1925 Plat Map of Sheridan Township, Clay County

Sheridan Township, Clay County, Nebraska - Township 6 N - Range 5 W

From a wall poster produced by The Farmers State Bank of Saronville in 1925

1925 Plat Map of Marshall Township, Clay County

Marshall Township, Clay County, Nebraska - Township 6 N - Range 6 W

From a wall poster produced by The Farmers State Bank of Saronville in 1925

1925 Plat Map of Lone Tree Township, Clay County

Lone Tree Township, Clay County, Nebraska - Township 6 N - Range 7 W

From a wall poster produced by The Farmers State Bank of Saronville in 1925

1925 Plat Map of Glenvil Township, Clay County

Glenvil Township, Clay County, Nebraska - Township 6 N - Range 8 W

From a wall poster produced by The Farmers State Bank of Saronville in 1925

1925 Plat Map of Spring Ranch Township, Clay County

Spring Ranch Township, Clay County, Nebraska - Township 5 N, Range 8 W

From a wall poster produced by The Farmers State Bank of Saronville in 1925

1925 Plat Map of Fairfield Township, Clay County

Fairfield Township, Clay County, Nebraska - Township 5 N - Range 7 W

From a wall poster produced by The Farmers State Bank of Saronville in 1925

1925 Plat Map of Edgar Township, Clay County

Edgar Township, Clay County, Nebraska - Township 5 N - Range 6 W

From a wall poster produced by The Farmers State Bank of Saronville in 1925

1925 Plat Map of Logan Township, Clay County

Logan Township, Clay County, Nebraska - Township 5 N - Range 5 W

From a wall poster produced by The Farmers State Bank in Saronville in 1925

Honey Furniture Ad - 1912

Advertisement from the Sutton Register - 1912

Between Lincoln & Denver!

It was common on the frontier for the furniture store guy to also take on the undertaker business - Geo. Honey followed that model.

Honey built this large store building on the southeast corner of Saunders Avenue and Grove Street. The building was later purchased by the school district and served as the high school auditorium for several years until the school moved "up the hill" to the north end of town.

The building burned while serving as a blacksmith shop. The Sutton Community Center now occupies this site.

George Honey also operated a hardware store for a time along with his furniture store and undertaking business. 

The Sutton Museum has a bedroom set that came from Honey's Furniture Store.

Bender & Sons Ad - 1912

1912 Bender & Sons Ad

from the Sutton Register

Staff Sergeant Ralph Wenz - WWII Casualty

Staff Sergeant Ralph Wenz became Sutton's sixth war casualty of World War II when he died in the crash of a B-24 Liberator bomber on a hilltop in the Yukon-Charley River National Preserve in Alaska on December 21, 1943. His parents, Mr. and Mrs. L. C. Wenz were initially informed that the aircraft and their son were missing after departing the base at Fairbanks.

SSgt. Wenz remained in “missing” status for some time.

Staff Sergeant Ralph Wenz - killed in aircraft
crash in Alaska December 21, 1943

The mission of the flight was to test a procedure to feather the propeller. Only five men were on board for this flight including an officer who was listed as a propeller specialist.

The crew encountered a thick fog that restricted their horizontal visibility just as their instruments failed. The plane went into two spins which the pilots were able to correct but as a third spin began the pilot called for the crew to bail out. Only the co-pilot 2^nd Lieutenant Leon Crane and the Crew Chief Master Sergeant Richard Pompeo were able to get out of the plane before it crashed.

Crane and Pompeo made it out of the plane through the bomb bay doors. Lt. Crane saw Pompeo drift over a ridge but he was never seen again. Crane had cold weather gear but did not have gloves as he landed in the mountains of Alaska, in December. He found a series of trapper cabins where he found more cold weather gear and food. It took him weeks to cover 75 miles where he found an inhabited home where he was given a dog sled ride to a settlement where a mail plane brought him back to his home base in mid-March of 1944, almost three months after take-off.

Lt. Crane led rescue workers back to the plane where the bodies of the propeller specialist 1^st Lt. James Siebert and the radio operator S/Sgt. Ralph Wenz of Sutton were found in the plane. There was no sign of MSgt Pompeo or the pilot 2^nd Lt. Hrold Hoskins.

Staff Sergeant Ralph Wenz’s body was recovered and he was buried in Alaska.

Wenz was an experience flyer having flown mail in Alaska starting in 1939. He joined the marines after the Japanese attacked Dutch Harbor and was assigned to instruct army pilots in the hazards of flying in sub-zero weather in the North. His last visit to Sutton was in mid-August of 1943 when he had ferried a B-29 to California after test flights in Alaska.

