Sutton Centennial Sketch

The committee named in this sketch wrote a history of Clay County which was delivered by Dr. Martin Clark at the Centennial celebration in the Sutton Park on July 4, 1876.

This history of the county was written just six years after Luther French homesteaded the 80 acres that became the north part of Sutton and just five years after the first stream of settlers and townspeople arrived starting in the spring of 1871.

1916 Sutton Humor

This bit of newspaper filler appeared in The Sutton Register on February 17, 1916. Any comments?

Early Sutton Humor

Bill Dickson - Jay Leno writer from Saronville

The February 28, 1991 issue of The Clay County News carried this story of a local part-time writer for Jay Leno...

Sutton Commercial Club started in 1906

The Sutton News carried this story on March 30, 1906 indicating that the Sutton Commercial Club was organizied at that time.

Clay County, Nebraska - The Early Years, The Very Early Years

Clay County was named for Henry Clay, a Kentucky politician.
This portrait of a young Clay is a surprise - most of his portraits
were of an old fellow.

One of the first civilizing forces on the frontier was the arrival of government to bring order from chaos. The state’s assignment of counties marched west with the first settlers. The arrival of that first government held a promise of a future for those settlers.

The formation of Clay County and the settlement of this 576 square miles both had sputtering starts. The first appearance of a Clay County in Nebraska was as part of Pierce County in 1855, then territory south of Weeping Water stretching from the Missouri River and to the west for 100 miles. The specific portion that was called Clay County was between Lancaster and Gage counties on the eastern edge of the grid of square counties that reaches out here to Adams and Webster.

Someone pushed through the idea to dissolve that Clay County and attach the north twelve square miles to the south end of Lancaster County and put the south half into Gage County. That action was formalized on February 15, 1864 by territorial legislation. Three years later in 1867 the current Clay County was established where we now live.

Officials were persistent in seeing that Henry Clay was recognized by some county in the state. Henry Clay (1777-1852) was a Kentucky politician known as one of the great orators of the senate. He was a member of the Democratic-Republican party running for that party’s nomination for president in 1824. He founded the Whig party and ran again for president. Abraham Lincoln was the leader of the Whig party in Illinois and a great admirer of Clay.

Clay was associated with the West as he sought to diffuse the conflict concerning the admission of slave and free states in the west. He worked out the Compromise of 1850 and was credited with postponing the Civil War for ten years. Many believed that had there been someone like Clay around in 1860 there may not have been a Civil War at all, maybe.

Ole Buck and George Buck edited a 1921 History
of Hamilton and Clay Counties.

We have several sources for information about early Clay County. George Burr and O. O. Buck published a two-volume History of Hamilton and Clay Counties in 1921 with detailed information which has been recycled in later accounts since. County Agent George Woosley compiled “The Story of Clay County” in 1969. And there are additional sources that mainly cover specific topics.

The settlement of Clay County was as rocky as the story of the legal designation of the county, really, more so.

The first people in Clay County were Indians – mainly Pawnee, some Sioux and others from surrounding areas. Spanish explorers came near, French trappers visited the Missouri River and likely the Platte and could have wandered off that track. Lewis and Clark passed by on the Missouri River heading north in 1804 and back again two years later. Mountain men headed through the plains to find beaver and other pelts during the first half of the 1800’s.

The Mormon migration began in 1847 leading a steady stream of followers along the north side of the Platte for the next few years. Gold was discovered in California in 1848 and by the next year, the “Forty-Niners” came through in a bit of a hurry, generally on the south side of the Platte. But Nebraska was just a long path for those folks.

Editor S. A. Fischer of The Sutton News printed a three-part article called “Early Days in Nebraska” in August, 1915 issues of his paper. He referenced an earlier article in the Fairfield Auxiliary which identified the Salt Lake Express as the first mail service through this area in 1858. That company established stations every fifty miles and passed through the southwest corner of the county on the “St. Joe Trail.” The Express used a stage called a “mud wagon” with six mules, a driver and a “whip-up” – a fellow who rode a horse along-side to push the mules’ pace.

