Before their daughter,Hattie, was born in 1890, the family moved a few miles north of Reamsville across the State line into Franklin County, Nebr. They eventually lived in the village of Riverton in Washington Township a few miles east of Franklin, the county seat.  Albert and his father-in-law, Lorenzo Drake, each had one-forth interest in an old flour mill, Eagle Mills, near Riverton. Mr. Schwartz had one-half interest in this mill which later burned to the ground and was not restored.  After the death of Albert's wife in 1899 and when his daughter, Zetta, married, Albert and the younger children still at home moved from Riverton to Stratton (then called Claremont), Colorado for a few years.  He died at Stratton (Claremont) on June the 27th in 1904.  (Aunt Olive Berseley wrote - "Viola took their father's body home for burial").  His burial was at Riverton, Nebr.,  beside his wife and infant son William,  In September 1992, a granddaughter (Mildred Aday) accompanied by her niece, Linda Deming, made a trip to Nebraska and where she arranged for a tombstone to be placed at the until that time unmarked grave of her grand parents and their infant son, Willie.  Something she had wanted to do for years,  MYA

Concerning the departure ofAlbert and Mary Annfrom Michigan toKansas, their daughter, Olive, wrote in 1938:  " There five men in our party, only two married (I think),  anyways ours was the only 'family'.  We travelled by covered wagons all the way from Michigan to Kansas; crossing the Mississippi on a ferry (no bridge).  I think they forded the Missouri River.  It was in September.  We all stayed together until they built the sod houses.  They built ours first.  Inez was five I was four when we started to school in a sod school house.  My mother's aunt, her uncle's wifeNettie Richardson (Mrs. Gershom Richardson) was a teacher.  She had one baby when she began.  She taught two terms and had a new baby between terms.  We used Independent Series of books (I wish I could find one) and began with the Primer but skipped the 3rd Reader.   When I was six we got a new school house, a frame one, and Aunt Nettie built a frame house. Father sold the farm and bought an interest in a flour mill when I was eleven years old and we moved to Nebraskain 1881;  sixteen miles.  After a few years he planned selling out and moved to another little mill (Egle Mills, two miles north of Riverton).  The first mill burned  down and we never got any money from it. Grandma Loshbaugh (Anna Decker) died in Michigan in 1891 and we got a little money from the estate and bought a home in Riverton, Nebraskawhere we lived until Mother (Mary Ann Drake) died in 1899 and the family was broken up.  My sister Inez and I were married then and had homes of our own."

Following is a copy of the last letterAunt Olive wrote to me (Mildred Y. Aday) " Dubuque, Iowa, May 24, 1956. "Dear Mildred-- I have tried to write to you several times.  Maybe I won't get through but I will try.  I am very lame in my mind.  I am not here at all.  Hope someone will write from there and tell me the news.  I can't contact anybody.  You mite not hear from me again, tho someone else may write to you.  Good bye for now, from Aunt Olive."

I found a letter that Aunt Inez had written to Cousin Mildred about 50 years ago. Mildred wanted to know what life was like when Inez was a child, and she wanted to know more about our ancestors. Aunt Inez wrote a very long letter that gives us some insight into our ancestors lives.

Aunt Inez was the daughter of Albert Dennis Loshbaugh and Mary Ann Drake, my great grand parents.

"About the 10th of September in 1877, when I was a year and a half old and sister Olive six weeks, we with our parents, accompanied by other relatives (it being the custom in those days for whole families to travel together) left our home in Berrien County, Michigan, and started overland in prairie schooners for the "West" to take up homesteads. At the time Kansas, Nebraska and Colorado were young states in the Union and travel was not only a hardship but still was dangerous because of the threat of Indian raids from the north. Though the first trans-continental railroad had been completed in 1869 and new settlers were under the protection of the US Army, the great General Custer and two hundred and seventy six soldiers had been massacred by the Indians in June of 1876, not many miles from where our family settled.

We four, the camping stuff and household goods were in the first covered wagon which was drawn by two horses, a gray about 13 years old and a bay about 5 or 6 years younger. I mention the old gray for I think he was the last horse we owned. When Pa got to farming he began buying a new horse every season. He lost 9 horses in 11 years but old Jack, the gray, was the last to go when he was 24 years old. Rube, the bay, was taken on a mortgage to help pay for some of the other horses that died.