An Air Force historian at Elemendorf Air Force Base in Alaska had previously worked as the park historian for Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve and had visited the crash site first in 1994. He became interested in the site and on a later visit he found metal objects in the burned wreckage of the plane. He instigated further research and in 2006 searchers found human remains near the wreckage. A DNA test with Lt. Hoskin’s brother led to positive identification of the pilot’s remains.

SSgt. Wenz’s pilot, 2^nd Lt. Harold Hoskin was buried at Arlington Cemetery on September 7^th, 2007.

This item appeared in The Sutton News on August 19, 1943 as Sgt Wenz was home on furlough a few months before is death in Alaska.

Updates - March, 2019

This news arrived in March 1944 giving hope that Ralph Wenz, missing since December, may have survived in Alaska as one of his aircrew had found his way out of the winter wilderness.

This April 1944 newspaper item closed out the case of Sutton's missing airman, Sgt. Ralph Wenz as his body was found in the wreckage of the airplane.

Paul M. Hofmann - Sutton's 10th WWII Fatality

Paul M. Hofmann graduated from Sutton High School in the spring of 1942 where he was an impressive student and representative of the school and the community.

Hofmann held three minor offices in the Future Farmers of America of Nebraska before being elected president of the state organization for 1942-1943. He was selected to Boys’ State and was a winner of a prestigious Union Pacific scholarship. He was the state’s representative at the National Youth Foundation Camp at Shelby, Michigan for the F. F. A.

Paul M. Hofmann - February 3, 1924 - December 15, 1944

He headed off to the University of Nebraska Agricultural College where he was a member of the Alpha Gamma Rho fraternity and was active in campus activities. He signed up for officers’ training with the campus ROTC program but was inducted into the armed forces on March 27, 1943 at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

During Hofmann’s early army training he was selected to attend a cadet program at the University of Indiana and the University of Cincinnati but that program was discontinued. He was soon at Camp Campbell, Kentucky driving tanks.

He was assigned to the Third Army where he was believed to have been with Patton’s tank corps at Bastogone, France. His letters home indicated he had been in Marseilles, Lyon and Dijon France before his tank unit became engaged in action on the western front.

Private First Class Paul Hofmann, son of Mr. and Mrs. Karl F. Hofmann, became the tenth of Sutton’s sons to give his life in World War II when he was killed in action on December 15, 1944 at the age of 20. 

1912 Sutton Business

1912 Sutton Business

John Roberts grocery and hardware

Sutton Register advertisement

1912 Sutton Business - Schwarz Ladies' store

1912 Sutton Business Advertisement

CHRIS. SCHWARZ ladies' clothing store

Sutton Register - 1912

Sutton's First WWII Casualty - Marine Sgt. Merritt C. Walton

Merritt C. Walton's Biography and the Unique Honor for Sutton’s First WWII Casualty

Area newspapers reported in January, 1943 the posthumously awarding of the Navy Cross to Sutton’s first casualty of World War II, Marine Platoon Sergeant Merritt C. Walton, sometimes known to his family as Cecil Merritt. He received the award for valor displayed on August 7, 1942 on Gavutu, Solomon Islands when he led an attack on a Japanese machine gun position that threatened his platoon’s right flank. The attack was successful but Sgt. Walton was fatally wounded.

The Navy Cross was only one of two honors, the lesser one I believe, that the Navy bestowed on this Marine with Sutton connections. More on that other award in a moment.

Marine Platoon Sergeant Merritt C. Walton (18 Dec 1916 - 7 Aug 1942), Sutton's first casualty in World War II

Sgt. Walton was born in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1916 and lived there until 1933 when he and his mother moved to Sutton to be near relatives. He lived in Sutton until joining the Marines in early 1937 after spending the prior summer working on the Fort Peck Dam at Ft. Peck, Montana.

The first active duty assignment for Sgt. Walton was a three year hitch with the marine garrison in Shanghai, China. He spent much of 1940 at Mare Island on the north edge of San Francisco Bay before duty at Lakehurst, New Jersey. The beginning of World War II brought him to parachute training at Quantico, Virginia, a short tour in North Carolina and then off to the South Pacific and the battle for the Solomon Islands.

Sgt. Walton visited his mother and relatives in Sutton during Christmas, 1941. Area relatives included his mother, Mrs. Clara Olson, a sister Mrs. Floyd Schwab in California and his grandmother Mrs. Zenah Walton of Edgar. Sgt. Merritt Walton’s family connection to Clay County comes from his father Cecil Cullen Walton who was raised on the Marshall Township homestead of his father, also named Merritt Walton. The older Merritt Walton’s own father, Isaiah Walton was the family patriarch, born in Maine, lived in Indiana and came to Edgar late in life. He is buried in the Marshall Union Cemetery about a mile north of Merritt Walton’s homestead. A number of Isaiah Walton’s descendants lived in Nuckolls, Fillmore and Clay Counties and do still today – your author among them.

