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Early in the nineties, two companions might almost daily be seen on Lincoln’s downtown streets. Written and unwritten history traces their footsteps more minutely—into Don Cameron’s. Curious as to the sort of fame which perpetuated the name of Don Cameron we investigated and found that he was a restaurant keeper. The secret of his popularity and enduring memory seems to have been that he furnished a good meal for 25 cents.
Among the rising young men of Lincoln who found a good 25 cent meal important were these two companions. The shorter, darker of the two, who resembled a bundle of scantily padded charged wires, was Charles G. Dawes. The taller, fairer more reserved young man was John J. Pershing, then commandant at the university. In the restaurant, where they sat at a table with other young men who in the future would be Lincoln’s prominent citizens, they discussed many things, Dawes with animated forearms, Pershing more sedate but square-jawed and purposeful.
It was not until 1905, after he was gone from Lincoln, that Pershing married. A dozen years later his wife and three oldest children died in a California hotel fire. It was then that he established a home in Lincoln for his sister, Miss May Pershing, and his youngest child, Warren. This is still known as the Pershing home, and to it General Pershing has often returned for periods of visiting and rest. For the most part, this last great leader of the American Expeditionary forces of 1918 lives at Walter Reed hospital in Washington.
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From this house at 1301 H, little changed since the nineties, was Charles G. Dawes, later to be vice president of the United States and ambassador to Great Britain, catapulted daily by the boundless energy which eventually shot him up to the top in national affairs. Dawes lived in Lincoln only eight years (1887-1894), but he made a quite indelible impression, as will a red-hot little iron which a housewife goes off and leaves for a few minutes.
His mobile hands reached out, in many directions. Everything he touched seemed to thrive, his fingers being to many things what the green thumb is said to be to gardens. His first law suit in Lincoln won a case for some Nebraska farmers who believed they had been discriminated against in the matter of freight rates. Thus he gained the reputation of being an anti-monopolist—which he was not. Even in his twenties he was organizing utilities and starting banks and building a fortune, which eventually got up into the millions. He was a born financier and gained a wider reputation as such on becoming President McKinley’s comptroller of the currency.
For relaxation he loved to sit at the piano and improvise. He put on paper a number of piano and violin duets. The best known, “Melody in A Major” or something of the sort, became popular and often rolled out to meet him in great volume when he came back to Lincoln. Once—not in Lincoln—he had the whole Thomas orchestra come to his home so he could play along with it on the fife.
In a letter to The Journal Mr. Dawes once said that the eight years he lived in Lincoln he had always regarded as the most important in his life, and some of the friendships then contracted were most valued.
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Wyuka is, we think, a beautiful word, and especially so for Nebraska. Listening to the sound of it one hears not only the lonely prairie wind but the more cheerful call of prairie birds.... And the name should never be followed by “cemetery,” which is redundant, and, much worse, robs it of beauty. It is an Indian word often interpreted as “place of rest.” We like still better the more literal “place to lie down and sleep.” At any rate, Wyuka is a beautiful, peaceful spot, especially on a still summer day, when sun and shade lie side by side over it and large white birds drift timelessly on its quiet lagoon.
This is Lincoln’s oldest burial place—tho not the oldest in Lancaster county. Pale folded hands and open Bibles on pure white stones and flat slabs from which lettering is almost obliterated indicate certain age. The records show that it was founded in 1869, not as a city but a state cemetery. Many names of interest may be found on its stones, among them early governors Nance, Poynter, Thayer, Mickey and Aldrich. The founder of the village of Lancaster, Elder Young, was carried here when his days were done.
Little more than half of Wyuka’s 200 acres are laid out in lots. The southwest corner is devoted to an artificial lake bordered with grass and shrubs. Space to the north is for future use. Sections on the north also have been set aside for Civil war and World war veterans. The high iron fence surrounding the cemetery once encircled the university campus. It proved to be a considerable hindrance to firemen when fire broke out in the museum years ago, and in 1924 it was transferred to Wyuka.
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Five hundred and fifty-four convicts now sit scowling in their penitentiary cells. This statement, however, is merely to fix them in your minds. The personnel of the old gray bastille is in reality much more mobile and active. The men make things and do things, go to school and have music and movies. They live as pleasantly as is possible with whatever guilt hangs over their heads, and within their narrowed boundaries. For some who have lived there, the view narrowed finally to the sight of one black loop against the gray dawn—or the leaping of one fatal spark. Seven were hanged from 1867 to 1920; eight have walked to the electric chair—1920 to 1929, date of the last case of capital punishment.
