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Centennial History Book
Every community has cherished REMINISCENCES
BOYHOOD RECOLLECTIONS OF EARLY DAYS
AT FARNAM AND COMMUNITY
by Vincent Whitney
Taken from The Farnam Echo 1936
While I do not remember the first time the folks came to Frontier County, I remember when we came in the spring of 1889 and settled on the tree claim where Arch Jorgensen now lives.
As there were no buildings there then, we lived in a one-room shack on the eighty, cornering on the northeast until my father and brother, John could get the sod house built on the tree claim, when we moved there.
To obtain a tree claim at that time, Uncle Sam required ten acres of trees to be set out in rows, four feet apart each way, then of course they had to be cultivated and taken care of. If I remember right, my father replanted them three different times before he succeeded in getting them to grow.
One of the big tasks was the hauling of water for our use in barrels. I believe he hauled most of it from the Owen place where Mr. Stebbins then lived, which was about two miles away.
I believe that it was in the second summer that they put down the well, which was done by Henry Holderman. It was bored with about an eight-inch auger turned by levers. I remember my father and John going round and round turning the auger. Of course, every so often, the auger would have to be pulled out and dumped which was a slow job, when they got down to 350 feet.
While this method might seem primitive today, it beat digging by hand and hauling the dirt out in buckets, as many of the first wells were made.
At that time the country was mostly prairie. My father broke some of the first sod on the section north of us (where Ed Brock now lives). This was railroad land then, and could have been bought for five dollars an acre, or even less.
Much has been said about the menace of the prairie fires in the early days. Some of the fires would sweep from the Platte to the Republican river before burning themselves out. As a boy, I was very fond of hunting. I used to tramp the hills and canyons for a half a day at a time. The nimrods of today would think they were in a hunter's paradise if they could see the vast flocks of geese, ducks and brants, extending as far as the eye could see. The brants were especially numerous, and when feeding in the fields, would look at a distance, like great drifts of snow.
Of course our first guns were the muzzle loaders, muskets and zulas, which were effective at both ends. I remember one of my boy chums crawled up a pocket onto a bunch of geese with one of them. He got several geese at one shot, but lost some teeth from the kick of the gun. He still lives here, so I’ll not mention his name.
There were also a good many prairie chickens and quail here at one time, but shooting for the market did much to deplete them.
My first schooling here was at the sod school house on the place where Mr. Wharton now lives. It was situated a short distance southeast of the one in District No. 3.
Our next school house, of sod, was situated on the southeast corner of the H. Phillips farm, now Mrs. Preston’s.
I will refrain from mentioning any of our early “school mam’s" names as that might furnish too much data on their ages.
Many of our parents went through some very hard and discouraging times in the early 1890's. Of course, we as children, did not realize them at the time.
I remember the epidemic of scarlet fever in the Fitch family in the early 1890’s. My father and mother helped them nights and would change their clothes and hang them on the clothes line before coming into the house.
Scarlet fever and other contagious diseases were far more serious then than now.
As we look back and think of those early days, it is hard to realize the changes that have taken place in Farnam and community in the last half century.
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