Well, as I was saying, there were the four of us leading the train with one team, household goods, and a cow tied on behind to give us kids milk (only we never called the young ones "kids" in those days). After us came Uncle Hiram Drake and Aunt Hattie Drake, his sister, who were Mother's oldest brother and sister. They had a crate of chickens tied on the back of their wagon. Next came Mother's uncle Horatio Richardson, who we are told went to the Mormon Colony near Salt Lake in 1885. He had his team and wagon, a plow or two, hoes, rakes, spades, and I don't know what all. Everyone had a good wagon load, besides bedding for bunks if needed, though they always aimed to stop at some farmhouse for the women and the babies at least. The men could always sleep in the barn or in their wagons if need be. Pa soon found out that folks would rather have them come in than to have them camp on the road nearby. On some occasions folks would tell them that the folks at the next place would be able to put them up, then, either it was too far to go, or they were told the same thing at the next place. So whenever Pa was ready to camp the night he would drive out and start to camp by the side of the road anyway and nine out of ten times they would come out then and invite them to come in.

So they wouldn't have to answer so many questions along the way, they painted their destination on the wagon covers. Pa wrote on his, "To Nebraska or Bust"-- Hiram wrote the same, but Uncle Horatio wrote "Busted" on his wagon. He was a funny fellow, had curly hair, making it look kind of ragged and he wouldn't wear a hat. He wasn't old but he was at least 10 years older that the rest of them so folks meeting them would call him "the old fellow".

I was a great hand for bologna sausage and would cry if they ran out of it, so the folks would lay in supply wherever the could. They could not buy bread everywhere. They had a good supply when they started the trip but it seems to me they stopped over and baked once or twice at some farm house along the way. For the rest of the time I suppose they made pancakes or conepone on the griddle. It was a long griddle that covered the space of two round lids and the middle of a stove and could be used over a campfire just fine. The griddle was used by our family for many years and when it became broken Pa welded it so we used it many more.

One time while we were on the road we stopped at a house to camp or to buy something. It seems the men left the wagons and Olive and I were already asleep, she in Ma's arms. Ma laid her down on the wagon seat with her head on a small pillow while she and Aunt Hattie went to the door of the house near the road. They heard something go "kerplunk" and looked around to see baby Olive had rolled off the wagon seat down between the wheels of the wagon and was lying there on the ground at the horses' feet. It scared them terribly but they grabbed her up, put camphor on her head, and she was all right. She had bumped her head on the wheel tire or the end of the wagon box as she fell, otherwise she wasn't hurt a bit.

I believe they came southwest around the edge of Chicago through Illinois, and crossed the Mississippi by ferry at Rock Island and Davenport. They got along fine all by themselves until they got down into Missouri and another fellow and his wife in a buckboard with a span of mules overtook them and wanted to travel along with the folks. He told them they were tired of traveling alone and the folks didn't object to their joining them, although they preferred not to have along any strange company. The stranger and his wife was with them only about three days. At the end of the third day all stopped to camp near a house that was a little way from the road. They went up to the house for water. Ducks and chickens were all over the place. Some of them came by the camp and stranger knocked over two or three of the ducks with a club and then wanted to hide them in Uncle Hiram's wagon. Hiram said, "No you don't. We haven't started anything like that and we don't intend to now". Well, this made the stranger sore, so he got up sometime in the dead of the night, ransacked our provision box, took all my bologna and I don't know what else, and beat it. He reached the Missouri River and forded it just ahead of us for we saw him going up the bank on the other side of the river just as we drove up. They then must have taken another course for we never saw them again.

We followed the Missouri River into Nebraska and then we went along the Republican River to Riverton, Nebraska, where Pa got a house and unloaded all but the farm tools and feed. The men then left the women and children and went homestead hunting south. They found homestead sites southwest of Riverton, about twenty miles over on the Kansas side of the state line. They learned later that Franklin, Nebraska was closer than Riverton, so Franklin became their post office address all the time we lived on the old homestead.

Though Smith Center is the county seat of Smith County, Kansas, they filed on their claims at Kirwin, Kansas. After filing, they came back to Pa's homestead, broke sod, and went down to the creek in Nebraska to get ridge log poles for rafters. Then they dug a place in the side of the draw for one side of the house and built a sod wall for the other side - or for what we used as a house and stable until we got a house dug out and built the following summer. It was long enough for four stalls, with the partition in the middle, so we could live in one end and keep the horses, the cow, and the chickens all winter in the other. When this was ready they came and got the women and children and built the other folks' stables, leaving all the houses until spring for the sod was now frozen.

In the spring after the crops had been planted they built houses. It was hard to keep our roof from leaking. The back was all dug out clear to the eaves; then it sloped with the bank to the front. The front and half-ends were built up with sod, gabled at the ends with sod, and a sod partition divided our house into two rooms. They put a log or two on the peak, poles lengthwise along the top of the wall, poles crosswise from the eaves to the ridge, tacked on brush as thick as they could, and laid at least two thickness of sod on top with the grass side down. They put dirt in the cracks and used a dirt floor. 

