I Like Hats

February 2006

When I was about 4 years old, I spent a few days with Grandma Barb and Gramp Sees (as we called him.) Grandma Barb took me to town and bought me a beautiful little hat. It was round and flat, made of white straw, with a ring of white daisies around the crown and long ribbon tails that hung down the back. 

I wore it on the train when I went home. Three other little children were traveling without adults, and the conductor assigned us to a set of facing seats. I suppose my hat was uncomfortable against the back of the seat. Anyway, I took it off, and one of the little boys sat on it and squished it. He also sat on my lunch bag and squished my marshmallow-top cookie! I still feel irritated, all these years later.

In the days of my early childhood (the 1950's) all the ladies wore hats to church. I especially remember the hats of Mrs. James Tapley, our pastor's wife, at the Church of the Nazarene in Ainsworth, Nebraska. She was young and pretty, and she had a hat for every outfit. One of her hats had a bumblebee hovering over a flower. I was enchanted with it. 

Even after hats were no longer de rigeur, my mother still kept several black hats which she wore to funerals.

I have a small collection of hats. I bought a couple of them at yard sales because they were pretty. They needed to be owned by someone who appreciated them. I wore one of them at Halloween last year and told people that it was my costume.

Windmill Song

February 2006

Settlers of the Great Plains often found that water was harder to get at their new homes than where they used to live. To solve this problem, inventors re-imagined wooden windmills as water pumpers for the Midwest. 

Instead of the giant wheels of Holland's windmills, the American windmills had a smaller wheel of wooden blades that turned to catch the wind. These machines could easily pump water from deep wells. The windmill rapidly became an essential piece of agricultural equipment and a key to a better life in the Midwest. 

The Aermotor, brought to market in the late 1880's, was one of the first all-steel windmills. With a revolutionary set of gears and a carefully engineered ability to respond to the slightest puff of wind, the Aermotor was a reliable and popular machine. It is still manufactured today.

 Dempster was another major windmill manufacturer, and there were many others. Windmills made by the hundreds of competitors in the windmill business can still be seen and enjoyed in the collections of Nebraska towns, museums, and individuals.

In old images of Nebraska, I notice that many citizens of Nebraska's small towns had windmills in their backyards, even into the 1930's and 1940's.

Every ranch child of the Nebraska Sandhills has the windmill's song embedded in his memory. It's a repetitive melody with the tempo set by the wind, a creak and a groan as the mill turns and the sucker rod moves, and an alternating gush and trickle as the water pours out. It was the soundtrack of my childhood.

As the windmill pumped, the fresh, cold water poured out of a horizontal pipe that extended a couple of feet beyond the edge of the stock tank. To get a thirst-quenching drink, we cupped our hands under the water flow and leaned over the tank to drink from them.  It was best not to drink at the moment in the pump cycle with the strongest gush of water from the pipe. That could instantly fill a nose with water.

The overflow from the water tank almost always created a windmill pond. The tank and pond supported a wetlands flora and fauna greatly different from the surrounding landscape. Waterbirds chirped around the edges of the pond. Frogs sang, and dragonflies hovered above the water. 

We had a windmill in the greater yard around our house, barn, and other buildings. Its tank was positioned to provide water to cattle on both sides of a fence that divided two pastures. My sister and I spent hours in my childhood, making aquariums in a quart jar with snails and moss from the windmill tank, and playing around the windmill pond. On a hot day, getting a bit wet was a bonus.

Grandpa Harry Sees had goldfish in the big wooden windmill tank in his barnyard. I think they were large, but probably not as monstrously huge as they seemed when I was little

By the 1960s, electric pumps had taken the place of windmills in the farmlands of Iowa and Illinois. My father had a small business in rebuilt windmill motors from Iowa. He became acquainted with a retired plumber from central Iowa. This fellow drove around Iowa's farmlands, purchasing unused windmills to restore. His son climbed the old windmill towers and helped him get the motors down. He preferred Aermotors, but he occasionally bought Dempsters, too. 

When the rebuilder in Iowa had a batch of windmill motors ready, my dad took the pickup and trailer and hauled them home. I think he advertised them in the local paper at times, but mostly, the neighbors all knew that if they had windmill trouble, Charlie Hill probably had a good rebuilt motor on hand that he would sell them at a reasonable price.

