This is an Excerpt from

A publication by the "Garfield Women Extension Club"

Published in 1970, Entitled...

Franklin P. and Elsie Hoy

Settled in the West in 1884

Written By:  Loreta (Hoy) Carlson

They came to a farm southeast of Arnold where my

Uncle Walter Hoy lived in a little sod house, and it seemed

to have an attic or anyway, and upstairs where  they had an extra room and a place to sleep. They climbed a ladder to get up there and Mother was pregnant and was expecting in October. 

She said the fleas about ate them up at the time because they were thick on the prairies and everyone was bothered with them

and they didn't have sprays and the like to get rid of them.

Father filed on a homestead in Lincoln County, Nebraska

 and had to ride horse back to North Platte

and was gone several days. 

I guess Mother shed lots of tears then,

as she was just nineteen years

of age and had never been out of the city before and was

pretty home sick too.  They hurried and built a sod house

on the homestead, sixteen by sixteen feet square and it was

on the east edge of the Garfield Table on the north side of a

lagoon which lies east of the buildings which they

lived in and built a year later.

In the year that they lived in the little Soddy, Mother gave birth

to Harry who was born the 20^th of October, 1884, and was the first white child born on the Garfield Table.

Oh:  Forgot to tell about when Harry was born. 

For a long time there were no Doctors, but there were women who they called midwives who came and helped when

your baby was born.  The one who came when Harry was born came from Missouri or Arkansas, and she smoked a pipe and would sit in the doorway with her back to the sill

on one side and her feet on the other one,

 and Mother said she thought sure she would die as she

was in so much pain, and that woman just smoked

 her old pipe and seemed to enjoy it.

My brother, Harry, became a Chiropractor Doctor

and practiced in Iowa for several years. He married a girl

from Iowa and then moved to Luverne, Minnesota. 

 They had one girl and two boys.  When the girl was about

eight years old she had dropsy and in a year or so she died. 

 In a couple of years he and his wife separated and she

went back to Iowa.  He stayed on in  Minnesota for a few

years then moved to Brownwood, Texas and then to Dallas. 

 He died July 28^th, 1955.  His two boys came to see him quite often, they were lawyers  practicing in Des Moines, Iowa.  The older of the two, Robert, was killed in a car accident in 1966.