Sgt. Merritt Walton’s fatal encounter on Gavutu occurred just seven months after that Christmas visit to Sutton on the Allies’ first offensive on the island. The award of the Navy Cross was an appropriate recognition of the bravery of his actions that day. The Cross is a highly ranked medal in the hierarchy of Navy medals. But that “other” award is truly noteworthy.

It may require some personal military experience to fully appreciate the honor that the U. S. Navy granted to Sgt. Walton. The United States Navy saw fit to name a ship, a World War II John C. Butler-class destroyer-escort, the USS Walton after Sutton’s first World War II casualty, Marine Sergeant Merritt C. Walton. Yes, the Navy named one of their ships after a Marine. Sure, the Marines are part of the Department of the Navy, but, personal experience speaking here; it often takes a soldier or an airman to remind seamen and marines that they are parts of the same organization.

Is the USS Walton the only Navy ship, or the only ship overall, to have a Sutton connection? I can’t think of another.

The Walton was launched on 20 May 1944 in Orange, Texas with Sgt. Walton’s mother present and sponsoring the ship. The destroyer was commissioned on 4 September 1944. The ship served briefly as a school ship at Hampton Roads, Virginia before heading to Bora Bora and the Solomon Islands. Her first active wartime duty was in late January, 1945 as escort to merchantmen ships bound for the Philippines. Escort duty continued through the end of the war. After the end of the war, the Walton had the honor or transporting discharge-bound veterans home arriving in San Pedro, California nine days before Christmas, 1945.

She was decommissioned until the Korean War when she was re-activated and was assigned to Pearl Harbor for a second career as destroyer-escort throughout that war. The Walton became a school house again after the Korean War, this time for Naval Reserve personnel.

Final decommissioning came on 20 September 1968. In her final act of service to the country, this time as a target ship she was sunk on 7 August 1969, the 27^th anniversary of the death of Sergeant Merritt C. Walton.

Was it a pure coincidence that the ship was sunk on the anniversary day of the death of her namesake? Perhaps, and I’m sure that official Navy archives would not indicate anything to the contrary. But I also can’t help but speculate that some Navy Lieutenant with a sense of history, and maybe a sense of humor too, tweaked the gunnery practice schedule so that the hull of the USS Walton would be the target on August 7^th. As one who was an Air Force Lieutenant that day in August, 1969, I hope something like that really happened and I salute that Lieutenant, real or imagined.

The complete story of the USS Walton can be found at several online locations. Try these first: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Walton_(DE-361) and http://www.navsource.org/archives/06/361.htm

Then through the wonder of 1940's home movies, check out the USS Walton and its crew on youtube.com ...   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtLqe70FW6M&feature=related

And for a better and extensive look at the men who served on the USS Walton, visit the ship's web site at http://usswalton.com/    where you will find dozens, no hundreds of photos taken by crew members during the life of "our" destroyer.

As a distant relative of Merritt Walton, I was very familiar with the story that the USS Walton had been named after Merritt Cecil Walton but I’d associated him with Minnesota and Fillmore County. It came as something of a surprise to find local papers describing Walton as Sutton’s first casualty of World War II. I am proud to include the story of my distant cousin in our collection of Sutton’s veterans, especially as we can make the connection with the destroyer – that definitely adds to this story.

Sgt. Walton’s citation for the Navy Cross reads as follows:

“For extraordinary heroism as member of the First Parachute Battalion, First Marine Division, in action against enemy Japanese forces on Gavutu, Solomon Islands August 7, 1942. Although fully aware of his extreme personal danger, Platoon Sergeant Walton voluntarily proceeded  to reconnoiter the position of a hostile machine gun which threatened his platoon’s right flank. After skillfully spotting the weapon’s location, he courageously participated in a daring attack and realized success in silencing this deadly menace before he died of fatal wounds.

“Platoon Sergeant Walton’s unflinching determination and unconquerable fighting spirit were in keeping with the highest traditions of the United States Naval Service. He gallantly gave his life for his country.”

USS Walton, DE-361, John C. Butler Class Destroyer-Escort named for Sutton's First WWII Casualty, Sgt. Merritt C. Walton here pictured in San Francisco Bay on 7 May  1967 as the flagship for the annual blessing of the Fleet.