.jpg)
John M. Lammers of Hartington celebrated his 82nd birthday on November 1, 1945. Lammers had recently read that an airplane had flown from coast to coast in less than seven hours. This prompted him to recall the speed of travel when he was a boy.
“It used to take a day and a night to drive a wagon load of hogs to Ponca, our nearest trading post. A trip to Yankton took all day. Travel was by foot, horseback or wagon. There were no roads and only a few trails.“ Lammers came to Cedar County on a steamboat that landed at Brocke’s Bottom on July 4, 1876. Lammers would have been about 13 years old.
His father had purchased a farm about a mile south of the present site of Hartington. Lammers said there were few settlers in that area at the time and only three families living on the Bow Creek west of their farm.
Lammers said there was a small post office known as Smithland located on a farm about two miles east of where Hartington now stands. Once a week, a mail carrier on horseback carried the mail from Ponca to St. Helena and then to Smithland. The nearest Catholic church was at Bow Valley.
There were few trees in those days. Wild plum thickets along the creeks and prairie hay provided most of the fuel, he said. “We use twisted hay to heat our log house.
We would take the lids off of the cook stove, put in some twisted hay, and light it. Then we would put a wash boiler upside down over the holes. This would keep the house warm for quite a while.“ Prairie chickens and grouse were plentiful in those days, he said. A group of boys would go hunting and shoot until we had 100 chickens. This would keep our families fed for about a week.
About once a year, we would travel to Yankton or Ponca. Lammers said he brought the first load of lumber to the Hartington town site and helped drive the first stakes when the town was laid out in 1883. The first stake was driven near where the bank of Hartington now stands, he said.
The above information was published in the Cedar County News on November 8, 1945.
Last week I rode my Harley to Minden to visit Pioneer Village. I had planned to stay overnight, but the Pioneer Motel was permanently closed and there were no other places to stay in the town.
I left Sioux City around 8 a.m. and got home around 10 p.m. the same night. A little over 500 mile round trip.
Pioneer Village is a great place to see how our pioneer ancestors had to live. I recommend it highly. It was once Nebraska’s top tourist attraction.
One of the many exhibits that caught my attention was a show wagon built in 1899 for Jeb Bowman of Wakefield. Bowman planned to use the wagon to haul his family to Oklahoma to take part in the opening of the territory to settlement. But illness caused Bowman to change his plans. He then started a traveling show. Walter and Art Savage and Elwin Strong started out with Bowman. Over the years, the Savage and Strong shows made numerous appearances in Laurel.
The Wakefield Republican of June 23, 1905, noted that the Bowman show had two large tents, six or seven wagons, animal, acts, acrobats, trapeze artists, singing, dancing, etc. One of the entertainers who started out with Bowman was a five or six-year-old boy from Omaha named Fred Austerlitz. He would later become the famous dancer Fred Astaire.
Roger Tryon. a Laurel native, and a retired teacher, has written about Cedar County history for the Cedar County News and Laurel Advocate for the past 35 years.
