into town was the livery stable.
“There four men stepped out into the road to stop the travelers. They wanted to know who they were, where they were going, and why. They said, yes, they knew Tom Webber. Then they asked, ‘When you go home are you going back out UP that hill?’ They were told ‘Yes,’ unless there is a better way. There wasn’t, so the men said, ‘When you go back we will have a team and buggy ready to take your women up the hill and we .want to ride to the top with you in that Ford.’ “So that is what they did. And right after that those fellows started selling Fords, their place of business being right close to the livery stable.” Charlie Edward Shane was born in Illinois in 1870, Jennie Towelle in Nebraska in 1880. They were married in Fairfield, Nebraska, in 1899. Their son Oliver was born the next year and in 1913 they bought a half section of land a few miles north of Atkinson. Oliver attended a country school three miles north of town, then graduated from Atkinson High in 1920.
In 1924 Oliver married Feme Davis at her parents’ farm home north of Atkinson. They had gone to the same country school and had both gradu-1 ated from Atkinson High. The couple had two sons. Both went to the same school their . parents had attended. Harold, the older son, married Fredda Pettijohn of Stuart but lives in St. Paul, Minnesota. Charles Oliver, the younger son, married Holly Smith and is a rancher, farmer and cattle feeder, as well as the owner of a fertilizer business in Atkinson.
Charles and his son Oliver had the first irrigation well north of Atkinson, on the old home place. Charles now has eight wells, all self-propelled systems.
Martin and Victoria Regal came from Moravia to settle near Schuyler in 1879. Unlike most of the pioneers, Martin had a fair sum of money when he arrived, but a dishonest land agent, who preyed on foreigners who could not speak English, sold him a mortgaged farm and he lost everything he had. An exceedingly religious man, he accepted the loss as God’s will and 444 held no bitterness. Victoria had more difficulty in forgiving the agent. Martin then left for Holt County to file on a claim, leaving his family all but destitute. One night, when there was no food at all in the house, there came a knock on the door. Victoria opened it and found a large basket of food, but never found out who brought it.
In 1881 the Regals moved to a homestead about eight miles west of Atkinson. The parents brought four children with them from Moravia and three more were born in Nebraska, two on the homestead. Victoria found life on the prairie hard and lonely, a land where people lived in dirt houses and neighbors, at first, were far apart.
The family used hay burners, as so many did, and came to hate the smell of burning hay, an odor that permeated everything. Later, when they no longer burned hay, the Regal children disliked sitting by anyone in school or church whose clothing bore the strong, smoky odor. Years later they were reluctant to admit they had burned cowchips, the fuel that replaced the hay. With embarrassed smiles they’d confess, “Yes, we did. Everybody did. We used to pile them up on the prairie, then go around with the wagon and load them up. If someone came by we hid behind the wagon. We didn’t want them to see us picking chips.” When Mary Regal turned fourteen she went to work as a laundress at the Northwestern Hotel in Stuart, washing sheets and towels by hand and boiling them white. Later, Josie, her younger sister, worked as a cook in the Commercial Hotel in Atkinson. When the boys, Jim and John, were old enough, they hired out to work for the Ziskas on the threshing machine. John and Jim both played violins. John was so young when he learned to play his brother’s fiddle that he couldn’t remember learning— it seemed to him that he had always known how. Sometimes Jim was so carried away by his music that he played tunes in such rapid succession that the dancers ran out of breath and his daughter, Helen, would remind him to let up long enough for the couples to change partners and catch their breath.
Victoria Regal was totally blind the last six years of her life. While standing in the garden with her daughter Antonia, she had looked up to watch an eclipse of the sun. Blinded* almost instantly, she had to be led into the house. She never complained about her loss, but thereafter her keenest joy was to have a grandchild take her on a tour of the farmyard, describing to her how the garden looked, how big the young chickens were, which flowers were blooming and what was going on among the animals.
His pioneer neighbors long remembered Martin Regal as the man who prayed at funerals. After the officiating minister at wakes and funerals had finished the service and stepped back, Martin stepped forward and led the people in more prayers. His relatives felt that his intense interest in funerals was due to the fact that, as a young man in Europe, he was nearly buried alive. He was already laid out in his coffin when a friend insisted that he had seen him move an eyelid and a doctor was called. Mary, born in 1870, married John Ziska in 1888. Their children were Fred, Annie, Albena and James. Antonnia, born in 1871, married Joseph Ziska in 1891. Four of their eleven children died in infancy. Josephine, Charles, Matilda, Albert, Mary, William and Arthur lived to grow up. Antonnia died at eighty-two, after being struck by a car while walking to church.
James Regal, born in 1874, married Emma Dibble in 1899. They had two children, Helen and Arthur, then Emma died of childbed fever in 1903. Sixteen years after Emma’s death Jim married Alice Mullen. Their children are Francis and Helen.
Josephine, born in 1877, married Stanley Johnson. Their only child was Violet. Grace, born in 1879, never married and died at age twenty-three. Agnes, born in 1882, married John Walenta in 1908 and moved to Canada. She died there in 1970, seven days after the death of her husband. John, who never married, now lives at the Good Samaritan Center in Atkinson.
Martin Regal died in 1920 at the age of eighty-five, Victoria in 1928, aged eighty-eight.