The Salt Lake Express was in operation as the Pikes Peak Gold Rush hit its peak but it proved too slow for mail and passenger demands and was replaced by the Ben Halliday Overland Stage Line. This line was a bigger deal with a sound infrastructure and lots more capital. The line had stagecoaches, horses, drivers, many more stations with station keepers and a supply chain for food for men and livestock. Again, passing through southwest Clay County.

We need to interrupt this survey of freight and passenger services for the iconic enterprise of the time, the Pony Express. Officially called the Leavenworth and Pike’s Peak Express Company in 1859 it became the Central Overland California and Pikes Peak Express Company in 1860. The system operated for just 19 months, from April 1860 to October 1861. You can remember the date knowing that news of Abraham Lincoln’s election reached California via the Pony Express.

The overland express companies and the pony express followed the route of the St. Joe Trail, later called the Oregon Trail.
Liberty Farm Station was in Southwest Clay County. The Fairfield station on this map was far west of the town of Fairfield.

The Overland Stage Line and the Pony Express used the same route passing near Deweese and Spring Ranch. Stations were twenty-five miles apart including Liberty Farms just west of Deweese, Kiowa Ranch to the east in Thayer County and 32 Mile Creek station about five miles southwest of Hastings.

The time to get a message from the Atlantic to the Pacific dropped to 10 days during this period. Almost 35,000 letters were sent from St. Joe to Sacramento. Postage was five dollars for a half ounce letter dropping to a buck at the end. (Onion-skin paper was an answer to that weight/cost problem.) Very few artifacts remain from the Pony Express including only 250 examples of mail.

Two main factors account for the close of the pony express: the beginning of the Civil War and the telegraph.

All these names run together as the founders of the Pony Express, Wm. Russell, Alexander Majors and William Waddell had their own freight line and in 1866 bought out Ben Halliday’s (or Holladay) company forming a company called Wells Fargo which later did some banking. Yes, Deweese, Spring Ranch and Clay County connected with that story.

The route we’re are talking about here was referred to in that 1915 Sutton newspaper as the St. Joe Trail though it acknowledges that when it came time to erect monuments, the name “Oregon Trail” became common.

So by the early 1860’s there were settlements in the southwest corner of Clay County supporting transcontinental traffic.

A few of the several books that relate the story of the early

days of Clay County.

A valuable source of Clay County’s next chapter is in the account of James Bainter that appeared in The Fairfield News in 1889.

James Bainter acquired his ranch in January, 1864 from the Roper brothers whose uncle had built it in 1860 near Liberty Farm along the St. Joe Trail. He brought his family and settled in. This was after the close of the pony express but still a time of heavy traffic; Bainter claimed there was an average of 300 teams passing through each day. That’s what he said – 300 teams a day.

James Bainter wrote that during the spring of 1864 larger numbers of the Sioux hunting parties visited trading their pelts for goods and also paying cash for supplies. About the first of August he noticed the Sioux were becoming “sulky and ill-natured.” He sent word up and down the trail about his concerns, and fears.

On August 7^th the Plains Indians began the only widespread, multi-tribe coordinated attack on white settlements that happened in the history of the west. Mainly Sioux and Northern Cheyenne but also involving Cheyenne and Arapaho bands attacked from Julesburg, Colorado to the Big Sandy here in Clay and Nuckolls counties and further east down the Little Blue River. It was a two hundred and fifty mile long battlefront, a significant military operation for anyone’s army.

Sometimes called the Cheyenne War of 1864 – a big part of the Indians’ last stand against white settlements – there were five major incidents which warranted names: The Little Blue River Raid, Eubank Homestead, Plum Creek Massacre, Little Blue/Oak Grove Station and the Kiowa Ranch Station. These all occurred between August 7 and the 10^th.

Laura Roper (age 16) and three young children were turned over to the army by Indians at a council near the Smoky Hill River. Miss Roper and Belle Eubanks on the right had been captured at the Little Blue River near Oak.

About 100 were killed including settlers, those on wagon trains, station operators, etc. All communications through the Republican and Blue River valleys was cut. The Colorado Territorial Legislature authorized a militia of 700 men on a 100-day enlistment to track down the attackers resulting in the Sand Creek Massacre in late November when a village of friendly Cheyenne and Arapahos was nearly wiped out with about 170 deaths (you’ll find estimates to 400) about two-thirds women and children.