In seventy-five years there have been several outbreaks, mostly minor ones. But on March 14, 1912, there was a more spectacular performance. During a deep snowstorm three prisoners, John Dowd, Shorty Gray and Charles Morley, shot their way out, killing Warden Delahunty, Deputy Warden Wagner and Usher Heilman. Thereafter for a number of days Lincoln people were reluctant to plunge out into the neck-high snow lest conspicuousness result in their being picked off by a convict or a member of a posse. In the final windup of the chase an innocent farmer, as well as two of the convicts, were killed—a total of six deaths for the incident. The third convict, Charles Morley, surrendered. He was released from the penitentiary about a year ago.
A somewhat sensational escape, 1922, was that of bad man Fred Brown, who was not only bad but quite antic in his movements. He was variously referred to as Kangaroo or Chain-man Brown. One day he would pop up in Omaha, then in some peaceful Lincoln spot, keeping citizens in a state of uneasy dismay until he was finally captured in the wilds of Wyoming. On his second attempt to break out, in 1925, he was shot down and killed.
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While other Lincoln churches have been stepping along with the years, changing costumes as they went and, incidentally, taking on new building debts, Holy Trinity has remained content with what it has—and it has something, says the historical American building survey, which designates it as typical of the best architecture of its period. Indeed, it is not hard for any of us to see enduring beauty in this structure, erected in 1888. Speaking as a temporary columnist with six and a half inches of two-column space at our disposal, towers and turrets cause us some difficulty. In this case, however, we are delighted to relinquish writing space to a noble and eloquent church spire.
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During its 75 years, Lincoln has worked up to an excellent school system, with three high school buildings, three exclusively for junior and 20 exclusively for elementary grades. It includes attractive and ample buildings and high standards of education. There is little now to indicate ordeals of past schoolboard heroes who kept an adequate school roof over juvenile heads as Lincoln in its hasty growth trampled down surrounding cornfields.
Lincoln’s first public school was held in Elder Young’s stone seminary where The Journal now stands—Mrs. H. W. Merrill at the blackboard with a babe on one hip. The seminary burned in 1867 and another stone schoolhouse started at 11th and Q, partly the product of town-held festivals and dinners. But the board announced when school began that funds were exhausted and it would have to levy a “rate bill of 50 cents per month, per scholar, payable monthly.”
Seventy years ago Lincoln schools showed not a trace of today’s pattern. However, that year school authorities looked over their motley throng and for the first time waved it into groups. Out went these orders in the fall of 1872: “At the first ringing of the university bell all scholars of the primary grade and those who will read in the first and second readers and begin the study of mental arithmetic will meet at the stone schoolhouse at the corner of 11th and Q. Those who will read in the third reader ... will meet at the building on 12th street known as the White schoolhouse. All prepared to enter schools of a higher grade will meet at the building on O between 11th and 12th.” The stone schoolhouse at 11th and J continued more or less as a free and easy country institution, without all that citified grading.
But even in 1872 the high school which was to serve students at 15th and N for 42 years had been started, and next year it was occupied. From that date Lincoln schools looked up and on. The present building was placed on its 15 acre grounds, J to Randolph and 21st to 23rd, in 1915.
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This rim-of-the-prairie picture is of Veterans hospital. Here men lie and think of war. Planes thunder over their upturned faces and they remember the airplanes of 1918, tho a few may be occupied with planeless thoughts of San Juan Hill, and a very few with moldy memories of the blue and the gray. Here, perhaps, war news is taken—largely by radio—in larger and more frequent doses than anywhere else in Lincoln. All the patients—capacity is 251—have been thru war somewhere. Before long the doors will swing open for a fourth generation.
Veterans Hospital is probably the first place in Lincoln to practice the art of blackouting—a wide precaution, for the hospital, with its 28 subsidiary buildings, off by itself on a hill, sparkles at night like a row of Christmas trees.
A few veterans at the hospital are veteran patients—five or six years—but only a few. The turnover in most cases is more of the pancakes-on-a-hot-griddle sort. It is a general medical hospital which does not handle long, slow cases. There are 92 veterans hospitals sprinkled over the country. Except in special cases, each takes veterans living nearest, so that those treated here are mostly from Nebraska or a narrow strip around it.
The patients are not left alone with their gloomy thoughts. Tuesday and Saturday nights they have movies. On Mondays, Wednesday and Fridays there is some other form of entertainment. The hospital library contains 4,000 books, and if the patient can’t come to the library, the library comes to the patient. From now until Christmas occupants will be busy making next spring’s American Legion poppies.