Pat, Joe and Thomas McDonnell (now spelled McDonald), sons of Edward and Margaret McDonnell of County Sligo, Ireland, came to Holt County as early as 1883 and settled some six miles west of Atkinson. Cattle raising and some farming were their main occupations. Pat went into business in Atkinson, after selling his holdings to John Morgan, Sr., in 1901. He never married and, upon retirement, went back to Ireland. Joe McDonald became “section boss” for the Chicago and Northwestern after he gave up cattle raising and held that position for more than twenty years. A widower for most of his mature life, he remained a resident of Atkinson and lived into his late ‘nineties.
Tom married Alice O’Connell, daughter of John O’Connell, one of Atkinson’s earliest pioneers, and farmed until his death in his early middle years. They had four children, Margaret, Edward, Kathryn and Thomas L.
Ed McDonald, son of Michael and Jane McDonnell of County Sligo, born in 1875, at the age of fourteen came to live with his uncles on their land west of Atkinson. From the year of his arrival, 1889, until the early 1900’s he worked on their ranches, herding cattle on the open range for several years. Later he went into farming and cattle raising for himself, on lands adjoining his uncles’ holdings. In 1903 he married Alice O’Connell McDonald, widow of his Uncle Thomas. A daughter, Monica, was born to them. In 1938 Ed married Anna Hise. After retirement from the farm they moved into Atkinson. Ed’s brother, Tom, born in County Sligo in 1880, came in 1899 to live with his brother. He helped with the farming and livestock raising until his marriage to Theresa Ramold in 1914. They farmed south of Atkinson until 1938, then retired to Atkinson. They had no children.
Mike McDonald, brother of Ed and Tom, born in Ireland in 1884, at the invitation of his brother Ed, came to Holt County in 1912. He lived with Ed for twelve years, then struck out for himself, working on other farms and in Atkinson. He never married and eventually retired in his own home in Atkinson.
Dr. Josiah Dexter Cotton served through the Civil War as surgeon of the 92nd Regiment of Ohio Volunteers. After his discharge he returned to his practice at Marietta, Ohio. His son, George Dexter Cotton was born in Marietta in 1861. In 1884 young George, usually called “Deck,” homesteaded at the head of the Big Sandy, about ten miles northwest of Atkinson. Two years later he married Eva Blondin. They had ten children but lost two in infancy. The children attended the Pioneer School, where some of the teachers were Reuben Slaymaker, Edith Zink, Alma Norton and Nettie Fisher. From this school Anna and Edna Cotton went to Ohio to live with their grandmother while they went to high school. The other six Cottons graduated from Atkinson High School. The girls all taught school except Lillian, who became a registered nurse.
The Cottons got their mail at Inglis, housed in the home of Mrs. Walter Stewart, the postmistress. Mr. Cotton, a tall, stately man, enjoyed walking and did a lot of it, visiting his neighbors, going after the mail, even walking to Stuart, several miles to the south.
Eva Cotton, a teacher before her 445 ; when it puffed it filled the house with smoke.
“The homestead was a mile long and a quarter-mile wide. Trees, brought from Iowa, were planted near the building site, in the center of the mile. A few trees are still standing there in a row. Bennett remembers attending a Camp Meeting at the mouth of Little Sandy Creek. He says it must have been on the Fourth of July as he saw a balloon in the sky over Butte. He also remembers going to a gathering at John Bennett’s in Atkinson. The Jarvises, Westphal Is, Lew- ellyns and Sam and Alice Good were there. (Sam and Alice were living in a tent southwest of town while putting up hay for someone.) All in this group were directly related to the Smiths except the Jarvises, who were former friends from Iowa.
“The brothers, Seth and John Smith, held a public auction at Seth’s place before the two families moved to Cherry County. Jack Jarvis was the auctioneer. ‘All I remember about the sale was the coffee and ginger snaps they served for lunch,’ says Bennett, a small lad at the time. ‘While the sale was going on I ate ginger snaps.’ ” The Seth Smith family, parents and six children, made the trip from Iowa to Nebraska in a surrey with a spring wagon hooked on behind. The camp equipment was carried in the latter, and two of the boys slept in it at night. Two more sons were born to this couple on the homestead three or four miles northeast of Atkinson. The family lived with the uncle, Henderson Bennett, in Atkinson while Mr. Smith was building a one-room house in the country. Later he built a very nice two-story home, with a bathroom, for his family. The children attended the Beck school, two or three miles east of Atkinson.
While the Smiths went to that school a bad prairie fire, set by sparks from the railroad locomotive, burned straight north, spurred by a strong south wind. As it bore down on the schoolhouse the teacher, with the boys helping, put her horse and buggy on a bare spot in the schoolyard, then all ran up the road a half mile to the Beck house. “I remember,” writes Leah Smith Wallace, “running along holding the hand of my oldest brother, Vance, and crying like my heart would break. I was afraid the fire would reach our house and burn my mother and little brothers. My brother said, ‘Don’t cry. God will take care of them.’ And He did.” As sometimes happens when the wind is so strong, the fire swept on over the schoolhouse without setting it afire, and on to the Smith place. Mrs. Smith had hooked a hose to the marriage, was later known as “Grandma Cotton” in her community. Superintendent of the Pioneer Sunday school, she was also a capable leader in many neighborhood activities. Clinton DeWit Blondin and his family came to Holt County with George Dexter Cotton, or perhaps it was the other way around, for Mr. Blondin was the father of Eva Blondin. The Blondin family and young Deck Cotton filed on neigh- born ing homesteads.
