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

Mr. and Mrs. Frank Hoy came to Nebraska in the spring of 1884, from Pennsylvania.  Mother's name was Elsie Susanna Ammerman and was born in Shamokin, Pennsylvania.  Father was born in Orwigsburg, Pennsylvania.  They had been married about a year when

they decided to come to Nebraska as Father had a brother

settled southwest of Arnold, Nebraska.

They came to Nebraska City, Nebraska by train and there they crossed the river by ferrying the train across as at that time there were no bridges across the Missouri River, even at Omaha,

 as at that time Omaha was just a trading post.  They came in May and spent some time visiting there and it was in August when they came to Lexington, Nebraska; at that time it was called Plum Creek. 

They came by train to there and then by covered wagon to

 Arnold, Nebraska.  Mother said she was so homesick

for the trees and there were no trees in Nebraska then.   Down in the south of Arnold there was one cottonwood that looked just beautiful to her as it was the only tree she saw.

They came to a farm southeast of Arnold where my Uncle Walter Hoy lived in a little sod house, and it seemed to have a attic or anyway, and upstairs where they had an extra room and a place to sleep.  The 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 file 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 a 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.

 While they lived there they had dirt floors and Mother

 covered them with rag rugs that they brought from Pennsylvania, and they bought their furniture from a store in Plum Creek. 

Dad was gone quite a little that winter up on the Dismal River,

cutting trees for posts and hauling them to Plum Creek

to get money to live on, and he would be gone for

two to three weeks at a time.

 The neighbors were real nice to Mother. 

She told of Indians coming by with families

walking and pulling their children on those sort of shaves

they fixed up and let drag on the ground and wanting

settlers to give them food.  She was so frightened that

she met them at the door with an old fashioned bread knife,

 one of those square on the end about 14 inches long. 

He left and she cried.

The blue stem grass grew so high then and the prairies

 fires were terrible. They could start at the Dismal River

and burn to Platte River and no way to stop them because

 it was all open prairie then.  Mother said one time I think

 in the early spring of 1885 one came and she took her

 baby out and sat on the roof of the sod barn and it had a

 hay roof but she felt safer there and didn't realize it

could have caught fire and burned her up.  They plowed

the ground around the buildings about thirty or forty wide

so the fire wouldn't get to them  It worked pretty well, too,

 unless the wind was strong and blew the trash over

while it was afire and lit it inside of the fire guard.

In 1885 they moved to the new house over the hill

west of the lagoon and that house had two rooms and flooring.  They also built a barn which held two horses and a couple

 of cows but it still had a hay roof.  There were no trees yet.

 I don't remember her telling when they planted the trees

but they had a government deal and had people plant trees. 

They broke some land by then and they raised a little corn, potatoes and some garden,  they hauled water from the

 Fox well and from the Smith well.  I think that those were

 about the only wells close by here at that time and they

 paid five cents a barrel.   They had a couple of horses

and then one died and Mother had to go along to hold up

 the end of the neck yoke and walk along side of them

so he could pull the wagon, as she didn't know much

about driving horses at that time.

Oh:  Forgot when Harry was born.  For a long time

there were no Doctors and 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 she was in so much pain and that woman

 just smoked her old pipe and seemed to enjoy it.

Then in 1886 my sister, Ruberta Elizabeth Hoy,

was born and I don't remember who was with Mother

at that time but she knew more people then, and there were more people living here, too.  Ruberta was born March 20^th. 

 She and Harry went to school in sod school south of where the Garfield Church now stands ( 1 ¼ miles west of the homestead) 

 and than to another school which sat straight

south of us.  I never knew but one of the people who

 taught school then was Bill Campbell, who I met in later years. 

They used to go to singing school at the sod school

over south of the church.  In the early years people worked together to make entertainment for one another and

 seemed to enjoy it more than we do now. Mr. Steward,

 who owned Milldale Ranch, and which is now owned by his granddaughter, he used to go to Wyoming in the early days

 and gather wild horses and drive them through here back

 east and sell them somewhere.  That is how Dad got his first team.  Mr. Steward come through here and stayed

with the folks and he gave Dad a blind horse and sold him one. 

He stopped every once in a while.  After the folks moved

 over to their new home, I don't remember what year,

there was a mountain lion got to coming around and killing

 some of the people's stock and one morning Dad heard

 him close and he didn't have a gun then, so he got on the

horse he could ride, and got the pitch fork and started after the lion. 

He ran him east over the lagoon and on over the canyons.

 Guess he got close enough he threw the fork at him, but they never saw or heard of him again up in this country.

 I think someone down by Callaway killed him.

Father and Mother had two boys born to them.  Arlington Ray

was born in 1888 on June 15^th, and died September 3^rd, 1888.  Clarence Earl was born November 8^th, 1889and died July 26^th, 1890.  that was during the years the children had cholera and fantom.

 It was so hot and dry then and they didn't have doctors. 

They made their own caskets and buried their dead at once.  Mother told me of Allen Jared's first child that died about that time.  She and Stella Smith sat up with the dead child. 

They laid it out on a board that was placed across two 

chair backs and they watched it during the night and had only candlelight for light and the mice and rats were so thick they had to take sticks to chase them away from the body at night.

During this time they built another room on to the two rooms

they already had, and it was used for the kitchen. 

 Then my sister, Alta Viola Hoy, was born August 17^th, 1891. 

William Albright Hoy was born on August 12^th, 1897

and then I was born September 30^th, 1902.

 By the time I came along they built another room

on to the sod house and the kitchen was moved to

one of the little rooms of the first two and they had a

cave leading from it on the north of the house. 

