Video about the Rose Church

Community of Rose, Nebraska

Here's a short video about the church I attended during most of my growing-up years. I went to Sunday School and Vacation Bible School in the basement, played on the swings in the church yard, and took piano lessons in the parsonage. I know the people who talk about the church in the video. They are the parents of my childhood church friends.

It's so good to see that the Rose community is working together to preserve the little church!

I know that I have a few photos of the Rose Church that I took while visiting up there in 2002, but apparently I've never scanned them. The photo below shows the Rose Cemetery, right across the road from the church. Like the church, it has served the people of Rose for many years, and it continues to play an important role in the community.

The Spattered Silhouette

Friday afternoon art classes

When I was a little girl attending Duff Valley District 4, we all loved Friday afternoons. (I'm speaking for myself and the half-dozen other students in our little one-room schoolhouse.) Of course, Friday afternoons were wonderful because the weekend lay ahead. And the other reason that they were wonderful was that we had art class after last recess.

We all did the same art project, no matter which grade we were in -- kindergarten, eighth grade, or anything  between. Some of us cut, pasted, and colored a lot better than others, but before we went home on Friday afternoon, everyone's project was pinned to a bulletin board where it would be displayed for the next week or two. Seeing my handwork in comparison with the others motivated me to cut, paste, and color more neatly.

And we did do a lot of cutting, pasting, and coloring. Sometimes the teacher used the hectograph to copy a coloring sheet, and sometimes, we drew our own pictures. Sometimes we cut pieces from construction paper and pasted the pieces together to make a valentine or a turkey or whatnot.

A lot of our art work was flat, but I do remember some three-dimensional projects:  flowers cut from egg carton sections or made from crepe paper, mosaics made with shards of Easter-egg shells, and even a sculpture of a cow's head made from crumpled aluminum foil.

Once in a while, our teacher got out the water-paint boxes or mixed up a batch of tempera paint. We all painted whatever she announced our subject would be -- such as "trees in autumn colors." And once in a blue moon, we did a finger-painting.

We painted just often enough to make us super-excited when we got to do it again. I am not sure whether we painted so rarely because paints were expensive or because our teachers hated the mess.

I remember quite a bit of spatter painting.  It only required one color of paint, and the paint was applied with the teacher's close supervision, outside if the weather permitted. It only took a minute to do the spattering. The procedure was this:

• Draw or trace a shape and cut it out. 
• Lay the cut-out (or several cut-outs) on a sheet of construction paper.
• Put on a very large shirt, backwards.
• Dip the bristles of an old toothbrush in tempera paint and scrub the toothbrush over a small window screen so little drops of paint spray all over the paper.
• Let the paint dry and remove the cut-outs.

The day that I made my silhouette the teacher set up the filmstrip projector while we were gone to recess. When we came back inside, we took turns sitting in the projector's bright light and tracing each other's silhouettes. Then we cut out our silhouettes and spatter-painted them. I think I was in third or fourth grade at the time.

I did dozens of Friday afternoon art projects before I left country school at the end of 8th grade, but the only one I still have is my silhouette. I found it in my mother's things after she passed away.

I Say "Ky-oht" and You Say "Ky-oh-tee"

Coyotes, wolves, and coy-dogs

After hearing the coyotes howl for the last few nights, I read a little about the animal. One bit of trivia I picked up is that the word "coyote" comes from the Aztec word "coyotl", which is often translated as "trickster."

I came across some interesting spellings of the animal's name in old books: "cayute," "cayota," "cayeute," and so on. Today we have standardized the spelling, but pronunciations still vary. According to Merriam Webster's entry for the word, the primary pronunciation is \kī-ˈō-tē\ but in the West, it's sometimes pronounced \ˈkī-ˌōt\.

Coyote in Yosemite National Park
Photo source: Wikipedia

Well, I grew up using the Western pronunciation \ˈkī-ˌōt\ . To me, "coyote" rhymed with "my oat." And I was equally comfortable with \ˈkī-ˌyüt\  (rhymes with "my boot".) These were the pronunciations of northern Nebraska.

On the rare occasion that I heard someone say \kī-ˈō-tē\ , it was obvious to me that they knew coyotes only from watching "Wile E. Coyote" on TV. To me, the three-syllable pronunciation was an overly-fancy version that only a dude would say.

Over the years, I've amended that preconceived notion because I've learned that many rural folks in other parts do say \kī-ˈō-tē\.  However, I haven't changed my own way of saying the word. The three-syllable pronunciation will never feel right in my mouth.

I've also heard lots of people call them "wolves." But in my internal dictionary, the word "wolf" is used only for the larger wild dogs. To me, calling them "wolves" would feel just as silly as calling them \kī-ˈō-tēs\.

I base my mental image of a coyote on the animal I knew during my Nebraska childhood. The average male coyote there weighed  maybe 30 lbs. But in the eastern U.S., the native coyote is a bigger animal -- at least a third bigger on average (10 to 15 lbs. heavier) -- than the Nebraska coyote. DNA testing has revealed that some eastern coyotes carry wolf genes as a result of coyotes and wolves mating with each other.

So my notion that no coyote should be called a wolf is probably wrong, too. I read that these crossbreed coyotes are called "coy-wolves." Now I wonder how they pronounce that first syllable, "coy."  Is it \ˈkī\ or is it  \ˈkȯi\?

Range map of the coyote
Image from Wikimedia

Related:
Website of Jonathan Way, Ph.D., a Coy-Wolf expert

Highway 2, Sandhill Scenic Byway

One answer to an impossible question

Someone asked me today, "What's the most beautiful place you've ever seen?" I had a hard time answering that question, because I've been very fortunate. I've seen many beautiful places, and it's impossible for me to rate them.

One of the places that came to mind was the National Scenic Byway section of  Highway 2 from Grand Island, Nebraska, to Alliance, Nebraska. Charles Kuralt, longtime news reporter and host of the CBS television program, "On the Road", listed Highway 2 among the top ten most beautiful highways in the United States. I love what Kuralt said about it (italics added by me!)

From the first time I ever drove along it, I’ve been in love with Highway 2. It’s not so much that there’s a special something to see along Nebraska’s Highway 2. There’s a special nothing to see. From Grand Island to Alliance, Highway 2 takes you through the Nebraska Sandhills, the largest area of sand dunes in the western hemisphere. Writers inevitably use a metaphor of the sea to describe the hundreds of thousands of acres of grass – and hundreds of thousands of acres of sky. Like the sea the emptiness of the Sandhills gives the travelers a strange sense of comfort, there’s a feeling that as long as these two things are in order, the earth and the sky, all the rest can be forgotten until tomorrow. Highway 2 is not just another highway that goes somewhere, Highway 2 is somewhere.