The details of the Cheyenne War are left for another time. The town of Oak holds an afternoon of re-enactments every few years of events at four sites in that neighborhood.

James Bainter and his family survived the attacks in a story worthy of twice the text in this article. The Bainters and other Clay County settlers abandoned the enterprise returning back east and Clay County was again unsettled. The wagon train period had waned, the army was busy finishing off the Confederacy and rational behavior dictated other plans.

By 1870 things had calmed down. The war was over, the army could concentrate on security of the west, soldiers had returned home to find farm land taken and the plains settlement project resumed.

James Bainter returned to Spring Ranch and found his claim jumped by Tom Smith of Marysville, Kansas. He regained the claim shortly. Other settlers had moved in and more followed.

Meanwhile in the northeast corner of the county Luther French and five Swedes had staked out their homesteads that same year in territory where the towns of Sutton and Saronville would soon develop.

Clay County had been formally established in 1867 and now Acting Governor William Hartford James ordered that settlers organize themselves. (James was in office following the impeachment of the state’s first governor David Butler, but that too is another story.)

Clay County citizens met October 14, 1871 at the home of Alexander Campbell northwest of Harvard. A full complement of county officers was elected and Sutton chosen as the county seat.

The first county commissioners were A. K. Marsh, P. O. Norman and A. A. Corey. Marsh was elected chairman of the board at their first meeting on November 4^th. The fellows organized three precincts for the county. School Creek was the east half of the county, Harvard was the northwest quarter and the southwest quarter became Little Blue Precinct.

The Oak Town Book told the story of the

part of the Indian War of 1864 that happened

near the town.

So after a bumpy start to organize our county in this location and to populate the territory, Clay County was off and running.

There are options when recounting history and certainly so in Clay County’s history. We have multiple accounts to draw on – that’s good. The multiple accounts don’t always agree on what happened – that’s not so good.

We’ve been judicious in avoiding many of the contested details, sticking to the general story and including details that seem to be agreed on. Every time someone tells a story like this, as we’ve done here, there’s a danger that untruths that have slipped in will soon be retold as an authoritative account. So if you’ve heard a version which varies from this one, okay. It’s another opportunity for some clever and ambitious person to locate primary sources that may be more likely to be factual. Have at it. Let us know what you find. Maybe we’ll meet someday in the library or the court house or in somebody’s attic treasure.

Two Clay Co. State Championship Teams - 1991

Clay County 1991 State Champs

Twenty-five years ago in 1991 Clay County girls' basketball teams dominated Class C. The Sutton Fillies were undefeated for the season and won the Class C-1 championship with a 40-38 win over Crofton. It was the first state championship for the Sutton program coming after two previous trips to the final game where the Fillies had lost both times to Battle Creek.

The 1991 Class C-1 State Champs - Sutton Fillies

The 1991 Class C-1 State Champion Sutton Fillies basketball team: Front row, left to right: Heather Johansen (stats), Sarah Maser (stats), Jeni Hust (stats), and Lynn Wuger (photographer); Middle row: Meredith Figi, Janelle Drudick, Laurel Stoehr, Mindy Smith, Kristie Cronin, Darla Scheierman and Kim Bergen; Third row: April Bottorf (stats), Tom Newman - Assistant Coach, Denise Saathoff, Candice Bottorf, Tara Johansen, Jennifer Trautman, Amanda Liska, Crystal Nunnenkamp (stats) and Head Coach John Schoneberg.

The Sandy Creek Lady Cougars defeated Overton 56-44 to win the Class C-2 championship. Their semi-final win over Lincoln Christian included a comeback from a 14-point deficit. Sandy Creek had only two losses in the regular season, one of them to Class C-1 champs Sutton. It was Sandy Creek's first trip to the state tournament.