Clinton, or “Cap” as he was best known, had six children and had been married twice. His first wife was the mother of Grant (who stayed in Ohio), May and Eva. The second wife, Mary, was the mother of Fred, Agnes and Dougald. Mary died when Dougald was two years old and the child was sent back to Ohio to be reared by relatives.
Mr. Blondin, who had been a captain of the Ohio Volunteers during the war, was a good horseman and rode a great deal. Decoration Day was an important occasion for him. On each anniversary he would dress in his captain’s uniform, complete with saber, mount his best horse and ride into Atkinson to take part in the memorial services.
John Ransom Smith and his wife, . Isabel Yaw Smith, Jived in Grant, Iowa, before coming to Holt County. John’s uncle, Henderson K. Bennett, had filed a homestead and bought other land northwest of Atkinson in the late ‘nineties and early 1900’s. Due to the urging of this uncle John, and later other Smith families, moved from Iowa to the Atkinson area. John Smith’s homestead was five miles northwest of Atkinson. That of his brother, Seth Smith, who came a little later, was three miles northeast of the town. John and Isabel had eight children. For awhile the children attended the Goldfuss school where Bennett Smith, who couldn’t understand German, and Johnny Goldfuss, who as yet couldn’t understand English, had some most heated arguments. Neither ever knew the outcome of these arguments, however, as neither knew what subject the other was debating.
“There was a place south of our house that we called ‘The Big Hill,’ writes Marie Frickel Smith, the family historian. “When the folks came home from town we could always see the team come over that hill. Since I have come back to Holt County I can’t find that hill anymore. The house and ( barns were built of lumber. None are 4 there now but the mounds where they stood are still recognizable. The house v was small— about 16′ by 20’— for a ( family of seven. The hay burner we i heated with put out a lot of heat, but / windmill and wet the house until the flames were almost at the door, when she ran inside. The fire passed on, sparing the wet house but burning the barns and sheds. When the children reached home there were dead chickens lying all around; and two sows, almost ready to have pigs, lay dead, burst open by the heat.
The fire had burned a clean sweep, taking almost everything in its path. The teacher’s horse and buggy were spared— but the horse was blinded by the intense heat of the passing fire. The railroad company later paid damages to the farmers who lost property to the flames.
The Smiths rebuilt their barn and other buildings. Then about two years later while they were putting up hay, a bad storm came up. The men hurried to the barn, unhitched and ran the horses into the barn. A neighbor, a Mrs. Wright, on her way home from town saw the storm coming and stopped at the Smiths. They put her team in the barn, too.
The tornado touched down at the Smiths and the new barn went down, crushed like an eggshell. One of the horses belonging to Mrs. Wright, lying flat on its side, was under the hayfilled loft, but unhurt. Pieces of the barn and windmill were found miles away. Only a granary and the house were left standing.
“My little brother, just older than I,” wrote Leah, “was put to using the two-horse cultivator. Father put a little seat on the backend of the tongue and put me on the seat to drive the horses. What a job for two little kids.” After the passage of the Kinkaid Act the Seth and John Smiths had the aforementioned sale and moved to Cherry County. The home place, purchased by Jake Braun, had a unique system for supplying water to the house, one of the first modern rural homes in the area. A large tank in the barn hayloft was kept filled by a pressure pump attached to the nearby windmill. Well buried pipes carried water to the house by gravity pressure. Only recently Jake found some of the underground pipes, still intact, where Seth Smith laid them so long ago.
Incidentally, Leah Smith, although totally blind, wrote this history of her family on a braille typewriter. Swinging on around to the southeast of Atkinson, one of the earliest settlers was William Hayes, born in 1857 to Morgan and Hannorah Hayes of Albany, New York. The lad went to school in a Trappist Monstery until the family moved to Iowa in 1868. In 1876 Morgan Hayes came to O’Neill on a scouting trip with General O’Neill. The next year Morgan and his oldest son, Michael, came to Atkinson with a 446 team, wagon and plow. They built a sod house and a shed a mile east and two miles south of the new village, then returned to Iowa to get their fifty head of cattle.
This time twenty-year-old William came with them. The next spring a brother and sister, Patrick and Hanna, came by train to Sioux City with a carload of household goods. Following in a covered wagon were the mother and the youngest brother and sister, Jack and Lizzie, with fifteen head of horses. They arrived in O’Neill on St. Patrick’s Day.
In the spring of ’79 Mr. Hayes and the four sons, William, Mike, Jack and Patrick, took homesteads and tree claims, adding up to quite a scope of land. They began at once to break ground for planting crops and trees. Later in the year William and Pat freighted cottonwood lumber from Niobrara and built the first frame house south of the Elkhorn River. The house still stands on a part of Pat’s homestead.
When not working on their claims, William and Pat worked on the construction crews that built the railroad west from Wisner. All of one summer they worked on the depot grounds at Norfolk, and that winter freighted from there to Boiling Springs. They followed the railroad building only as far as Long Pine Creek.