"The emptiness of the Sandhills...the earth and the sky"
Photo by leish76

Life has taken me many places since my childhood in the Sandhills. In 2000, I visited Nebraska for the first time in about 15 years. I brought my children with me, and during our adventure, we drove part of the Highway 2 Scenic Byway. That was the first of several summer trips I made to the Sandhills with them.

When I came back from that first trip, I wrote a long account of our odyssey. After re-reading it tonight, I realized that the Sandhills will always feel like home to me, and no place on earth is more beautiful to the soul than home.  Here's a quote from myself about my first sighting of the Sandhills on that trip:

What a thrill it was to see the Sandhills again after so many years. I lectured the kids on the details of the landscape -- windmills, sand-capped hills, blowouts, lowland meadows, cattle herds, soapweeds, cow trails, ranch signs! My young Kentuckians listened with some interest to my dissertation, and they were impressed by the striking sparsity of trees, the big blue sky, and the immense and endless hills.

I doubt if I'll get back to Nebraska again with both kids. They've grown up, and they have their own responsibilities that tie them down. But I'm glad that I had the opportunity to show them the beautiful Nebraska Sandhills.  I'm glad that we drove part of the Highway 2 Scenic Byway, and I hope I'll get a chance to travel that road again, one of these days.

Related:

• A railroad runs alongside Highway 2 east of Alliance for many miles. The extra-long coal trains are the topic of dozens of YouTube videos. See http://youtu.be/Naj56kWmrSg for a Sandhill view of one of the empty trains, heading back to the Powder River Basin of Wyoming.
• The photo albums associated with the Nebraska Sandhills page on Facebook are wonderful. Flikr has some nice Sandhill photos too. 

Grass as far as the eye can see. The Sandhills prairie is
the largest area of natural grassland left in the United States.

Exploring the 1940 Census

Browse free of charge

US Census Bureau [Public domain]

I have been looking at several Nebraska counties in the 1940 census tonight, and it's been quite a trip down Memory Lane. The parents of my childhood friends were teenagers in 1940. My father and mother were 16.

You can browse the 1940 census for free at http://1940census.archives.gov/. Start by selecting the state, the county, and the Enumeration District (ED).  The 1940 street address will help you find the ED, or there may be a map or description of the EDs that will help. Once you've found the correct district, you can look through images of the actual census pages.

In northern Nebraska where I'm from, the populations were small. In most of the EDs, it's easy to find a name by going from one page to the next.  Rock County, Nebraska, for example, had just 16 EDs. A county map on the census site shows the ED locations. Of the county's 16 EDs, 14 of them have 10 pages of names or less.

In comparison, Christian County, Kentucky, had 34 Enumeration Districts.  A map of Hopkinsville shows the locations of EDs 1-10, but there's no county map for the remaining 24 districts. However, there are written descriptions of those districts' locations. Then, when the ED is pinpointed, there are up to 52 pages of names to look through!

And can you imagine trying to locate a family or an individual in hundreds (or thousands) of pages when you only know a vague location, such as "eastern Kentucky?" Most of us don't have enough time or patience for that sort of search.

Fortunately, the 1940 census is being converted from its original handwritten form to a digital database that can be searched by computers. Ancestry.com has several states completely indexed and available for search-by-name. Volunteers are indexing at the 1940 U.S. Census Community Project. According to Family Search, a participant in the Community Project, 68% of the 1940 census has been indexed in just 2-1/2 months.

I enjoyed browsing a few sparsely populated Nebraska counties tonight, but I'm waiting for the indexing to be complete before I attempt any serious searching. In a few months, the 1940 census will be much easier to navigate.

The Elkhorn Livestock Company

One of my unsolved mysteries

About five years ago, I found an old seal on eBay. Or maybe I should say that I found a seal-maker. When you insert a piece of paper and squeeze the handles of this little tool, you get a tidy embossed circle that says "Elkhorn Livestock Company, Bassett, Nebraska" around the edge and "Seal" in the center.

You may remember that Bassett, Nebraska, is my hometown. I grew up on a ranch out south of Bassett. So when I saw this nifty device that was connected to the place of my childhood, I bid $5 for it, and after a few days, I became its owner. No one else even bid on it. It was meant to be mine!

I was very curious about the seal's history, but the seller had no information to share. He found the seal in a box of stuff that he bought at an estate auction in Minnesota. He didn't even remember whose estate it was.

I wrote to the Rock County Historical Society and asked if they knew anything about the Elkhorn Livestock Company, but they had no information, either. And  I couldn't find anything about the company on the internet. So with little hope of ever learning anything about the Elkhorn Livestock Company, I filed my questions in the back of my mind.

Then, a few months ago, I was looking at a 1912 plat book of Rock County, Nebraska, on Ancestry.com, and I noticed a couple of landowners south of Bassett whose names are similar to "Elkhorn Livestock Company."

An "Elkhorn Valley Land Company" owned 2920 acres, all in one piece, in the northeast corner of Thurman Precinct. And an "Elkhorn Land and Cattle Company" owned an adjoining 360 acres in Lay Precinct. If these two outfits were one and the same, they owned over five sections in total, one of the larger spreads in that part of Rock County at the time.

I also found a possible clue in a 1911 book of discontinued American corporations and securities. It says that the Elkhorn Livestock Company (the name that's on the seal) of Embar, Wyoming*, cancelled its Nebraska charter in 1909. Maybe the "Elkhorn" names in the plat book are different than the name on the seal because of legal changes?

Tonight, I searched the internet again for "Elkhorn Livestock Company" and I learned that the University of Nebraska at Lincoln has a document that pertains. Box 4 of their Mari Sandoz papers includes the following:

Item 174. W.B. Hodge to Mari Sandoz, 1937, Nov. 10 [frame 1037]
Regarding Elkhorn Livestock Company; the hanging of Kid Wade; Doc Middleton; someone claims to be Mari's sister.

Kid Wade and Doc Middleton are well-known names in early Rock County history, so I'm virtually certain that this letter has information about "my" Elkhorn Livestock Company.

I sent the UNL library an email asking how to get a transcript of the letter's text or a photocopy of it. The library's website says that I should get a reply within 48 hours, and I'm waiting with keen anticipation to see what they say. Maybe the story of the seal's first owner will be revealed at last.


-------------------
*Researching the Elkhorn Livestock Company of Embar, Wyoming led to a strange discovery that I'll write about another time!