Those sod house, until they got board floors in, were certainly some places in which to live! The boys said they had to go outdoors to clean their feet when it rained. But they got floors in after a while and the sod settled so it didn't leak. When I was married my first house was also a sod house , and it was built up on a hill. I had rafters and boards overhead covered with sod and dirt. It was a nice clean house warm and comfortable in the winter and cool in the summertime. I could keep houseplants the year around, something I haven't been able to do since.

They plastered these sod houses with magnesia, a native lime. There were several banks of it near Pa's farm where we could go and get it as it was sand. It was almost as white as the rocklike we use to plaster with now, only it wasn't necessary to add anything to it.

One time when Aunt Hattie Drake was on her homestead she had a teaparty for three or four girl friends, one from Riverton, Nebraska. After they drank their tea she told them to turn their teacups over and around as she said some kind of charm. Then she took each cup and played "fortune teller" with the tea grounds. The girls all knew who each other's fellow was and that this was all just in fun. Aunt Hattie told the girl from Riverton that she was going with a light complexioned young man but that she would not marry him as she could see a dark complexioned man in the background whom she would marry. The girl went home, broke her engagement with her "fellow" and married another because he had dark hair. The girl’s brother decided Aunt Hattie had done such a good job of telling fortunes that he’d have her tell his, so one day he came to call. As it happened Aunt Hattie wasn’t home so he told Uncle Hiram Drake that he wanted to see Miss Drake to have her tell his fortune! Uncle Hiram said they could have "knocked him down with a feather" and he told Aunt Hattie she must not tell any more fortunes even if it was only in fun because he didn’t want it to get around that his sister was a "fortune teller".

When they were back in Michigan, Cousin Charley Anderson used to come see Aunt Hattie when Pa and Ma were keeping company. He used to sing a song that went, - "If I had but a thousand a year, if I had but a thousand a year, in what land would I be and what sights would I see, if I had but a thousand a year"! After we were in Kansas a few years he came west as far as Des Moines, Iowa, got a job as railway mail clerk, and that was just exactly what his wages were- "a thousand a year." Only it sounded like a million does to folks now.

Uncle Horatio Richardson’s place had a creek all the way through and a nice spring near his building site so we hauled water from there for four years. Pa had started to dig a well the second summer, got down about 30 feet, and then the crops got to crowding them so they covered it up with boards and didn’t get to finish it for two years. Then they struck water in two or three hours, less than 10 feet on farther down! The well was about 40 feet deep and never went dry except when they drew it dry to clean it. Then they had to work hard and fast to do that. The water was six feet deep, and there they had been hauling water for four years all the way from Uncle Horatio’s homestead.

I don’t know just when Aunt Hattie filed on her homestead but hers joined Uncle Hiram’s and when they built their house it was all on top of the ground, with half on her place and half on her brother’s. They had three rooms, so each could sleep on his own homestead at night and the living room was in the middle on both properties. I believe Aunt Hattie lived on hers fourteen months and then commuted (paid $1.25 an acre) for her deed, for she got married and went to live in Nebraska. The rest stayed on their homesteads' five to seven years and "proved up" in the regular way.

The first spring, while they were still living in the stable at our place, Grandma Drake made a visit. Grandpa Lorenzo Drake had come and filed on a homestead too, but had not built a sod house until Grandma could come and see how she liked the country. She stayed about three weeks, claimed she never saw the sun while there - it rained the first three days and nights at least and a bit each day she was there - so she made him take her to a train as soon a it could be done. It was a 40 mile drive to the nearest railroad a Hastings, Nebraska. She said she wouldn’t live there if they gave her the whole state! Later her baby daughter a little older than I became ill and died so she decided she would rather come back to where the rest of the folks were than to stay in Michigan alone. So Grandpa Drake built her a nice frame house and she came back to make her home but lived only a year after her return.

Grandpa’s frame house had a living room and two bedrooms downstairs and two upstairs -- one and a half story high. I remember one day when we were over there we children were upstairs playing and started down. Olive was just like a little ball. She got about half way down where the stairs made a turn and then she just rolled on down against the door. When they opened it she was sitting with one heel on the bottom step and the other in a dish of soft soap. Of course I would remember that, though it didn’t hurt her at all.

I don’t remember much about Grandma except that she had a mole on one side of her face with a hair growing on it. Then I remember seeing her in her coffin and the long string of teams that went to the grave. We were ahead and they came and got Pa’s lines to help let the coffin down in the ground. We children were made to stay in the wagon though I suppose we saw more than if we had been down. I was then about 3 years and 9 months old.