When Sheridan Township was organized in 1892 William was appointed its first representative on the County Board. The next year he married Miss Mary Joyce of O’Neill at St. Patrick’s church. His bride, born in Scotland, was eight years old when her parents came from Ohio to O’Neill. In 1910 the couple moved to Atkinson, where Mr. Hayes served as mayor during the first world war. William and Mary had one child, Nona. She started to school in 1902 in District 35, where Tillie Nightengale was teaching. After the Hayes moved to town she went to school there, graduating from St. Joseph’s high school in 1914 and teaching school until her mother died. She then kept house for her father and worked in the Hoskinson’s store.
In 1919 Nona and Leonard Ullrich were married. A machinist in Seger Brothers garage, Leonard went to work for the county, operating its first Caterpillar tractor from 1921 to 1924. With Nona’s father, William Hayes, the couple then moved back to the homestead, where Leonard farmed with the first tractor in that community. Nona served for twelve years on the board of District 35, where she had started to school in 1902. In 1945 Nona and Leonard retired on the farm where she was born.
Mike Wenner came to Nebraska from Luxemburg. Seven years later he returned to the old country to marry Katherine Schmit. A friend, Miss Lizzie Weber, came back to America with them. Probably around the mid- ‘eighties they came to Holt County, where the Wenners settled about seven miles southeast of Atkinson, and where Lizzie Weber married Mike Gonderinger. No dates are given in this history, except for mentioning that the Wenners experienced the blizzard of ’88.
Mike and Katherine had six children, two dying in infancy. Lena Wenner married Nick Klein and had no family. Lizzie married Joe Ramold and had two daughters, Lena and Katherine. John married May Olinger and had three children, John, Mike and Leona. Anna married Cecil Bogue. All of the first two generations are now dead.
John Wenner married Marylin Ray-mer, Mike married Sharon Davis. With their families, these grandsons of old Mike Wenner now live on the home place.
The Wenners lived in a frame house in pioneer days but later, when they were able to build and furnish a new house, Grandma Wenner still took her bread over to the old house to bake it, in the old stove that she preferred to her new one.
John Galligan, born in County Caven, Ireland in 1845, as a young man came to Connecticut where in 1878 he met and married Miss Roseann Lynch, also from County Caven. Four sons were born to them in Connecticut; Thomas, John, Jr., Joseph and Eugene. In 1885 the family came to Atkinson where John’s sister, Mrs. Patrick Smythe, had established her home southeast of town on the former Sam Hickman place. Their youngest child and only daughter, Rose, was born on the homestead seven and a half miles southeast of Atkinson.
Father John Smythe, brother of Patrick and the first permanent priest in O’Neill, had persuaded his brother to come to the territory. And Patrick, in turn, had urged the Galligans to come. Roseann always lamented leaving her comfortable eastern home for “this wilderness,” and declared that she was going home to die. This never came to pass. She died in Atkinson in 1923.
John was gone a great deal, working on the railroad building west from Norfolk, and Roseann and the little boys had to run the farm. John was not at home even when the baby, Rose, was born in October, 1886. After twenty-six years on the ranch John and Roseann retired in Atkinson, where John died five years later in 1915. All of the family except Eugene married and remained in the community.
Tom, eldest of the Galligan boys, married Nellie Gaffney in 1911. They made their home on a farm three and a half miles southeast of Atkinson and reared two children there. Tom died young (forty-three years) in 1923. Nellie and the children then moved into Atkinson where the mother spent several years as the operator in the local telephone office. She died in Denver in 1968 and is buried there. John Galligan married Tillie Night-engale in 1907 and lived on the farm four and one-half miles southwest of Atkinson, where Owen Galligan now lives. They had four sons, Francis, John, Erwin, Thomas and Marvin (Dude). The father died in 1963, the mother in 1958. Francis and Marvin are also deceased.
Joseph married Anna Torpy and lived on the original Galligan homestead. They were the parents of five children: Angela, Owen, Bill, Mary and John, who died in childhood. Angela married Charles Prussa, then died of a heart attack in 1952, leaving four small children.
Owen, eldest son of Joseph and Anna, married Mildred Batenhorst of Stuart and lives on a farm four and a half miles southeast of Atkinson. William (Bill) stayed on the farm with his parents until he went into the service in World War II. After Joseph’s death in 1948, he and his mother moved to town. He died in 1968. The old home place is now owned by Owen Galligan of Omaha and no one lives in the old house.
Eugene, youngest son of John and Roseann, grew up on the farm, then went into Atkinson where he operated the first, or one of the first, livery stables in the town. In later years he moved to Norfolk and then into Iowa. He never married, died in Sioux City and is buried there; the only one of the original family not buried in St. Joseph’s Cemetery of Atkinson. Rose Galligan grew up on the farm where she was born. In 1910 she became the bride of William Mona-han who worked for Tom Crimmins on the former Schorn place near Rose’s home. After their marriage they moved to the farm he bought, a mile north of the Galligan home, where she lived until 1954, when her husband passed away. She then moved into Atkinson. Rose and William had four daughters: Eileen, Marjorie, Eleanor and Florence, and one son, Leo.