We kept the potatoes, separate, and apples dad bought in the barrels in the cave. Usually in the winter we had a couple

 of barrels of apples and oranges by the crate which held

about half a bushel, cabbage and sour kraut in ten gallon crocks,

 and all the canned things mother made.  I guess first

they put it up in cans before they started using glass jars.

 We had a four hole cook stove when I was little with oven doors

on both sides,  and I think it was the first stove Mother had. 

We burnt cobs and coal then but when Harry and Berta

were little they picked cow chips to burn.  We had to pick

cobs out of the feed corrals and fill the wagon in the fall,

then Dad would haul them to the old fuel house and fill it

and then in the winter we carried them from the fuel house

 to the house to burn. That was our chore at night after we had come from school, and milk the cows which would be ten or twelve. 

Then mother got a Majestic cook stove with one oven door

 open in front and a warming oven and that was something.

I think the folks put down their first well in 1886 and as they

 progressed they put another one in up on the hill.

 In those days they dug cisterns.  They were holes in the ground about eight feet across and fifteen or twenty feet deep and they

cemented or put the cement on like plaster and filled it

 with water and covered it with lumber or made the top come

up like a jug and made a hole so a man could get down

in it to clean it every year.  These they pumped full of water

and then put a hand pump in the top and pumped the water out to use.

 If they had it on a hill they put a pipe in the bottom in

water tanks for the stock.  Then to put a float on the tanks

so when it got full it would shut itself off or stay and

watch it and turn it off but that is how they stored

water and still do only now we have electric pumps

 hooked on the water pipe from the cistern and it shuts itself off.

Father and Mother made their first trip to Pennsylvania in 1898.

  It had been fourteen years since they had seen any

of their folks.  They took Alta who was seven years old

at that time, and Bill who was just a baby yet, and wasn't

 very well.  I guess the trip was rough on Mother but she was

so happy to see her folks and Dad's people were getting

along in years, too, but Mother still missed the trees

and the beautiful country of Pennsylvania.

My brother, Harry, became a Chiropractor Doctor and

practiced in Iowa for several years and married a girl

from Iowa and then moved to Luverens, 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 quite often

 and they were lawyers, practicing in Des Moines, Iowa.  The older

 of the two, Robert, was killed in a car accident in 1966.

Ruberta taught school when she was about seventeen

up until she married in 1910 to Vic Von Goetz, of North Platte, Nebraska.  She taught the old Auble school down in the hills and stayed with Mr. And Mrs. Abe Auble, the Zeman school

 in Wildhorse Valley, the Morgan school on the Tallin Table,

the Garfield school and in Wyoming a year.

 She rode horseback to all of these schools, taking her

horse with her and board and rooming it too. 

Her salary was forty to fifty five dollars a month and she paid around twelve or fifteen dollars a month for her

board and room for herself and the horse. 

She moved to Portland, Oregon and lived there for

 twelve years and then moved to Seattle, Washington,

 where she lived until 1965. 

Then she moved back to North Platte, Nebraska.

 Her husband passed away in 1940. 

 She had no children.

Alta now lives in Arnold, Nebraska and is married to

Henry Eastburn and they had four children. 

Charles was killed in Brest, France in 1944,

Margaret married and lives in Denver, Colorado,

Roland died in 1925, and Tommy lives with his family in Lomita, California.  Alta worked in the store in North Platte

for several years and the went to Iowa and worked for the telephone company.  She helped at home quite a bit of her life, off and on.

Bill, who worked at home, got sick and lost his mind when he was

about thirty eight, we placed him in the State Hospital at Hastings.

 He is better now and in a nursing home in North Platte.

Then there is myself, Loreta Irene, born in 1902 on September 30^th.

 I married Harry Carlson and we live on the old homestead farm.

 We have two children, Rodney, who is married and lives in

Lincoln, Nebraska and Sandra, who lives in North Platte

and works for an Insurance Company.

I was sixteen years old when my father died in 1919,

and was attending high school in North Platte.  Mother took

 me out of school and then the next year sent me to

 Brownell School for girls and then I attended Business School

 for a year but mother was alone so I stayed on here with he until

she passed away on 1938.  In the years they lived here,

Dad accumulated a little over four thousand acres of land and some three hundred head of cattle and a lot of hard work

 and the summer and fall before he died he built a beautiful new nine room farm house all modern with electricity and bath. 

 Then they had to put in Delco plants of their own but now

 we have R.E.A.

The first car he ever had was a Carter Car and it had

a top you could let down and it was a dilly.  More head aches

 than car, if I remember.  I know we used to push lots

 on those old sandy roads we had in those days.  Then we got

 a Ford and it worked.  After Mother and I were here alone we had different cars but we took a trip of some kind most every

year and we were coast to coast, and I think it helped

make up for all the lonely year she had in her early life. 

I wonder how the women did stand those years

when you look at the young people of today, and they have most everything their folks have, even before they get started. 

I do think the women enjoyed each other more then,

because they were all in the same boat and people

 gathered at the church more.  Then they went to school programs and they made their own entertainment then. 

I remember when they had children's day up at

Garfield Church and there used to be twenty five or

 thirty in the program alone, and some of those boys girls were

 in their twenties and some went way down to two or three years. 

They were most all dressed in white with pink and blue and yellow sashes.  Hair ribbons were worn and were really pretty.

 But I wouldn't want to go back to those fussy dresses

and all that IRONING.

 Good Bye.

 - Loreta (Hoy) Carlson -