Sale of a Large Sandhill Ranch

Circle Cross Ranch at Valentine, Nebraska

The 40,000 acre Circle Cross Ranch near Valentine, Nebraska, sold at auction on Dec. 2, 2011, for $11.75 million. A seven-brother partnership, represented by Danny Weinreis of Minatare, Nebraska, and Gene Weinreis of Golva, North Dakota, placed the winning bid.

You can read more of the details in "Ranch sells for $11.75 million" on the Norfolk Daily News website. There's also a video tour on You-Tube. What a beautiful place! It includes 7 miles of Niobrara River frontage. I'm pleased to read that the Weinreis Brothers will continue operating it as a cattle ranch.

Larry of Arabia

Vintage photo from Arabia, Nebraska

In the 1950s and 1960s when I was growing up, Arabia, Nebraska, was just a set of corrals next to the railroad tracks. The headquarters of the Arabia Ranch (owned at that time by Johnny Drayton) was a mile or two across the meadow from the old cattle pens along the railroad. The only settlement around Arabia was the cluster of  little houses and bunkhouses where the Arabia Ranch employees lived.

Whenever I traveled through eastern Cherry County in the back seat of our family car, I watched for Arabia. Most of the scenery along Highway 20 was sandy, hilly pastures with occasional cows and windmills. In comparison, Arabia and the Arabia Ranch were rather interesting.

"Larry of Arabia", 1937.
Photo courtesy of Larry Wilson.
Used with permission.

After reading a post I wrote about my memories of Arabia, Larry Wilson sent me the photo at right, and gave me permission to share it on my blog. This photograph was made in 1937 at Arabia, Nebraska, and Larry Wilson was the young fellow posing as "Larry of Arabia". (I love how Larry of Arabia had one straggling sock. What a great photo!)

The Wilson family's automobile, a 1935 Pontiac, appears in the background. They were driving to Valentine, because Larry's father Lawrence was interviewing there as a school administrator. He was offered the job but did not accept it, and so the Wilsons did not move to Valentine.

I see that Highway 20 was paved in 1937. My father had childhood memories of a sandy road to Valentine that went through pastures. Travelers had to open and close some barbed-wire gates along the way. That was probably in the late 1920s, around the time that Highway 20 was commissioned as an official route.

I'm amused to see in the photo that a small tumbleweed has blown in and lodged itself against the population sign -- or maybe it is growing there. Some things don't change much.

Related posts:
Memories of Arabia, Nebraska
More about Arabia, Nebraska

The Hayfield Water Jug

Cool water in a hot place

My dad prepared thoroughly for the haying season. He overhauled all the tractors and hay-making machinery and got each component into the best working order possible. He stockpiled sickle sections and guards, rake teeth, sweep teeth, belts, hoses, tractor gas, oil and grease, hydraulic fluid, and so on. In the back of one of the pickups, he mounted the gas tank for fueling the tractors. He also mounted the wooden carrier that held the big Igloo water cooler where a thirsty hay hand could get a drink.

I didn't participate in the pre-season work in my father's machine shop, but I did make a new hayfield water jug every year. In the hayfield, I worked separately, away from the group that was putting up the cured hay. I was on the mowing machine at the edge of the uncut grass. I needed a personal water jug so I didn't have to travel far to get a drink.

Here's how I made my hayfield jug. I raided Mama's collection of jars and acquired a big glass vinegar or cider bottle. Then, I raided her cloth scraps and acquired some rags and pieces of old jeans.  I wrapped several layers of rags around the bottle, fitting the cloth to the curves, and I tacked the layers in place with enough stitches to hold them together.

Then, I enclosed the bottle in a layer of denim that I cut from the old jeans. I made some  tucks and folds so the denim would fit the bottle's shape, and I sewed it in place as neatly, tightly, and firmly as I could.

I didn't invent this method of making a hayfield jug. I watched my mother make them when I was a little child.

Every day, before I went to the hayfield, I filled my jug with cold water, and I also saturated its cloth shell. When I got to the hayfield, I found a shady place to stash it. The evaporation of the moisture from the cloth wrapper helped keep the water in the jug cool.

In the hayfield on a summer day, the hay crew got hot and dirty. We didn't have air-conditioned cabs on our tractors. The only shade was from our hats. Dust and pollen and chaff stuck to our sweat-dampened skin  and clothing. Sometimes we got off our machinery and worked up an extra sweat by moving hay around by hand or fixing something that was broken. The hottest work of all,  in my experience, was to lie in the prickly grass stubble under my windrower and pull a hot, wet, sappy clog of hay out of the crimper.

Sunbaked, gummy with sweat and dust, my arms green with grass juice after a crimper episode -- then, how sweet it was to pull my still-damp jug from its shady nook and drink deeply. If cool water ran down my face and soaked my shirt as I tipped the jug, it was a well-earned bonus.

By the end of the hay season, the denim cover of the water jug showed hard use. It had been damp to some degree all summer. It had lain on the ground and rolled around on the grimy floor of the pickup truck, day after day. The stitching had come loose in places, releasing odd folds of cloth, and threads had raveled where the cut edges of the denim were exposed. It didn't matter. By then, the water jug had served its purpose.

I would make a new jug next summer, as we prepared again to go to the hayfield.

Thanks for reading this memory of my childhood in the Nebraska Sandhills.

- - - - -

Related:
Hayfields I Have Known
The Hayfield
Newport, Nebraska: Hay Town
Bull Stories
Horse-drawn Hay Rake
Horse-drawn Hay Sweep-Rake

Hayfields I Have Known

Meadows I've mowed

Around Christian County, KY, the first cutting of hay has been taken, and across the nation, many farmers and ranchers are making hay. If you pass a hayfield, you should slow down, open your window, and breathe in the sweet scent of fresh-cut, sun-warmed hay. Ahhh. Hay has smelled like that for thousands and thousands of years -- there's a nice thought to enjoy.

I grew up on a cattle ranch in some of the best hay-producing country in the world -- Rock County in the Nebraska Sandhills. Making hay was the main work of the ranch every summer. All of my family's energy and focus was directed toward harvesting enough hay to feed the cattle during the next winter.

I spent seven summers mowing in the hayfield. The first year, I had a little tractor with a six-foot bar. It broke down a lot, so the next year, my dad put me on a better tractor with a new mowing machine that had a nine-foot bar. Don Saar, a grown-up neighbor boy, ran the double-bar mowing machine, and I followed him -- together, we did the mowing. A few years later, my dad got a self-propelled windrower, and on it, I became the only mower of our haying crew.

This rig predates my mowing years.

