EARLY EXPERIENCES IN NEBRASKA
By Elizabeth Porter Seymour
In the spring of 1872, we came from Waterloo, Iowa, to Plymouth, Nebraska. My husband drove through, and upon his arrival I came by train with my young brother and baby daughter four months old.
When my husband came the previous fall to buy land, there was no railroad south of Crete, and he drove across the country, but the railroad had since been completed to Beatrice. There was a mixed train, with one coach, and I was the only lady passenger. There was one young girl, who could not speak any English, but who had a card hung on her neck telling where she was to go. The trainmen held a consultation and decided that the people lived a short distance from the track, in the vicinity of Wilber, so they stopped the train and made inquiries. Finding these people expected someone, we waited until they came and got the girl. My husband met me at Beatrice, and the next morning we started on a fourteen-mile drive to Plymouth, perched upon a load of necessaries and baggage.
We had bought out a homesteader, so we had a shelter to go into. This consisted of a cottonwood house fourteen by sixteen feet, unplastered, and with a floor of rough boards. It was a dreary place, but in a few days I had transformed it. One carpet was put on the floor and another stretched overhead on the joists. This made a place to store things, and gave the room a better appearance. Around the sides of the room were tacked sheets, etc., making a white wall. On this we hung a few pictures, and when the homesteader appeared at the door, he stood amazed at our fine appearance. A rude lean-to was built to hold the kitchen stove and work-table.
Many times that summer a feeling of intense loneliness at the dreary condition came over me, but the baby Helen, always happy and smiling, drove gloom away. Then, in August, came the terrible blow of losing our baby blossom. Cholera infantum was the complaint. A young mother's ignorance of remedies, and the long distance from a doctor, caused a delay that was fatal.
Before we came, the settlers had built a log schoolhouse, with sod roof and plank seats. In the spring of 1872, the Congregational Home Missionary Society sent Rev. Henry Bates of Illinois to the field, and he organized a Congregational church of about twenty-five members, my husband and myself being charter members. For a time we had service in the log schoolhouse, but soon had a comfortable building for services.
Most of the land about Plymouth was owned by a railroad company, and they laid out a townsite, put up a two-story schoolhouse, and promised a railroad soon. After years of waiting, the railroad came, but the station was about two miles north. Business went with the railroad to the new town, and the distinction was made between New Plymouth and Old Plymouth.
Prairie chickens and quail were quite abundant during the first years, and buffalo meat could often be bought, being shipped from the western part of the state. In the droves of cattle driven past our house to the Beatrice market, I have occasionally seen a buffalo.