Now sun power is beginning to replace wind power. Solar panels can run a pump, and ranchers don't have to climb a windmill tower to service them. The windmills of the Nebraska Sandhills may fall into disrepair and disuse, just as they did in Iowa and Illinois a few generations ago. 

Marcus and Emma Eaton, Homesteaders

February 2006

Marcus and Emma (Hart) Eaton

About 1899, my great grandparents, Marcus and Emma (Hart) Eaton, came from Marshalltown, Iowa, with their daughters Cora and Violet (my maternal grandmother), and homesteaded in the Lavaca area of Cherry County, Nebraska. 

With a population of 20 (according to the Nebraska State Gazetteer, Business Directory and Farmers List for 1890-1891,) Lavaca was the Sandhill version of a post-hamlet.  It had 2 blacksmiths and a general merchandise store that probably doubled as a post office, as well as a school and probably a church or two. It was located about 25 miles southwest of Merriman on the extreme western edge of Cherry County.  The Lavaca Flats lie alongside the Niobrara River. It's an area of level land with good meadows, and nowadays, some center-pivot irrigated farmland. 

According to the 1886 map of the Fremont, Elkhorn & Missouri Valley Railroad. a rail line ran through Valentine and Gordon and on to Douglas, Wyoming. The Homestead Office was in Valentine. Marcus and Emma probably rode the train as far as Merriman, but I have read about people who got off the train at Valentine and walked many miles through the sandhills to their homesteads.

During their years at Lavaca, Marcus and Emma added two more daughters to their family, Almira and Letha. Marcus drove the twice-weekly stage to Gordon, and was a road overseer for the Lavaca precinct, as well as farming his homestead.

As the girls grew up, Marcus and Emma wanted them to have a high school education. They sold their homestead in about 1912 and moved to Gordon.* There, the three younger girls completed high school, and Marcus operated a livery stable. Marcus was a farm boy, and he had worked as a teamster in Marshalltown before they came to Lavaca. He knew a lot about horses.

Emma died in 1929, and in 1931, Marcus lost his daughter, Violet (Eaton) Sees to influenza. Marcus visited his widowed son-in-law Harry Sees and his granddaughter, Doris (my mother) frequently after Violet's death.  Doris described Grandpa Eaton as a tidy, well-groomed fellow. Both she and her cousin Maxine Young (daughter of Letha Eaton Young) had fond memories an all-day trip with Grandpa Eaton in his car to visit Wounded Knee, just across the South Dakota line from Sheridan County, Nebraska. 

  

Marcus and Emma are buried in the Gordon, Nebraska city cemetery, adjacent to the graves of Violet Eaton Sees, Harry Sees, and Harry's second wife, Barbara Weber Sees. The Eaton graves were unmarked for many decades, but in 2014, my brother, Dwight Hill (a great-grandson,) had a tombstone installed.

When I was a little girl, my mother pointed out a certain frame building in Gordon as her Grandpa Eaton's livery stable. The building had big doors -- beyond that, I don't remember much about it. When I was in Gordon with Keely and Isaac in 2000, I tried to relocate it, but I learned that it had been torn down.  

One other thing of interest about my great-grandfather Marcus Eaton -- he remembered that as a little boy in Marshall County, Iowa, he played in the buffalo wallows on the prairie.

* In about 1917-1920, Violet Eaton returned to Lavaca as a schoolteacher. While Violet was teaching there and boarding with a school family, she had the memorable experience of discovering a mouse inside her nightgown after she had put it on and gone to bed. (Good family stories should be recorded and retold.) In 1940-42, my mother (Doris Sees Hill) taught in the same Lavaca school. As part of her contract, she was given a horse to ride to school. Some in the community remembered both her mother (Violet) and her grandparents (Marcus and Emma.)

Emma (Hart) Eaton was born in Polk County, Iowa, 06 Feb 1865, and died 19 Apr 1929 in Gordon, Sheridan County, Nebraska. Marcus Eaton was born in Marshall County, Iowa, 13 Sep 1861, and died 03 Jul 1942 in Gordon, Sheridan County, Nebraska. Marcus and Emma were married on 19 Nov 1889, in Mitchell, Davison County, South Dakota.