September 2008 Archives

Again, a family photo of Otto and Ella Koftan Adel and their children.   In the archives is a previous entry about [Great] Aunt Ella and her three children, Raymond and the twins Lloyd and Lorraine.  [Great] Aunt Babe [Margaret Koftan Langhammer] had said her sister Ella--12 years older--and her first husband, Otto, were buried in Witten, where Otto farmed and the children were born.  He had been shell-shocked in World War I, again according to Aunt Babe, dying in 1937 after some years of disability, while the children were young.  Going up there to help with the children, Aunt Babe mentions that Witten was on the edge of the Rosebud Indian Reservation (near the northwest corner of it):  "Witten was a small town with wooden sidewalks.  The roads were everywhere, as there were no fences, just wide open."  

She also mentions that "At one time, Bess and Ella lived close.  Ott would be in and out of the hospital.  At that time Bess and the kids were living in Witten and Lee was running a barber shop. . . . He had jobs such as barbering and showing movies. . . . Ella helped her out a lot of times." 

Because she had said Ella was buried at Witten, after Mills and the Olive Branch Cemetery, Sue, Jim, and I headed up there, northwest of Winner.  Again, like most small towns, we found little left, a few main street buildings, but a number of residences clinging to the site.  Near a community hall an older man directed us to the Witten Cemetery north of the village, about as abandoned as they come.  I should have taken photos.  Fenced, entirely overgrown in tall grass, the few graves obscured in that grass, it was as unkept with a ramshackle gate as Mills' Olive Branch is neatly trimmed.

With no luck, we returned to Witten to ask where the other cemetery might be the man had mentioned and ended up discovering that Calvin and Jean Adel had an impeccably neat home on the south edge of town, a retired couple who were most hospitable and helpful.  (Otto was Calvin's uncle, I believe.)  Earlier this year they had had an Adel reunion at which Lorraine's two daughters, the only ones left of Otto and Ella's family, were photographed, Connie Meyer in the brown and Donna in the red.  Jean allowed me to take a photo of the two photos of the women.  Sue and I are most grateful for Calvin and Jean's kindness to family strangers.

Whereas I have an entry about our 1948 trip to Yellowstone when we stayed briefly with Aunt Ella and her sons, I had not known--or had forgotten--until Labor Day Sunday that Mom had taken Grandpa and my little sisters up to Isabel to visit Ella, then staying with her daughter, Lorraine and Harold Meyer.  Jean set us straight that Otto and Ella were buried in the large Winner cemetery on the north side of town and gave us excellent directions.  She advised us to go in the back or west way, though the big gates are on the east side.  We were overwhelmed by the size and number of graves, but she had specified the northeast corner.  I told Sue to turn at a small north-south cross-road and park under some trees before we separated to start walking the rows.  We all were rueful about the potential job in late afternoon, so I cannot begin to convey our amazement when Sue, driving, got out of the car and gasped.  By wildest coincidence that still makes us laugh in disbelief, we were parked immediately in front of the gravesite, right by the roadway.

Another cause for surprised coincidence was the grave seen in the next row behind Otto's tall veteran's marker, Beranek.  Those following my family blog will recall that the Beranek Cemetery in Pawnee County, Nebraska, is the small country cemetery where Great Great Grandmother Rose Hlinvovsky, her daughter, son-in-law, and two grandchildren are buried, northwest of Table Rock.

Though against the low sun and thus poor, this photo is to help anyone looking for the grave.  The little cross-road we parked on is back at the two trees over the main road. 

As I mentioned in the previous entry, the Outhouse cousins had pointed out the Chapin photo on their picture walls, and the local one said a Chapin still lived in the area, at Ainsworth, I think.  The cemetery closest to Mills has four Chapin graves, as I found.  If you look back at the photo overlooking the deep wooded depression containing Mills, you will see that the road dips sharply down, then back up to a flat just west of the community.  About a mile or two west beyond Mills is the well-kept Olive Branch Cemetery with its neatly trimmed trees.  My photo looks northeast and is of the eastern gate.

  A list of its tombstones is online but proved to be a bit confusing.  When I was there in June and took the scenic photo of Mills, I couldn't find the family graves.  I had overlooked the note that the graves were catalogued in east-west rows when I had assumed north-south rows.  So at that time I could find only the more obvious Chapin graves, below. 

An additional problem was that, where there once were probably some other kind of markers, wooden or metal, for some of the Chapin graves small, simple home-made cement markers simply inscribed are easily overlooked. 

That includes the one most significant for our family, Levi/Lee and Bozena/Bess, with their daughter, Josephine.

In the two landscape photos, to show context, [Great] Aunt Bess, her husband, and daughter are in the lower left corner and lower center, respectively.  After my June failure, I was overjoyed to find the grave.

Grandpa Koftan, Laurence John, was the oldest of Joseph and Frances Hlinbovsky Koftan's children.  Third was his sister Bozena, known as Bess, born 20 September 1894.  I have some earlier photos of her but here use two good ones when she appears on either side of, say, 20.

Here are two photos, early and late, with her husband, Levi/Lee Chapin.

 According to Margaret Koftan Langhammer (Great Aunt Babe), they had two children, Joe and Josephine.  She said the daughter was retarded; we understood handicapped.  At any rate, on 21 November 1927 in Ainsworth where Bess had taken Josephine for treatment,  she threw kerosene in a stove with coals, and both burnt to death.  Lee married again, though Aunt Babe says, "It didn't last."  His son, Joe, moved to Missouri.

Now I have to switch gears entirely, because, though Lee and Bess lived for a time in Witten, South Dakota, where Ella and Otto Adel lived, Mills, Nebraska, seems a Chapin center, judging from what we discovered over Labor Day Sunday, the same day my sister and brother-in-law and I went to the Peters homestead and collapsing Moriaville School..  Like most disappeared villages, including my hometown of Center, Mills was once a fair-sized settlement, as these old photos attest.