If you, too, are puzzling over the 28 buildings, check them off as living quarters for attendants, power plant, warehouses, electric shop, plumbing shop, utilities buildings, garages, etc. etc.
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To the child, grandmother and grandfather were never young—that was too far away and long ago for him to picture in the faintest degree. So with cities and towns as we contemplate them today. Our imaginations are scarcely more elastic than the child’s. We see Lincoln as it is now; Yankee Hill as it is, or almost is not, today. Seventy-five years ago they were two little sisters, side by side, quarreling over a pile of blocks—the first state capitol.
The story is that when the commissioners were on a tour in search of a capital site they were given a chicken dinner by the ladies of Yankee Hill, followed by ice cream, “a treat which astonished them greatly, as it was undoubtedly the first ice cream to be served in the wilds of the salt basin.” The commissioners, nevertheless, gave the prize to Lincoln.
And now, as in some parable of two sisters, Yankee Hill, in her barren old age, toils daily in the making of bricks which pile up to the magnification of the fortunate sister, Lincoln.
The bricks works are almost sixty years old. It is an interesting fact that as late as 20 years ago there were nearly 50 brick plants in Nebraska. Gradually they disappeared, for one reason or another, one of which was that the right kind of clay can’t be found just anywhere one might throw up a factory. There are now four in the state—at Yankee Hill, Nebraska City, Hastings and Endicott. Yankee Hill, adjoining Pioneers park on the southeast, makes all kinds of brick, many of which are used in Lincoln and many shipped to other places. Plant capacity is 80,000 bricks a day.
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Whitehall has romantic appeal, for a number of reasons. It was once the home of Mrs. C. C. White, pioneer Lincoln resident and Methodist, and, in its calico and cornbread days, one of Lincoln’s first young ladies. When in later years one of the White daughters became the wife of an Italian count there was a general pleased feeling of something or other—as that east and west do sometimes meet, or that it’s just one step from pioneer to peeress.
Mrs. White, who had presented Wesleyan university with a college building named for Mr. White, long deceased, later gave Whitehall to the state as a home for children. There is sometimes romance in Whitehall even yet. We once wrote a story about the children, picturing the one red headed child, a good and wistful little boy. The parents of red haired twin girls, seeing the picture, arranged to adopt him.
It is of course dangerous to expose yourself to childish charm at Whitehall—you might come away a parent. Forty years ago a train of New York waifs was sent out thru Nebraska. A woman, feeling idle curiosity, went down to see the train come into her small town. As she stood on the platform she noticed a small boy—he is now a Lincoln man—walking forward and looking up most earnestly at all the people around him. When he saw this woman he took her hand and said, modestly but confidently, that he would like her to be his mother. Altho already supplied with a child of her own, the woman found it impossible to refuse. And, happily, he turned out to be the best of sons and the finest of men.
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Encountered by another heaven-kissing spire, so delightful to look at, so difficult to encompass in small space, we decided to invite you inside St. Mary’s, to contemplate the high altar and reflect on the enduring work of that fiery first bishop of Lincoln—Bishop Bonacum.
This advantageous position, 14th and K, was first snatched by members of the Christian church, who built an edifice very like the one now standing opposite the capitol. They lost it during the 90’s depression and Bishop Bonacum took over, rebuilding once after a fire had well nigh demolished the church.
A cathedral is a bishop’s church and in it the first bishop’s successors, Bishops Tihen, O’Reilly, Beckman and Kucera have presided. Since Msgr. C. J. Riordan has become pastor the entire basement has been finished, so that it contains two large halls. In one of them each Sunday a second mass is celebrated at 11 o’clock, while the solemn mass is celebrated upstairs. From the kitchen each school day noon are served hot meals to the entire student body of the Cathedral school.
University art classes each year visit the church to sketch its architectural beauty.
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Those three sister territories, University Place, Havelock and Bethany, spread out side by side in northeast Lincoln and once quite separate divisions of the city, were tied together as neatly by the new Northeast high school as three handkerchiefs are secured by one knot in the corners. Thus caught up, they are a flag of friendly challenge, not to say defiance, to wave across to Lincoln high at 21st and J. Overnight a feeling of solidarity sprang up at the new high school.
There had been murmurs when the school neared completion over a year ago that the name Northeast was undesirable—that it had a cold, damp sound and that no one could love an institution with such an appellation, and so why not name it for some Nebraska or national notable. Others contended that the name was not the thing—that dear old Northeast could entwine itself as firmly around the heart as dear old VanWyck or Montmorency.