The 1991 Class C-2 State Champs

The Sandy Creek Lady Cougars

The Sandy Creek 1991 Class C-2 State Championship team. Front row, left to right: Chris Engel, Jenni Frager, Laurie Herbek, Kima Johnson, Lisa Shunkwiler, Tonya Wilson, DeAnne Wenske. Back row: Head Coach Russ Ninemire, Sara Cosler, Jennifer Lipovsky, Jennifer Schliep, Julie Herbek, Janet Lipovsky and Loralyn O'Kief, Assistant Coach.

Sutton Post #19 of The Grand Army of the Republic

General George C. Meade Post No. 19

 

The early settlement of Sutton happened just six years after the end of the Civil War. As soldiers went back home in 1865 they often found stiff competition for farm land or businesses. The lure of the open west was attractive and west they came, many to south central Nebraska.

One of our first settlers in 1871 was the family of Hosea Gray, Captain of Company A of the Iowa 6^th Infantry. The Clark brothers were in Sutton shortly, Dr. Martin Clark of the Ohio 7^th Infantry and Isaac Clark, quartermaster of the Ohio 25^th.

A high percentage of early Sutton settlers were these Civil War vets. The Sutton Museum is fortunate to have a large display poster from Sutton’s chapter of the Grand Army of the Republic (G.A.R.), the General George C. Meade Post No. 19. Forty members of the post are pictured and best of all, a key identifies each.

This display of the Sutton GAR chapter pictures 40 of its members and ribbons from several events.

The G.A.R. was founded right after the end of the Civil War in 1866. The founders envisioned the organization to be an arm of the young Republican Party. G.A.R. members were credited, perhaps justifiably for the successes of the party in the elections of 1868. But as beneficial as their work was for the Republican Party, it was disastrous for the G.A.R. as loyal Democrats and many members with other notions of the purpose of a veterans organization left, perhaps 40% of the membership.

The turmoil destroyed the early G.A.R. In many parts of the country, no post survived longer than two years until a reorganization and re-direction happened.

Sutton’s G.A.R. Post #19 was organized on May 27, 1879 with Philip Schwab as commander, Martin (or Markus) Wittenberg, vice commander and Isaac Clark as quartermaster. Meetings were held the 2^nd and 4^th Tuesdays of each month.

Post numbers were assigned sequentially by state. That is, the Sutton post was the 19^th in Nebraska. Each post selected a name. Back east, posts were generally named after some local veteran, often a casualty of the war. Other chapters took on the name of a famous person. There were Abe Lincoln posts in most states. The Sutton chapter chose General George C. Meade, the commander of the Union Army of the Potomac. General Meade had an illustrious career even before his appointment to head the Army of the Potomac only three days before it met Lee’s army at Gettysburg.

G.A.R. members met in “encampments” for departments (state), districts or county. The host for a department encampment in Nebraska was expected to provide 240 acres of ground and food and water for 3,000 horses and 30,000 people. Encampments lasted from three to six days. Our display has ribbons from several encampments. 

The encampment was a big deal. When my great grandfather moved his family from a rented farm near Edgar to a Hoxie, Kansas wheat farm, he timed the trip to stop in Grand Island on the way for a department encampment, likely August 31 – September 5, 1886. He would have had his wife and eight kids with him including a 2-month old baby – camping 19^th century style.

We have not dated the photos in our display but that should be doable. There was likely only a few months when all 40 of these fellows were residing in Sutton.

Someone in the distant past performed that noble task of identifying the individuals in the photo. That didn’t always happen. We’ve received several boxes of photos, real nice photos from people in the community but with no names associated with the folks in the pictures and no one left around to tell us who those people were.

Rarely are we able to make an identification of these anonymous people – it is very satisfying when that happens but we’ve generally spent a huge amount of time getting there. Take a lesson. Collect your old photos and write on the back – who is it, when was the picture taken, where, etc. That will be a great gift to someone, someday.

Our helpmate on these photos did a great job, with one exception. There are numbers written lightly on the men’s chests in the photos and an accompanying key with names of the fellows. Unfortunately, not all of the numbers are clear and the sequence is almost always sequential, almost. One fellow, B. Isley seems to be associated with two guys in different pictures who don’t look alike. We’ll take “close” in this case.

So who are these 40 guys?

Several of them are well known to us today. H. W. Gray was Sutton’s first attorney and with his son John started a lumber yard on the site of our museum.