Several areas of the ranch were primarily hay-lands, and we always hayed them in a set order. First we cut the Little Meadow. just east of our house. (I am capitalizing because this name was just as official as the Black Hills or the Platte River. We never called that meadow by any other name.)  We always made haystacks on the Little Meadow. In the fall, my dad moved the stacks to a "stack yard" (a fenced enclosure) near the house. He saved those stacks for feeding the cattle on the very worst days of winter, because they were closest to home.

"Under the 1785 [Federal land surveying] ordinance, section 16 of each township was set aside for school purposes, and as such was often called the school section. Section 36 was also subsequently added as a school section in western states. The various states and counties ignored, altered or amended this provision in their own ways, but the general (intended) effect was a guarantee that local schools would have an income and that the community schoolhouses would be centrally located for all children."  (Quoted from Wikipedia)

After we finished the Little Meadow, we moved the hay equipment across the ranch road to a piece of land we called the "School Section". (In the early 1960s, the State of Nebraska sold the school sections in Rock County, and my dad bought a tract of the local school section that he had previously leased. I think it was about a third of the section.) Bloody Creek ran through that piece of land, and it always produced a lot of hay.

When we were done making haystacks on the School Section, we stacked the Big Meadow, which adjoined the south end of the School Section. Then, we went to the west side of the ranch, and mowed the meadows along Skull Creek. I think we always baled (made hay bales on) the west side of Skull Creek, because the bridge was not wide enough to pull the stacker across.

And finally, we went back to the extreme east side of the ranch and baled the Long Quarter. The Long Quarter was so named because it was 1/4 of a mile wide and l mile long (a quarter section of land). We had to cross John Dearmont's long quarter to get to our Long Quarter, so we always waited until John had finished haying before taking our equipment across his meadow.

There, on the Long Quarter, was Bloody Creek again, somewhat bigger and wetter than it had been on the School Section. And there were the angriest bumblebees of all the meadows on the ranch! They had been building their nests and hoarding their honey all summer long, and they didn't appreciate any disturbances. Someone nearly always had a bad encounter with them!

This photo of my brother was probably taken before I was born.

It was always exciting to mow around the sloughs (or "wetlands" as people say now) of the Skull and the Bloody. The challenge was to mow as much lush grass as possible without getting your tractor stuck in the mud. There were no set boundaries for what could be mowed. It varied from year to year. Sometimes I got off the tractor and waded through the grass ahead to feel how wet the ground was. And I always watched the tractor tires. If water started dripping off them or they were muddy (bad news!), it was time to get back to higher ground! And another bad omen was when the ground beneath the tractor tires began to quiver. (The soil was so saturated just below the surface that it was like a huge pudding with a slightly hardened crust.)

My dad hated "streaks" -- narrow strips of grass left unmowed because the person on the mowing machine was being careless. I had plenty of time to think while I was driving my tractor around the endless patches of grass, but every time I let my attention wander too far, I left evidence. And once a streak has been left, it's quite difficult to back up, drop the mower bar into all that loose hay, and mow that little narrow strip. Mower bars like nothing better than clogging up in loose hay.

Looking back now at the summers I worked in the hayfield, I realize that was my first experience with work responsibilities. I particularly remember being disgusted one Saturday when I wanted to spend the day at the rodeo. It was good haying weather, and my dad didn't want to let me off my windrower. I had to mow as late as possible the night before and mow a while in the morning before I could leave. I hadn't thought my hayfield job was that essential -- but of course it was.

I understand it all much better now. Our very livelihood depended on the hay.

My dad welded the hydraulic arm that's
 lifting the hay -- and built the tractor cab too!

Related:  
Newport, Nebraska: Hay Town
Horse-drawn Hay Sweep Rake
Horse-drawn Hay Rake
The Hayfield 

Great photo of an old-time hay crew on Flickr

Merchants of Ainsworth, Nebraska, 1912

Seen in old plat book of Brown County, Nebraska

Recently, I came across a 1912 plat book of Brown County, Nebraska. The original copy is held by the Library of Congress, and Ancestry.com has images of the pages.

Brown County, NE, Wikipedia image

In it, I found the locations of land that belonged to three sets of my ancestors (see endnote). They were all neighbors to each other in southwestern Brown County's Lakeland and Moon Lake precincts.

I recognized the names of many of their neighbors as people my dad knew. And I realized that I knew at least two of the 1912 landholders myself -- my great grandfather Charles Clark (who lived until 1972) and Jess McDaniel (whom I remember as an old man with white hair in the mid-1950s.)

My father, born in the Moon Lake area in 1923, had boyhood memories of going to Johnstown and Wood Lake with the wagon for supplies. These small villages west of Ainsworth were the closest settlements, and I think that's where my Mapes grand-uncle and my Hill, Fisher, and Clark grandparents would have gone for most supplies in 1912. Still, I am sure that they visited Ainsworth sometimes for legal matters, because Ainsworth was the county seat of Brown County.

Ainsworth probably seemed a large town to homesteaders. The platbook's images of Ainsworth show two-story commercial buildings and white frame houses with porches -- presumably the showiest structures in town.  (Scroll down about 2/3 of the way on this Brown County genealogy page for links to similar photos of Ainsworth in that era.)

As my ancestors drove down the dirt streets of Ainsworth in a horse-drawn wagon (prepared to haul home a load of supplies), they might have seen some of the following firms that advertised in the 1912 plat book:

Hotel and restaurant:
The Osborne House: "We have our own dairy, poultry and garden, and serve the best of everything. In winter, this is the warmest house in the northwest. Steam heat throughout. Meals are ready one hour before all trains. A large, well lighted sample room free. We want your business and will do our best to deserve it. Sportsmen's goods are cared for while you hunt or fish, without extra charge. If you can't stay all night, eat with us -- 'Every Little Bit Helps.'" Philip Mensinger, Prop.

Supplies for riding and driving horses
Sam Schneider & Son: "Harness, Saddlery Blankets, Robes, Whips, and other Horse Clothing and Leather Goods"

Three places to rent or board a horse:
Fisk Livery Feed & Sale Stable
Fry Bros. Livery and Feed Barn
S. B. Turner Proprietor, Livery, Feed, and Sale Barn. "Driver Furnished if desired."