Three of the daughters married. Two, Eileen and Marjorie, live in or near Atkinson. Eleanor died in 1949. Leo married Mary Ellen Schaaf and lives on his father’s farmstead. The couple have seven children, all at 447 home.
The Gathje family of Germany emigrated to Iowa in 1884. The father, Christian, went right on to Holt County and took a homestead ten miles southeast of Atkinson. He built a two-story frame house, then brought his family to the new home in January, 1885. The younger children (six daughters) attended school a few months each year but the oldest, another Christian, had to stay home and help his father on the claim. He had, however, received some education in Germany and he soon taught himself to read and write English. He had also had some musical education in Germany and was a member of the school band.
Christian stayed with his parents but the daughters all left home to live in other states. Minnie, one of the sisters, was working in California when she became ill and was dying of cancer. She wanted to come home but her father had no money to send for her, so Chris sold one of his steers, went to California and brought his sister home to die. Her grave is probably one of the earliest in Wood-lawn cemetery. The parents added a tree claim to their homestead and Chris, as soon as he was old enough, filed on land two miles south of his father’s place. Christian died in 1902 as the result of a fall from a haystack. The mother then divided her time between Chris’ home and that of her married daughters in Iowa. The family had attended a small German Lutheran Church six miles to the southwest on Holt Creek, where young Chris met Susanna Walter.
Susanna was born in Canada in 1879, the daughter of Jacob and Regina Walter. She was ninth in a family of seven daughters and seven sons. Her parents sent her to Holt County in 1896 to make her home with an older sister, Dora, (who had married John Harley) and she had been working as a maid in O’Neill. The rest of the Walter family later came to Chambers.
Chris and Susanna were married and added a pre-emption and other lands to their homestead. Their children were Minnie, Henry, Marie and Clara. In 1912 eleven-year-old Minnie was stricken with polio. Proper diagnosis and treatment were not immediately available. When she could be moved her father took her to Lincoln for treatment. Not much could be done for her there.
Chris’ mother died in 1915, in Iowa, and was brought home for burial beside Christian and Minnie, their daughter. Later that year Chris moved his family into Chambers, then took his daughter Minnie to Rochester, and after that to St. Louis, but it was too late. Minnie would never walk again. After four years in Chambers the family moved back to the homestead.
The family was still regular in attendance at the little country church on Holt Creek where Chris and Susanna met— until it burned down in 1920. Some of the furniture and homemade pews, saved from the fire, were moved to the Gathje home and services continued. In 1927 a new church was built on land donated by John Harley, Jr., and a resident pastor engaged.
The children grew up, Clara went to highschool, and on to Wayne State. Marie married Emil Johnson in 1926 and had two children. Clara taught school for eleven years and married Alvo Crawford in 1938. Chris continued to farm the land he loved until his death in 1949. Susanna and the little crippled Minnie stayed on on the home place until the mother died in 1956. Then Marie and her husband moved onto the home place to care for Minnie and do the farming. Marie died in 1969 and the old Christian Gathje farm, where Minnie still makes her home, is now owned by heirs of the Gathje estate.
August Grothe and Henrietta Paulsa were born and raised near Berlin, Germany. When in their late thirties the two met and married there. Their son, William Frederick, was born in July, 1880, and that fall they sailed for America. They settled first near Hooper, Nebraska, then came on to Holt County in 1887 and built a two-room frame house on a school section about seven miles southeast of Atkinson.
When School District 76 was organized in 1888 and a schoolhouse built, young William acquired all his grade school education there. Being the only child, he learned very young how to handle horses and help with the farm work. His mother became ill soon after turning sixty and a girl had to be hired to do the house work. This young lady, Eva Roth, was also German, and the daughter of neighborhood settlers. William and Eva were married in 1900 at the courthouse in O’Neill, where Judge Clarence Selah performed the service. They made their home with William’s parents, as Mrs. Grothe was by then quite senile. One day while William and his wife were milking Mrs. Grothe disappeared. The nearest neighbors, the Hoppes and Claussens, were called and all searched for the sick woman. The next morning, April 14, 1904, she was found, drowned, in the water trough. She was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery where, eleven years later, August was laid to rest beside her.
Franz Joseph Gilg left Germany for Nebraska in 1882. With him were his sons, Edward and Henry, fourteen and twelve, his eight-year-old daughter Anna, his second wife and her two daughters, Minnie and Anna. The family spent a few years in Platte County, then took a homestead ten miles southeast of Atkinson. Five or six years later Franz, his wife and the girls moved to Washington state. Edward and Henry stayed on the homestead. Edward, a carpenter, built many of the neighborhood homes, as well as the four-room house to which he brought his bride, Mary Tushla, in 1905. Edward was thirty-seven at the time of his marriage and when he died at sixty, in 1928, he left his wife with nine children, the youngest only three years old. Mary stayed on the farm until 1946, after four of her sons had been called into the service. She then sold the place to her son Clarence, who still makes his home there.
Henry married Mayme Hynes of O’Neill and lived on a farm a mile east of his brother Edward. With their two children, Henry and Mayme left Nebraska in 1914 to join other relatives in Washington.