J. C. Merriill was an early merchant with his brother. I. N. Clark had a hardware store, the first business on Saunders Avenue and with his brother Dr. Martin Clark (Sutton’s first physician) developed the Clark Addition in the northwest part of town.

John Dinsmore was the first banker. A.A. Corey was an early homesteader northwest of town and later a merchant. P. T. Walton ran hotels. Markus Wittenberg was from Hungary and became an early merchant in Sutton with a confectionary business – candies, cigars, etc. For a time, he had two stores, dry goods and a grocery.

William Keller was a blacksmith by trade but in Sutton was in the grain business, ran stores with general merchandise, then a drug store, then a jewelry store and real estate. He organized a local military unit called the Governor’s Guards and was the commander of the First Regiment of the Nebraska National Guard with a Lieutenant Colonel’s commission.

Jacob Steinmetz and C. W. Walther, both in this crowd, ran a McCormick & Co. implement dealership in Sutton. Jacob’s wife Elizabeth and infant daughter were the first burials in Sutton Cemetery. Mr. Steinmetz later moved to McCook.

We have an ongoing project at the Sutton Museum to research and write biographies for these folks whose names pop up in various places. Several of the fellows in these photos did not leave deep tracks and have slipped by our attention before.

John W. Shirley was from Iowa and went to California in 1849 at the age of sixteen. We’d guess his goal was gold. He stayed there 22 years mining and later growing hops. His Civil War service was with a California unit in Apache Country mainly at a post northeast of Phoenix. It counted for G.A.R. qualifications.

Which brings us to the criteria for admission to the G.A.R. and similar organizations. The modern organization is the Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War which was created by the G.A.R. They set their own rules.

The Daughters of the American Revolution and the men’s equivalent organization for instance, admit not only the descendants of active duty, uniform-wearing soldiers in the Revolutionary War but descendants of anyone who contributed to the cause. If one of your ancestors sold a couple of hogs or sacks of grain to revolutionary war soldiers, and you can prove it, you just may be in.

Other fellows were learned a bit about with this project include Joel Longstreth who ran a restaurant in town and was the constable. He moved to Ogden, Utah and died there in 1923. He’s buried in the Sutton Cemetery.

I. D. Evans founded The Sutton Register newspaper in February, 1880 later buying and merging the Clay County Globe into his paper. He sold the paper in 1886 to F. M. Brown who operated it into the 1940’s.

A. B. Lucore is not well known in Sutton today, but he was in town for the G.A.R. photos as a rep of the 20^th Iowa Infantry. A bit of research finds his name was Alonzo Billings Lucore and the topic of a few message boards threads on genealogy websites. He died in 1905 and is buried in a GAR cemetery in Multnomah County, Oregon.

Longstreth, Evans, Lucore and thousands of others have lived in Sutton, contributed to the community and many moved on leaving only a few shallow tracks, if that. Every now and then we turn out attention to some resource that has been sitting nearby in plain sight. Such was this G.A.R. display. Close to half of them were familiar to those of us who have spent some time on the topic of Sutton history but 15 or 20 of them, not so much. Think of it as a puzzle.

We’d like to…

How does one finish that sentence? We’d like to recognize these 40 Civil War vets who posed for these three pictures one day. We’d like to recognize the other Civil War vets with Sutton connections who weren’t here that day. We’d like to recognize the Sutton-connected vets from World War I and II, Korea, Vietnam, Gulf Wars and vets who served at times and in places that didn’t involve conflicts that generated big books – even the Cold War – my era.

And why just vets? Sutton Historical Society members have worked on several projects, even completing one or two, to tell the story of the people who founded, developed and contributed to the Sutton community. It’s a bit of work, but it’s good work. Entertaining work. Work that soon can become play. A few years ago, this was hard. With the overwhelming wealth of online resources, it’s doable with just a bit of cleverness you pick up quickly.

Care to try it? Give us a call. This posting is not complete, there is always more to learn.

 

This article first appeared in the November, 2015 issue of Sutton Life Magazine. Contact Jarod Griess at mustangmediasales@gmail.com for more information about this publication.