Metal and Wheel Work
Henry Coad, Blacksmith and Wheelwright:  "Repairing a specialty"

Two dentists (I shudder to think!)
G.D. Shipherd, Dentist
Dr. J. M. Jessen, Dentist

Two newspapers
The Brown County Democrat: "A country newspaper, published where the corn and potatoes grow, in the heart of a rich agricultural district."
The Star Journal

Produce dealer
Ross Smith: "Buyer of Cream, Poultry, and Country Produce"

Two banks
Citizen's State Bank,
National Bank

Two auctioneers
Col J. H. Hart: "Many years of practical service in his line have demonstrated his ability. See him if you are thinking of having a sale."
Claude E. Smith: "Have you sold or rented your farm? That's your business. Are you going to have a sale? That's everybody's business. Do you need a good auctioneer? That's MY business."

Four Real Estate Agents
(It was not uncommon for people to homestead, gain title to their land after five years, and then sell it.)
Richardson & Suell, Real Estate & Insurance Agents
Geo. P. Reynolds, The Land Man
McSweeney Land Company
Northwestern Land Company

Wells
 (I notice that this fellow doesn't dig wells. He drills them.)
Thos. S. Bower, Well Drilling and Boring, Tanks, Pumps, and Supplies

Lawyers
A. W. Scattergood, Attorney at Law
Wm. M. Ely, Attorney at Law 

Modern technology
Ainsworth Telephone Company
Reeves & Bailey Automobiles

Two lumber yards and coal dealers
Krotter & Hall Lumber Co.: "Dealers in Building Materials, Coal, Hardware, Grain and Implement, Yards at Long Pine, Johnstown, Crookston, Georgia, and Merriman." (These little towns were east and west of Ainsworth on the railroad.)
Excelsior Lumber Co.: "Lumber, Coal, Flour, Feed, Grain, Agricultural Implements, Buggies, and Farm Wagons. Roller Mill and Elevators."

Building contractors and subcontractors:
W. E. Moseley, Building Contractor
L. P. Barnes Concrete: "Sidewalks, Porches, Doors, Door and Window Caps and Sills, Foundations"

Shopping:
Munson & Howe General Merchandise
Baldwin Brothers: "Hardware, Paints, Oils, Furniture, Carpets, Rugs"
H. House & Son: "Fine Furniture"
Suell & House Clothing
Larson & Son: "Merchant Tailors"

Note:
I usually say that my ancestors had ranches in southwestern Brown County, because the Sandhill land was much better for grazing, than it was for farming. One of them is officially listed as a "stockman" in the back of the 1912 plat book. However, if my ancestors homesteaded under the original Homestead Act, they were required to farm (to plow and plant) a portion of the land. I have found the homestead papers for the Clark and Hill grandparents and the Mapes great-uncle, but not the Fisher grandparents. I have not researched what homestead requirements any of them had to meet.

Pioneer Stories of Brown County, Nebraska

Names in Brown County history

I've been lurking around eBay quite a bit lately, and not surprisingly, I found a book that I needed -- Pioneer Stories of Brown, Keya Paha and Rock Counties, in Nebraska, published in 1980 by the Brown County Historical Society. (Brown and Rock counties are where I was born and raised.) I bid on the book and was happy when I won it.

Today, the book arrived in the mail, and I'm a little disappointed. The title is misleading. The Brown County section of the book has 581 pages. The Keya Paha County section has 165 pages. And the Rock County section has 16 pages -- yes, 16 pages. The book should have been titled Pioneer Stories of Brown County, Nebraska and subtitled With Additional Stories from Keya Paha and Rock Counties.

Despite the shockingly-short Rock County section, the book is interesting. I don't regret buying it. Leafing through the Brown County pages, I see many surnames that I recognize. I don't know the people at all, but I know their names.

My dad's mother was a Brown County resident most of her life and an enthusiastic genealogist. Sometimes Grandma Nora came to visit us for a week or two at a time when I was a kid. I remember her sitting at the dining room table with her embroidery, talking on and on about who was related to whom. Because of her, I recognize Brown County names like Hulshizer, Schipporeit, Bejot, Kackmeister, Wolcott, Mundorf, and Klapper. (I think some of the Kackmeisters may be cousins of my family -- we may share a great-grandmother or our great grandmothers may have been sisters. Then again, I could be wrong about that.)

Some Brown County names in the book do have personal meaning to me. The Gudgels drilled many wells for my dad. When I was little, we attended church in Ainsworth with the Bollers and Lotspieches, and my parents were always friendly with them. The Babcocks and Mengers lived in the western expanses of the community where I grew up. And there are other names that stir memories of faces and experiences.

Regrettably, no one from my family wrote up any of our history for this book. My great-grandparents on my dad's side of the family were homesteaders in Brown County, too. My great-grandfathers' surnames were Clark and Hill, and my great-grandmothers' surnames were Fisher and Mapes.

First Church of the Nazarene in Ainsworth, NE

Postcard from the 1950s

Some of the Nebraska folks who read this blog may recognize the building on this postcard even though it no longer exists. It is the First Church of the Nazarene in Ainsworth, Nebraska. The photograph was probably taken in the 1950s. About 1960, this building was torn down and a larger, stone building took its place on the corner of Third and Elm.

The building in the photograph is where I formed my earliest memories of going to church. I think I was about 3 years old  (definitely not more than 4 years old) when we started attending church there.

I don't remember Sunday School classes at all, though I am sure I attended them. I do remember the church basement -- how interesting! You could go down the steps in the church, walk through the basement hallways, climb the steps at the other end, and come out in the pastor's house.

I remember sitting with my parents in a big room in the basement and singing "This World Is Not My Home". Everyone sang, "The angels beckon me from heaven's open door..." and that reminded me of my Aunt Becky.

Outside this church, one night after prayer meeting, my brother Dwight punched a little boy who wouldn't let go of me. I was very thankful to be rescued. I asked Dwight about this a few years ago, and he still remembers it too.

Another time, one of the little church boys threw a tin can from the trash barrel at me. It cut my forehead between my eyebrows, and I have a small, faint scar from it to this day. I won't tell the names of those naughty little boys, but I still remember who they were.

At the Church of the Nazarene, people called each other "Brother" and "Sister". I believe I remember a Brother Roy Morrow who was the pastor when I was very young. (Hadn't my mother cautioned me that "roy" hamburger would make me sick? How odd that a man had that word for his name!)

After that, Brother James Tapley was the pastor. (Sister Tapley, his pretty, young wife, put a band-aid on my wounded forehead.) Later, as I recall, Brother Hiram Sanders was the pastor.* These pastors served in the 1950s and early 1960s.

The various parts of the worship service were planned and orderly, but there was always room for the Holy Spirit to move. People said "Amen!", "Hallelujah!", and "Praise the Lord!" whenever they especially liked the singing, praying, or preaching. Sometimes after the sermon, people went to the front of the church, knelt at the altar, prayed aloud, and cried, while the piano played softly on and on.