At the time of her death in 1970 at age eighty-eight, Mary Gilg was survived by her nine children, thirty- two grandchildren and ten great-grandchildren. Peter Bonenberger, the eldest of nine children born to Nicolas Bonen-berger in Luxemburg, came to Holt County and married Rose Farner at O’Neill. Pete operated a butcher shop in Atkinson and lived a mile south of town. Bernard, or Barney, born in 1867, was Pete’s younger brother. He came to New York and walked from there to Nebraska, just behind the blizzard of ’88, walking on drifts that covered fences.
Barney stayed with his brother and worked for the railroad, walking from Pete’s place to the gravel pit, five miles west of town, loading two cars of gravel with a shovel and walking home again. In 1890 he homesteaded eighty acres of land eight miles south of Atkinson, where he lived in a small frame house.
After awhile, tired of batching, and of being the pacifier between his own people and the invading Irish at the Luxemburger parties, Barney decided he needed a wife. It was at this time that he bought himself a ticket, boarded a train for Mineral Point, Wisconsin and, on January 28, 1902, married Mary Mick, sister of the wife of his neighbor, Peter Weber. Mary proved well able to cope with a washboard, milking cows and serving as mid-wife when needed. And no doubt she was happy to be near her 448 sister, Susan Weber, and her brother, Matthew Mick, again.
In 1905 the Bonenbergers homesteaded a quarter seven miles southeast of Atkinson, where they made their home for the rest of their lives and reared their seven children. Elizabeth married Troy Howard; Peter married Freda Johnson; John married Margaret Dallegge; Michael married Velma Johnson; Nicholas married Margaret Coday; Marie married Marvin Johnson, brother of Freda; and Margaret married George Mathis. All of these families live in rural Atkinson.
Barney, a life-long Catholic, had walked to town to church at first, later he acquired and drove a one-horse buggy, then, as his family increased, they drove a two-seated carriage. Each Sunday they took along their ten-gallon can of cream, which they put off at the station before going on to church. After Mass they stopped and bought the. week’s supplies. “Then came the big treat— a box of soda crackers and a ring of bologna to eat on the way home.” The five oldest children had to board in town at St. Joseph’s School for two years in preparation for their first Holy Communion. The first two youngsters did not mind staying, but the next two were left crying every time.
Barney’s first car was a Chevrolet touring model. Later he had an Overland 90, then a Grampage touring car. Barney never lost a child or a can of cream while driving the team and buggy, but he once turned a corner too fast with the car, throwing the two little girls and the can of cream out. On that occasion he walked home and got son John to drive them on to town.
Barney owned the first Black Angus herd of cattle in that locality. When he and Mary retired they sold the farm to their son Nick and his family, who carried on with the black cattle until 1963.
The Harry Thompson family first came to Holt County from Iowa in 1906 and bought a ranch on Holt Creek. A few years later they rented the place to Amen Smith and moved back to Iowa. In 1911 they came back to the Holt Creek place for a few more years, then sold out and returned to Iowa.
The Lemmer family, parents, Albert and four girls, in 1909 bought a quarter of land that cornered the southeast edge of Atkinson. The house was inside the city limits. From this location Mr. Lemmer could carry on his farm work and the five children could go to town school.
Albert’s father took in milk cows to pasture during the summer and it was Albert’s job to gather the cows every morning, take them to pasture and bring them home in the evening. He had about thirty head in the herd. For this job, “which wasn’t a picnic,” he was paid fifty cents per head per month. Some of the neighbors whose cows he cared for were the Vanfleets, Marings and Rileys.
During World War I the businessmen of Atkinson laid out a golf course in the Lemmer pasture and Albert earned a little money caddying for several of the players. When he was about sixteen he and Gene Babcock were excused from high school to help drive herds of 2,200 steers from the west Lee and Prentiss Ranch to a pasture fifty miles south of Valentine. There were eighteen drivers and the trip took two weeks.
Albert graduated from Atkinson High in 1920, then took further training at Chadron Normal so he could teach school. He soon decided that profession was not for him, so hired out to run the Atkinson Light and Power Plant. He stayed with this job until the High Line came through and he was transferred to Northwest Nebraska as maintenance man for the Tri-State.
In 1929 Albert married a school teacher, Sylvia Clifford, rented a place from his ranchman father-in- law and began ranching for himself. This was just after the stock market crash of that black year and cattle were so cheap that it was easy to start a herd of his own. The Lemmers had three children, Robert, Vivian and Lyle.
When the Sandhills Feeder Cattle Association was organized in 1938 Albert was elected as Director to represent his area of the state. He served on the board for a long while and, with the passing years, built his ranch up to a good sized operation. In 1946 when their son Robert was ready for high school the family moved into town, while continuing to operate the ranch. In town Albert served on the school board for thirteen years and was a Director on the Farm Administration Board for three years. From 1957 to 1969, when he reached retirement age, he was a Director of the Production Credit Association.
Albert and his sons are still operating their ranches. Robert married Shirley Fox of Newport and Lyle married Sharon Nelson of O’Neill. The daughter, Vivian, married Merlin Ottoman, a surgeon, and lives in Colorado.