The latter seem to have been right. The three lines of youngsters we see converging on Northeast these mornings approach their new institution smiling. Probably one could learn to love Hogwallow school if associations and surroundings were pleasant. Speaking of appearances and surroundings, the picture above is a very inadequate representation of the building itself. The surroundings, naturally still a little barren, have been improved by a cement walk, and with gravel on 63rd.
Lincoln’s third high school is in College View.
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Conquerors sweep thru a nation or state bent only on conquest; traders camp on its borders intent only on immediate gains; missionaries kneel on its soil with the welfare of souls in mind; pioneers break the sod for the purpose of putting four walls around their families, bread in their mouths. It falls to the historian to follow after these men of one purpose, to gather up the fragments; to keep alive, in words at least, the spark struck off by fleeing hoof or flintlock or ringing ax.
Musing with half-closed eyes one can see a throng of people entering Nebraska, spreading out over it in patterns interesting and intricate. One can see a giant, colorful picture painted on the plains, even hear the throng moving to simple slow strains of music—and realize how literature, painting, music, are born of movements of people, individual or en masse.
There is no lack of romance in the building of Nebraska, beginning with its Indians—ships with adventurers and settlers sailing far up the rivers; the Mormon migration; the underground railroad (slaves were sold on the block in southeast Nebraska in the early sixties); the fight for the capital, the building of the railroads (which reminds us of Building of the Union Pacific, given by the Ballet Russe in Lincoln several years ago); Wild Bill Hickok, Doc Middleton and their brother bandits; the struggle between homesteaders and cow men in the north and west of the state.
The State Historical Society, state capitol (Dr. A. E. Sheldon, superintendent) has all this locked in drawer and file and safe—except for interesting exhibits spread on its walls. The picture above, drawn at Omaha for Leslie’s Sept. 26, 1860, depicts the arrival in that pioneer village of the Jennie Brown, bound for Fort Benton, Mont. It is one of over thirty thousand pictures filed by the librarian, Martha Turner, pertaining to the history of the state.
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The time has come, we believe, gently to remove the guide who has been walking ahead in these Lincoln explorations, and to let those following—if there are those following—go on, each with his own sightseeing. Possibilities have not been exhausted. There are, for example, the state orthopedic hospital, with its bright-eyed little birds, seemingly survivals of some great battering storm; the state reformatory, once a normal college (a thousand tapped on its door for admission 50 years ago this fall), later a military academy and now, last chance for wayward boys and young men; the state hospital, with its population of 1,440, widely known its treatments.
There are old houses, patient, wise and worn; churches, each with its own flavor, history and problems; parks we have not mentioned; hospitals and theaters. The agricultural college, apple cheeked sister of the university we have inadvertently neglected.
If you are interested particularly in the historical aspects of a community you will visit the historical society museum in the capitol. Here time will cease for an afternoon as in spirit you move rapidly from 1842 to 1942 and back again to 1842, your fingers touching visible evidence of periods between those dates. For Nebraska had its white people even before 1842—its fur traders, trappers, missionaries. In Bellevue, first Nebraska town, first territorial governor Francis Burt took his oath of office Oct. 16, 1854—only to die two days later in the log cabin home of Rev. William Hamilton.
... In short, we commend all ramblers into the past to the state historical society. It will serve as an excellent guide to early Lincoln and Nebraska.
And so, goodbye.
(THE END)
Streets running north and south are numbered from 1st to 78th eastward and to 2nd westward commencing at 1st street, the western boundary of the original city and continuing to the city limits.
Streets running east and west are either alphabetical or named. Alphabetical streets begin at the southern boundary of the original city at A, omit I and continue northward to Y. Named streets continue south of A and north of Y to and beyond the city limits.
Block and house numbers begin at O street north and south end at 1st street east and west. Streets north or south of O are designated by the prefixes N and S respectively. Addresses West of 1st street are designated by the prefix West, abbreviated W. For example, 534 W. Washington. Odd numbers appear on the west and south sides of the streets and even numbers appear on the east and north sides.
The location of each street is indicated by showing the number of blocks north or south of O, or east or west of 1st. The length of the street is indicated by showing the streets at which it begins and terminates. For example, Apple street is shown as follows: Apple—10th N of O...27th to 40th. This indicates Apple street is 10 blocks north of O and runs from 27th street east to 40th street.
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