My mother was brought up in the Methodist church. My father was not brought up in any named church, but there were Holiness and Pentecostal influences in his childhood. I imagine that when he and my mom decided to start attending church, the Church of the Nazarene felt familiar and right to him.

My parents became members of the Ainsworth Church of the Nazarene about 1954 or 1955. We lived south of Johnstown, then. In 1957, we moved to the Duff Valley in southern Rock County. We still went to church in Ainsworth for a while, and then we began attending the little E.U.B. (Evangelical United Brethren) Church at Duff, just a few miles from our house.

The Ainsworth church was my parents' first Nazarene church. In the early 1980s, they helped to found a Church of the Nazarene in Wheatland, Missouri; it was their second Nazarene church. In other times and places, they attended various other churches, but they remained members of the Church of the Nazarene throughout their lives.

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*Brother Sanders was a pastor at the Ainsworth Nazarene Church after we moved to Rock County. He is remembered by my family for getting spectacularly stuck in the mud when he came to visit us one spring day.

Brother Sanders was from the East, and he had heard that, on the Sandhill ranches, a road might be nothing more than a faint trace of wheels. He was driving down our ranch road when he saw our house on the opposite side of a low, wet meadow. He decided he should leave the graded road and drive straight across the meadow to our house. He thought he could see a "road". Soon his car was buried in mud.

Brother Sanders walked to our house, but no one was there. He waited for a while, and still no one was around. Finally, he decided to start a tractor and pull his car out by himself. Soon he had the tractor stuck in the mud, too -- and then, another tractor. When we arrived home, he was thinking about starting the crawler. 

My dad winched his car out and got him headed back to town before dark. The ruts in the meadow are probably still there!

The Johnstown Tornado of 1899

A twister in the Nebraska Sandhills

Wikipedia says that there are ten Johnstowns in the United States. Johnstown, Nebraska, the subject of this post, is surely the smallest member of the ten. Its population in 2000 was only 53. Nonetheless, this speck of dust on the map is interesting to me because it was once my address. Until I was six, my family lived on a ranch about ten sandy miles south of Johnstown.

I recently came across an account of a tornado near Johnstown, Nebraska, in 1899. Mr. A. H. Gale, a volunteer weather observer from Bassett, Nebraska,  recorded the event. He stated that the tornado started as a whirlwind about 5 miles northwest of Johnstown.

Gale reported that Mr. A. Brown witnessed the formation of the tornado, as he stood in his barnyard harnessing his horse. Mr. Brown saw a little whirlwind pass by, ruffling the straw eaves of his barn's thatched roof. As he watched the whirlwind's movement across the ground, it gained intensity, grew taller, and began to pick up plant debris and dirt. A "smokey veil" formed around the column of spinning air. (This was probably a swirl of fine dust.)

Mr. Brown observed with curiosity, but not fear. Then, as the whirlwind grew larger, darker, and taller, a funnel reached down to meet it from a low-hanging storm cloud overhead. The article says that "with this union the thing took on a terrifying aspect..."

Gale's report does not mention damage to Mr. Brown's property. Probably the tornado passed out of the immediate area before it was big enough to wreak havoc. It moved along slowly -- Mr. Brown estimated its speed to be 10 mph. Soon it passed through a cornfield, adding cornstalks to its whirling mass. Then it destroyed the buildings at Mr. John Strohm's homestead:

Mr. Strohm and his family saw it as it rose along the slant of the cornfield to his house on its edge, and dove for the cellar. The destruction at this place was complete; house of heavy logs, windmill, and tower, and stable, in all seven buildings, completely leveled to the ground, fences upset, broken down. Fence wire woven and interwoven with broken lumber, straw, debris of all sorts, plastered with mud. Every fence post standing in the track formed a dam around which was massed debris of everything imaginable, the whole daubed with mud; it was a picture of desolation and ruin -- dismal in the extreme.

Source: The Making of America, by William Matthews Handy, Charles Higgins, Volume 7, page 399. Published in 1905 by John D. Morris & Company.

Before it dissipated, the twister traveled for about 18 miles in an east/southeast direction. It probably passed through or near the land that became my parents' ranch, half a century later. Its path varied from less than 20 feet wide to about 50 feet wide. The report does not mention any injury or loss of life, either of livestock or people. If true, that was fortunate indeed.

In the time period when this tornado took place, many areas of the Nebraska Sandhills were still being homesteaded. Tornadoes must have been especially frightening for immigrants who had never seen weather phenomena of this sort in their homelands.

NOAA photo of a tornado at Cordell, Oklahoma

Related:
Top ten killer tornadoes in Nebraska
A tornado funnel that may be like the formation Mr. A. Brown witnessed

The Winter of 1948-1949

A long season of deep snow and cold temperatures

I wasn't born until 1951, so I didn't experience the winter of 1948-49, but I've heard stories about it all my life.

My parents, along with my brother Dwight who was a toddler, were living on a ranch some ten miles south of Johnstown, Nebraska. The first major snowstorm hit in November of 1948. More snow followed, but around Christmas, it warmed up a little. My parents were able to get to town in the Jeep for supplies. They didn't get back to town again until sometime in late February.

Earl Monahan's Sandhill Horizons (pp.280-284, published in 1987 by Earl H. Monahan) also notes the break in the weather that allowed them to open the roads and get to town around Christmas. At the holidays, the snow was about a foot deep at the Monahan ranch, out in the Sandhills northeast of Hyannis, NE.

On Sunday, January 2, 1949, the Blizzard of  '49 moved in. By the next morning, the temperature was -4°F. and it was snowing hard with a howling wind that created white-out conditions. The blizzard continued through Monday and Tuesday.

On Wednesday, January 5, the sun finally shone again. There were huge drifts, and the wind was stirring the loose snow into a ground blizzard. The effort to locate and feed the cattle in the deep snow began.

Monahan wrote that when the wind died down, they had a few days of moderate weather. Then the weather went bad again -- starting on January 8th,  frequent snowstorms and extremely cold temperatures prevailed until the wintry assault finally slackened in mid-February. The February 7, 1949, edition of Time magazine reported that Wyoming, Nebraska, and South Dakota had 18 snowstorms in 27 days following the initial blizzard in early January.

The Monahan Ranch owned a TD-9 crawler, and it was a tremendous help in feeding the cattle during those long weeks of deep snow. They were able to plow their way to the herds, but the crawler had to be brought home and kept inside every night so it would start again. (The diesel gelled if it got too cold.)