Frank Stanek was born in Czechoslovakia in 1877, on a thirty acre farm at the edge of the village of Lukavce. Although this was a large farm for that time and place, the family was poor, (by American standards) and had to work very hard. They owned four head of cows, with which they did their plowing. Since there were no fences the children had to lead the cows along the roads to graze. They also had to herd their flocks of geese and keep them out of the grain fields. Frank was the fifth of seven children. He went to school until he was fourteen, then had to quit and help his father, as his two older brothers and one sister had already gone to America. Two years later, in the spring of 1893, at the insistence of his brothers in the States, Frank and a sister, Emma, also left for America. The passage money, which the brother Jim sent, was $55 each, third class.
Frank and Emma landed in New York and went on to Chicago, where they joined their brothers and sister. Both found work there, and had the usual difficulties with the new language and customs. After about a year in Chicago Frank went to Iowa to work on farms. Farming methods were so different from the ones he had known in the old country that he had a few difficulties at first. For one thing he used horses. And when he tried to stop them by the command “Qurr,” nothing happened. His employer came to his aid and taught him to say “Whoa.” After three years in Iowa he went back to Chicago. He received his citizenship papers in 1900 and in July married Miss Antonia Sojka, also born in Czechoslovakia. She had come to Chicago in 1891 at fourteen years of age and had worked as maid and housekeeper in homes there. Frank’s parents came to America that same year.
Frank and Antonia started a laundry on Van Buren street and did well with it. Two years later they moved to Wood street and ran a larger laundry. They were doing well when Frank’s health began to fail and he had to look for a different kind of livlihood. In March, 1913, he got off the train in Atkinson and a real estate dealer took him twelve miles south and two east of town to show him a farm. He bought it and returned to Chicago to sell the laundry.
The family moved in April of the wet spring of 1913. There was water everywhere and the roads were almost impassable. When they reached the farm it looked so dreary and lonely that Antonia sat down and cried. Then she told her husband that she intended to take the next train back to Chicago. “But it was a long time before she got to town again, so she forgot about it.” The farm buildings were not very substantial, hay was so cheap it 449 had crossed the ocean with Antonia, also lived with them. One morning he went to work and never came home again. Although they notified the newspapers and had the police search for him, no trace of him was ever found. The grieving mother died not long after her son’s disappear- ence.
After Antonia finally accepted life on the farm she found much to enjoy, in spite of the inevitale hardships. The big Stanek barn burned, along with a grove of pine trees, but new improvements replaced the old and they slowly forged ahead. Of their home and mother, a son, George, and his sister Eleanor wrote: “This is the home place to all of us, and a very dear one. Mother was always a good sport and we are trying hard to repay the debt of love we owe her by making her life happier and easier than it was in the past.” Frank and Antonia celebrated their Golden Wedding Anniversary in 1950, with their family and many friends and relatives around them. Two years later Antonia died in her sleep at her home in Atkinson. Frank died the following year and both are buried in Woodlawn Cemetery.
Their son Edward, who stayed in Chicago and spent forty-four years with Commonwealth Edison, died in 1973. Son Frank, who came to the farm with them, retired and moved into Atkinson in 1955. He became a collector and dealer in antiques and built up a thriving business. His shipment of 1,500 wagon wheels to a California dealer is believed to have been the world’s largest single shipment of wheels. Frank never married. George, just out of high school, helped build six miles of Highway 11 south of Atkinson. After that he bought into the Platte Valley Construction Company of Grand Island and moved to that area. Eleanor married John Mohr and went with her husband in 1938 to the Charley Peterson ranch, where John had worked since he was fifteen years old. Since Eleanor had lived neighbors to the Petersons all her life, she had watched the big ranch grow bigger and bigger through the years.
Their daughter, Judy, grew up on the ranch, helping her father and the hired hands with the ranch work almost from the time she could walk— and ride. The fact that she was the only pupil in the home school district spurred influential Charlie Peterson to take the “Blanket Mill Tax Law” to the Supreme Court of Nebraska, where he won the case on the grounds of unconsitutionality, thereby entitling many taxpayers to refunds.
Judy graduated from high school in Atkinson in 1963, went on to college hardly paid to sell it and times were hard for awhile. When Frank’s parents, who had stayed in Chicago, died in the spring of 1919 Frank went back for the funerals, but Antonia and the children had to stay at home and take care of the farm.
The history does not say how many children were born to Frank and Antonia. All but one were born in Chicago and a daughter, Emma, died there when she was eighteen. The youngest, Eleanor, was born on the farm. Today three sons and a daughter are living. One son lives in Chicago, the others live on farms south of Atkinson.
Antonia Sojka had been the daughter of a well-to-do farmer in the homeland. He had owned eighty acres of land, five cows and four oxen. There were six children in the family. Their house, barn and other buildings were all built very close together and the barns were kept as clean as the house. However, this all came to an end when the father died. Antonia was eleven at the time. Her mother sold the farm and they moved into a smaller house and all the family worked out at whatever they could find to do.
Before Antonia was born her father’s brother, Antony Sojka, had gone to Chicago to start a tailor’s shop. When he had- a fairly good business going he sent the fare for his brother’s two oldest children to come to Chicago to learn the tailor’s trade in his shop. And so it was that fourteen-year-old Antonia and her twelve-year-old brother, Frank left for America. The voyage over was long and lonely, for few people on the ship could speak Bohemian and both of the children cried most of the way across the ocean.