   North of Newport and the Peters homestead, Mills is in Keya Paha County, not far south of the South Dakota border (north of Newport on 137 about 20 miles, five west on 12, one-two northwest on gravel).  What remains is in a very scenic little valley and area.  The view northwest, on this side of the intermittently visible gravel road west, in the trees, are some residences, a small community church, and a large, rambling communal hall with attached rooms that has become a genealogical center/historical museum/reunion spot created and maintained by two cousins from the Outhouse family--that's a Dutch name--their own family history available in several telephone-book-sized volumes.  I met both, the Oklahoma City man who owns it, willed to him by his mother, who comes up summers, and his local cousin, who handles it the rest of the year.  Both are affably chatty and willing to show you all the accumulated bits and pieces of the past as well as an astonishing long, huge wall of photos that area people have contributed of their families.  One such photo of family interest is at the end of this entry,     

As with the preceding Mariaville entry, I will repeat some photos with a pair not seen before and then show the site today.  Cousin Denny Ellingson bought the stained-glass section at the top of the living room window; it is in Cousin Penny Mindemann's house now.  The original homestead house:

I don't know the dates of these two rather poor photos, but I'd guess the 1940s, the one on the left maybe even in the early 1950s, based upon the number of trees.  Grandpa L. J. Koftan planted shelterbelts east and north of the house, the northern one evident in the aerial photo. 

In the aerial below, the Mariaville School can be seen at the upper right.  The store would've been on this side of the road and the long-gone post office to the right out of view.  Notice how bare the fields are, no trees.  This was the familiar farm Up West we knew well, even the wash on the line.  This was where we froze up the narrow, steep staircase in the unheated upstairs bedrooms, we repapered the walls and I caught all the little mice and put them in the slop bucket when Audree and Earl moved up here, where Grandpa butchered in the corn crib and I had to crawl under the hen house and get the baby skunks out, where we watched sows birthing piglets in the long white building at the bottom and I thought the little barn at the left was the worst ever for muck, where we deflated the tires and bumped across sandy pastures to Bassett, where we seemed miles from anywhere but were just six north and two-three west of Newport.  (Thanks, Cousins Mike and Pat, for the directions!  Though I found the place yet in court reporting years, this June I recognized nothing on my way up to Mills.)

I had been warned by my Ellingson cousins that the present tenants/owners are not hospitable to visitors, and their lane warning sign says as much, so the following photos are from the road. 

The above photo shows the new house at the end of the lane a bit more clearly.  I assume the white house peeking through the trees in the photos below, taken from a short distance down the road in front of the Anderson place back northwest, is the original.

It would've been happier if we could've driven in and looked about, but time and the trees have done their job, and Thomas Wolfe is still right, "You can't go home again."  But the effort was worth the trip, and I no longer need to go back.  The nearby Anderson place still looked the same in its cottonwood box, but down the road where we always liked going for the prairie dog town on the flat south of the Anderson farm--suitably warned about the rattlesnakes--was just another bland, well-kept field.  Farther down, at the corner where there was a pond, homemade benches, a merry-go-round, where picnics and reunions were joyously held, was a tangle of trees and the invasive eastern red cedar by a marshiness of reeds, no open space at all.

One sight remained indisputably the same:  Sugar Loaf.  On the neighbor's land west of the Peters homestead was a sharp little hill littered with small white limestone rocks, hence its name, where Mom found arrowheads and Indian pipe (plant) when she was little.  We loved playing in the little cold brook at the bottom looking westward toward Sugar Loaf.  I took the rattlesnake warnings too seriously because of the rockiness and never made the summit, though my cousins, Mike and Denny, were more fearless.  The first two photos below are from by the Mariaville School, across the store site, looking west, slightly southwest, using the telephoto lens.  The second one has Sugar Loaf at the far left and shows just how invasive the eastern red cedar has become.  The third, without the telephoto, is from the road by the Anderson place south of the Peters homestead.  Obviously, the pastureland had no trees scattered across it in my childhood, just a line along the brook, so this would've been mostly bare grassland.

Thanks to my sister Sue and brother-in-law Jim, Labor Day weekend turned into a fine final excursion into the past.  After an excellent picnic at the Thompson rest area on the southwest corner of Newport, the oldest rest stop in Nebraska dating from my birth year, 1938 (it has an historical marker; I don't), using our cousin Mike Ellingson's directions, we found our way out to Mariaville and the E. L. Peters homestead.  While too much has changed over the decades, I recognized Cloydie Turpin's place and maybe Buzz Brown's as we came in what I consider the back way, to the school.

To have points of reference, even though I've had some of these photos before, here is the oldest photo (1907) of the Mariaville cluster of post office, general store, and schoolhouse (community center).  The post office and store were on Great Grandfather E. L. Peters' land.

When I was a boy, the post office was gone, [Great] Uncle John and Aunt Nellie Feddersen briefly ran the store and then it was abandoned, and we had a variety of activities at the school:  picnics, card parties, receptions.  My cousins and I would run up there for the playground equipment, swings and merry-go-round. 

What we found on 31 August 2008 was this.  Obviously the store had long been gone, as evidenced in a photo of the farm in the next entry.  Its location across the road from the school now looks like this.  As in the two schoolyard photos, the eastern red cedar has invaded like any other weed, though at least brome grass hasn't killed out the native grasses and wildflowers here yet.

And unfortunately the school did not have a Jack Luckert who cared enough to save it.  A good picture of my sister Sue, of course.

 And with her husband, Jim.  Jim said a piano was tipped over inside.