Credit: Blizzard image from Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Detroit Publishing Company Collection.

Operation Snowbound and Operation Haylift

Loup County is located in the Sandhills of north-central Nebraska, east of the Monahan Ranch and just south of Rock County where I grew up. My Loup County (NE) centennial book contains the following description of that terrible winter.

The Blizzard of 1949 hit Loup County like a rocket and all was at a standstill. Cars and trucks were immobilized by drifts ten to thirty feet high. In the surrounding countryside, cattle were frozen stiff in standing position. Farmers and ranchers were isolated. When the airports were finally cleared, the Army flew supplies and troops for "Operation Snowbound," a month long program to help suffering familes, ranchers, and farmers. Mom remembers planes dropped food and medical supplies to the Loup County residents that were snowbound in the Sandhills[, s]ome of whom never made it to town until spring.

Source: Story of the J.U. & Delpha Predmore family on page 123, Loup County - Taylor, Neb. Centennial 1993-1983. Published by the Loup County Centennial Committee, no publishing date cited.

When I was a college student in Missouri, I was introduced to a friend's father. Jim Gentry was a heavy equipment operator, who had helped construct the Alaska Highway during World War II. As soon as he heard that I was from Nebraska, he began talking about the Blizzard of 1949.

I don't know the story of how Jim got the job for Operation Snowbound, but in early 1949, he was sent to northeastern Nebraska to drive a snowplow and open the roads to snowbound farms. He worked from dawn to dark every day, and the farm families fed him and gave him a bed, wherever he was. Thirty years later, he still marveled at the experience.

Operation Haylift was carried out by the Army Air Corp. Airmen dropped bales of alfalfa hay out of airplanes to starving herds of sheep and cattle. Many had not been fed for weeks. A terrible number of livestock and wild animals perished from hunger, thirst, exposure, and injury. Some ranchers lost 50% of their herds or even more.

I found several aerial images of the snow-covered prairies in 1949 at the Life photo archive. An image search for "Blizzard of 1949" brings up many interesting snapshots and websites. There's also an excellent video on YouTube: "The Blizzard of 1949: A Nebraska Story".

The entire north-central area of the United States, as far west as Utah, Nevada, and Montana, had a bad winter that year. However, Nebraska was one of the hardest-hit states, and so it has more than its fair share of the snow photographs and stories from the Winter of 1948-1949.

Related articles on Prairie Bluestem:
Blizzard of 1949 Stories
Ready for Winter
Winter Memories
1952 South Dakota Blizzard Story

Troubles with Horses

Life in a cow town

Valentine, Nebraska in 1911

The following news items are from the Sept. 3, 1903, "Talk of the Town" section of the Valentine Democrat (published in Valentine, Nebraska). It was a bad week for horses and their owners and riders.

• Miss Anna Ashburn was bucked off a horse at the ranch last week and hurt her head and shoulders. She was brought to town and is getting along all right.

• Frank Frush has had a streak of luck lately. Frank thinks it was bad. He was roping a heifer Tuesday of last week when his horse's feet slipped out from under him and fell across Frank's leg smashing his ankle and while yet using a crutch was out Saturday helping cut out some cattle to ship when his horse fell again and dislocated his right shoulder. Dr. Dwyer set it a half hour later and he's doing first rate now.

• Obe Church had his team hitched to a spring wagon and standing in front of his store last Friday when it became scared at the sunshade flopping in the wind and started to run. The horses ran across the street in front of the meat market of Henry Stetter and came near running into the building but whirled down the side walk and out in front of the postoffice taking out a couple of porch posts, then across to the corner of the Palace saloon where they were caught. Obe went around with his hammer and fixed things up.

And in the public notices on page 5:

• Lost, strayed, or stolen. One bay pony mare, white face, five years old, weighs about 750 pounds, broke to ride, has saddle marks, small sore right cheek from blind tooth, branded 2 2 on left hip. Raised on Rosebud agency by an Indian named Ben Hungry. Liberal reward will be paid for recovery. M. Webber, Ft. Niobrara, Nebr.

Valentine is located in the northeast corner of Cherry County, Nebraska. On the northern edge of the Sandhills, Valentine was an important shipping center for livestock -- in other words, it was a "cow town". There were probably as many horses in town as there were people -- maybe more.

The Rosebud Agency was (is) an Indian reservation, just across the state line in South Dakota. The soldiers at Ft. Niobrara, a few miles east of Valentine, were there to discourage any uprisings.

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We sometimes shopped in Valentine when I was little. We lived south of Johnstown, Nebraska then, roughly 35 miles southeast of Valentine. I've written about my memories of going to the Valentine post office with my mother.

Newport, Nebraska: Hay Town

The Gilg family's hay shipping heritage

In the pioneer days of Nebraska, many villages formed and (with luck)  flourished. Many of the little prairie towns had distinct personalities. Farm towns were centers where farmers bought and sold. Cow towns developed along the railroads, as shipping centers for the cattle of the Great Plains. And hay towns were shipping centers for Nebraska's great natural resource, the wild hay of the prairies.

Newport, Nebraska was established by the railroad as a hay town in the early 1880s. Located in the heart of northern Nebraska's hay country, Newport became the largest hay-shipping center in the world within a few years, a distinction noted in various books of the period:

... [A] little northwestern town, Newport, ships more hay than is marketed from any one other point in the world. (Source: The Strategy of Great Railroads (p. 206) by Frank Hamilton Spearman. Published by C. Scribner's Sons, 1904)

As an example of the quality of the lands, Rock County actually ships more hay to market via The North-Western Line from the town of Newport than is shipped to market from any other one point anywhere in the world... (Source: The Open Door to Independence: Making Money From the Soil (p. 129), by Thomas E Hill. Published by Hill Standard Book Co., 1915)

Nebraska is the first State in the Union in the production of prairie hay and grass. The largest hay-shipping station in the world is within her borders — Newport, Rock County. (Source: The Encyclopedia Americana: A Library of Universal Knowledge (p. 25), published by Encyclopedia Americana Corp., 1919.

When prairie hay was marketed, it was tightly packed and tied into square bales that stacked nicely in a boxcar or warehouse. Hay shipping offices weighed the hay and coordinated the supply with the demand. The photo at right, provided by Bob and Elaine Gilg of Newport, NE, shows horse-drawn hay trailers ("hay racks") of baled hay waiting for the train in Newport.

The Gilg family operated a hay shipping business and later, a lumber yard in Newport for over 80 years. Joseph Gilg, hay shipper, is mentioned by Keith Terry in his book Nebraska's Cowboy Trail, A User's Guide (p.67) The hay business was purchased by Mr. Gilg in 1915, a time when Newport was busy with hay nearly every day of the year.