Their uncle met the children and took them into his home, but both were lonely and unhappy for quite awhile. After a year and a half Antonia began working in the homes of other people and so learned to speak English, and to read and write it. She furthered her education by going to night school for awhile. She then went to work for an elderly lady in a small laundry, saved her money and bought the little hand laundry from its owner. It was this laundry that she and her new husband, Frank Stanek built into a successful business after their marriage in 1900. They had been in the laundry business ten years when the dampness affected Frank’s lungs and his doctor told him to get out into the fresh air and sunshine.
In due time Antonia’s mother, brothers and sisters had joined her in Chicago, bought a small home and all lived together. Frank, the boy who and earned her degree in Home Economics. She was teaching at Spencer when she met and married Jim Adkisson, another teacher. Another daughter was born to John and Eleanor Mohr in 1949. Jean Elaine won many honors in 4-H livestock work. After a year at the University of Nebraska, Jean married Jim Estill and both are still busy with ranch work. In the fall of 1955 the Mohrs moved back to Eleanor’s childhood home, the old Stanek home, and began ranching on their own, adding to the original land holdings.
In 1964 they took into their home the two youngest children of Francis and Violet Mohr, following the death of the father, Francis, raising and educating the brother and sister, Thomas and Frances Mohr. John and Eleanor are still ranching on the “home place.” The first of the Houts family came from Germany to America in 1738. In 1889 a descendant, Earl Houts, was born in Atchison County, Missouri. In 1910 he married Melvina Louder of Hamburg, Iowa. The Louders, too, were German. The couple had three children, Charlene, Hallie and James, by the time they came to Atkinson in 1921.
Earl had contemplated the move for sometime, first making an exploratory trip to Nebraska in 1918. With some friends he went as far as Gordon, Nebraska, then returned to Hamburg and talked with Sam Jennings, who was living near Atkinson at the time. Sam sang the praises of Holt County so enthusiastically that Earl and a friend, Frank Murray, went to Atkinson to look around. Earl bought 200 acres of land about five miles southeast of the town in the fall of 1919, rented it to Frank and helped him and his family move onto the farm. Before he went back home he had bought the farm next to it for himself. The following March he moved his household goods, farm machinery, seventeen brood sows and two cows to Emmet in two immigrant cars. Ruth and the children followed on the train. The home in Missouri had been surrounded by big maple trees. The only tree anywhere near the house in Holt County was an ash. The family promptly named the new place “The Lone Ash Farm.” The house had been built a section at a time, the kitchen-dining room first. The latest addition of four more rooms was fairly new, but none of it was painted. The first few years in Nebraska were difficult, with times so hard that there was barely enough money to live on and operate the farm. By 1948, however, times were better and the Houts were able to stucco the house, add a utility room 450 and install lights and water.
The children attended Grand Prairie rural school, then went to Atkinson to high school. Charlene taught school, received her degree from Nebraska Wesleyan University in 1946 and taught for many more years. She is now retired in Lincoln. Hallie taught school for four years, then went into nurse’s training and became a registered nurse. While working as a Public Health Nurse she met Ernest Green of Pierce, Nebraska. They were married in 1931. Later they went into missionary work and spent thirteen years in the Congo.
At this time they were captured by Communists and interned, with other missionaries, in storage bin-like buildings until a United Nations Official was able to secure their release. They now live in Chicago.
Jim Houts finished high school, helped on the home farm, worked for neighbors and did some trucking. In 1941 he was inducted into the service where he served in Radio Intelligence. After his discharge he married Annabel McMindes in San Francisco and returned to Nebraska. They now live in Grand Island where Jim manages the Coventry Apartments Complex.
Earl and Ruth Houts stayed on the farm. In the summers Charlene used to come home and drive the tractor to help out during harvest. And when all the family get together they remember back to the “old days,” such as the time when Earl borrowed money to buy calves at $4.70 per hundred pounds. It wouldn’t seem that a man could possibly lose money on calves at that price— but Earl did. He fed them out, then sold them for $3.60 per hundred. They lacked $33 of paying the original cost, so E. J. Mack, the Atkinson banker, cancelled the $33. What with the drouth, grasshoppers and hard times of the ‘thirties, Earl lost the farm he had bought and rented to the Murrays, but managed to save the home place, and to buy another quarter across the road later on.
There were some happy memories, too, especially the “picnic trips” the family used to take through the sandhills, visiting different lakes and attractive spots. The picnics would be at any place they happened to be when noon came, near a lake or a flowing well. A friend, Reich Findley, usually went along. He had an uncanny sense of direction, valuable in a land of “look alike” hills. The picnickers seldom followed roads but just took off in the direction they wanted to go, driving from hilltop to hilltop and “seeing the country.” In their later years Earl and Ruth enjoyed a good deal of traveling to a Farmer’s Union Convention in Philadelphia, and on down the coast to Florida; to the Rocky Mountains, the Black Hills, California and the Seattle World’s Fair. In 1960 they celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary and in 1963 began spending their winters in Arizona.
In 1970 the Houts sold their farm to Charley Peterson. Ruth died that fall. A year later Earl married Mrs. Everett Brown, a widow Earl had known when the two of them were children in Missouri. The couple still spend their winters in Arizona.
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