The image below shows the office of Newport Lumber (in earlier days, the hay shipping office) when it was sold at auction several years ago. Elaine wrote that the office interior remains today much the same as it appears in the vintage photos at the end of this article.

Hay was a vital commodity because hay-eating animals -- horses, mules, and oxen -- performed much of the nation's work and provided much of the transportation until automobiles and tractors came into widespread use. The marketing of hay was an important industry, and investors studied the hay market much as they might watch the price of crude oil today.

The vast meadows between O'Neill and Bassett, Nebraska, were (and still are!) some of the most productive grasslands in the world. Today, much of the hay is used and sold locally for cattle on area ranches. Some hay is still shipped to distant buyers, but it is transported by trucks. The railroad line that served Newport has been closed since my childhood.

The Gilg hay office in Newport, Nebraska

Thanks for sharing these images, Bob and Elaine. I should add that the photos were of particular interest to me because I grew up in Rock County, Nebraska, where Newport is located. Elaine is a cousin's cousin to me, through the Davis family. My great-aunt Goldie Clark Davis and Elaine's uncle Paul Davis (of Ainsworth, Nebraska) were husband and wife.

Related articles in the Prairie Bluestem archives:
Before Cars, The Importance of Hay
Reports of Prairie Fires and Wolves
The Hayfield
Remembering Pony Lake School

Credit: Map of Newport's location from Wikipedia.

Grasses of the Nebraska Prairies, 1903

Grasslands of Brown County, Nebraska

The Charlie Youngman Ranch, Brown County, Nebraska,
about 1900. Photographer: Solomon Butcher

In a century-old book digitized by Google, I found an interesting fact about Brown County, Nebraska.

At the 1903 state fair, Brown county exhibited over 160 varieties of native grasses, which was twenty-five more than were shown by any other county. For the most part these were forage grasses, and they indicate that Brown county was intended by nature to be the home of cattle and horses. It is not uncommon for them to go through the winter entirely upon the range, though this is not to be depended upon. Probably, the largest single interest in the county is its cattle, and for several years past they have brought to the county a large income.

Source: Resources of Nebraska (page 25), by the Nebraska Bureau of Labor and Industrial Statistics, published in 1904.

It should be noted that buffalo, elk, deer, antelope and many other forms of wildlife made good use of Brown County's grasslands long before they were "intended by nature" as a home for cattle and horses.

Science, a 1901 publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, states that 170 different species of grass had been identified in the Nebraska Sandhills. What a wealth of grass! Brown County's exhibit of over 160 different grasses may have represented a variety of Sandhills grasses along with other native grass species. The terrain of Brown County is varied.

Brown County is located in north central Nebraska, near the South Dakota state line. It borders on the east with Rock County, where I grew up. My father grew up at Moon Lake, in southwestern Brown County.

Related:
2.4 MB high definition version of the Solomon Butcher photo at the top of this post
Photos from the O'Hare Ranch in western Brown County

These photo tours have some nice shots of the Sandhills prairie, though no images from Brown County:
Photo tour of the Sandhills and northwestern Nebraska
Another photo tour of the Sandhills

UPDATE:
The primeval prairies of Brown County are described in a little book published in 1937, Days of Yore, Early History of Brown County, Nebraska, compiled by Lillian L. Jones. The following quote is from the section about "Early History".

Let us try to imagine what this portion of Nebraska was like before the coming of the white settlers. A great expanse of prairie, slightly rolling, spread out on every side as far as the eye could reach, most of it covered with a rich growth of grass. Some varieties of this grass were tall with stiff, straight stems, some of low growth with delicate, curling blades. Here and there were running streams which were hidden in canyons or ravines where trees and shrubs were found, but until the edge of the canyon was reached the entire country appeared to be "a sea of grass," which stretched ever on and on toward the setting sun.

In the section titled "Ainsworth, Reminiscent", Jones mentions another first prize won at the State Fair for a native grass collection. The winning collection of "nearly one hundred varieties of native grasses found in this county" was made by C. W. Potter, W. H. Peck and J. E. Stauffer.

Sand Tables in the 1916 Classroom

Sand table in a rural school remembered

At Duff Valley District 4, the one-room school I attended as a child, we had a sand table. It was a sturdy, wooden box about 2 feet wide, 3 feet long, and 6 inches deep, supported by 4 legs. The outside of the table was painted a sickly shade of pale green, and the inside held about two inches of sand.

I suppose that someone's father made it for the school and filled it with clean sand from a blowout in his pasture. Sand is one thing that is plentiful in the Nebraska Sandhills.

Sometimes we played at the sand table when we spent recess inside or when we finished all our schoolwork. However, I don't remember any special toys for the sand table. By the time I was in fifth grade or so, the teacher had dumped out the sand and was using the table to store a set of Funk & Wagnall encyclopedias that my mother had donated to the school.

I had never considered the age of that sand table, but after reading about sand tables in the 1916 issues of Primary Education, I suspect it might have been a couple of generations older than me.

According to Primary Education a scene constructed in a sand table was an excellent educational device. For example, a teacher's classroom activities during the county fair included a model fair in the sand table:

The children constructed a fair in the sand-table, placing booths and a merry-go-round, and pasteboard people, horses, cows, etc. Each child also made a toy merry-go-round to take home. These were made from the given pattern during the drawing and construction periods, thus giving lessons in tracing, some measurements, cutting, coloring and construction. (Source)

How-to books for sand table scenes were offered for sale in the advertisement section of the magazines. In the articles, many sand table scenes are described:

• A zoo and a cherry orchard
• Springtime
• A millinery store
• Holland
• A Dutch sand table
• A Japanese tearoom
• Animals of Africa, an African village, and the Sahara Desert
• Farming in the rain belt vs. dry farming
• A barnyard (for use in Language, Science, and Hygiene lessons)
• The Pied Piper of Hamelin

The frequent mention of the sand table in this teachers' magazine suggests that it was an effective teaching and learning tool. If it seems odd or quaint, remember the times. In 1916, the students weren't jaded by electronic wonders, and teachers didn't have today's myriad of resources.

A sand table was so simple and inexpensive to make that any school could have one -- even our little country school out in the Nebraska Sandhills. However, I think our sand table was just a relic by the time I came along in the late 1950s. Our teachers were using modern technology to enhance our learning -- the phonograph, the hectograph, and the filmstrip projector!

Also in Google Books: Primary Education magazines from 1894 through 1923