Grandpa took his little girl, our Aunt Lucy as we called her back to Michigan to stay with Grandma’s sister, Aunt Caroline, until she finished high school. There were two other Lucy’s in the school there so she was called by her second name, Nettie. Nettie Drake later Nettie Ingersoll. Then Grandpa Drake went back and forth between Kansas and Michigan until after he "proved up" on his claim. One winter when he was in Kansas he wrote Aunt Caroline Batchelor that he had a cough. She answered right back, writing out a recipe for cough medicine. By mistake she wrote the last page of her letter on the other side of the recipe. She finished her letter saying, "There, I have overdid it like all the Methodists." Ever since then, that expression has been a byword among the older ones who heard it then.

Mother told us that Grandma Drake (her mother) was quite a hand when the babies were unusually cross to give them lodinum. She kept a tiny bottle of it on hand and would put the point of a pin down the bottle, wash off what would cling to the pinpoint in a teaspoon of water, and give the baby that so it would sleep and she never had any trouble. One afternoon she was going to help and older sister and left Mother, who was then a baby, with her sister Saraphina Richardson (later Swearingen). Grandma told her what to do if necessary, but Saraphina used the head of the pin instead of the point and of course that picked up about five times as much lodinum and put the baby to sleep so they thought she would never wake up. They tossed Ma in the air, soused her in the rainbarrel, rubbed her and did everything they could think of to rouse her and still they couldn’t wake her up. An old tramp came down the road and stood at the gate watching them. He asked what was the matter with the baby. They told him and he came right in and asked if they and any onions. "Yes," they replied so he asked them to get him several large ones. He cut them in half, bound a piece of onion under each arm, one at the elbow, one under each knee, and one on the bottom of each foot with the cut side against the skin. He changed them as they turned black, and after about three changes she "came to." They gave her a warm bath to restore her circulation for she had been thrown into the air and dipped into the rainbarrel until she was cold. Well, she got all right, but you can see how near it came to there not being any you or me or the rest of us!

The man who had a homestead in the same section as ours sold his claim after a year or two to J. C. McCammon, afterwards Dr. McCammon of Reamsville, Kansas. He had four daughters. I don’t remember any of them although Nan and Dolly were of school age. Mary was 21 and I think Janie was 19 when they moved away. She and her mother died shortly after that of consumption, and Nan died of consumption about the time I was married and left two or three little girls.

While Doc McCammon lived there beside us he was studying medicine. One or two of his neighbors thought he was good doctor, but most of them claimed they wouldn’t have him in to doctor a sick cow. Some did just that, however, for he would go to a sick cow or anything and people began to notice he did know a little something about medicine after all. About that time his whole family became sick, some with what we call "flu" now, and he brought them all out of it by himself. Then they thought more of him. He moved to Reamsville, set up a drugstore, and hung out his shingle as "Doctor."

When a few of us little folks were five years old they decided it time to organize a school district and build a sod schoolhouse. They made all the furniture themselves; a teacher’s desk, benches without backs for the pupils, and a few shelves to put the books away at night. For several terms we had three months of school in the fall and three months in the spring. Nettie Russell was our first teacher. She taught one fall and spring and had the school’s promise for the next term when she married Ma’s uncle, Gersham Richardson. They wouldn’t let her go on teaching then because she had "broken her contract," but had to relent because no one else applied and so she taught again that fall. Someone else taught in the spring. Then she took it up again the following fall with a then 10 month old baby, our cousin Mattie Richardson. I went to school that tern. We used the Independent Series of school books. They wouldn’t let me go until Olive was old enough to go along with me as it was a mile and a half from home and we had to go alone.

The next year they built a frame school house with regular school seats and desks for two to sit in. The boys sat on side of the room and the girls on the other. This schoolhouse was a half mile nearer home so not so far for us to walk. We had a man teacher. He was only 16 years old, but he had lied about his age, saying he was 18. He was big enough and he was a fine teacher with perfect control in the schoolroom, but out on the playground he would be just a boy with the rest of the boys.

Our next teacher was an older man. They began having school during most of the winter for the big boys. This teacher organized a "singing school" to meet one night a week. He taught the first steps in music. He ruled our slates for us and taught us how to put in the cleft and notes. Some of the parents thought this was a "waste of time" and made him scrape the lines off and smooth our slates with his jack-knife. Olive and I didn’t get to go to the night "singing school" for Pa didn’t want to hitch up the team and take us and it was too far and too late for us to go alone. The teacher himself said we were better off in bed.

They had "Literary" every two or three weeks and Pa took us to that. Pa was the president of the school board and was the biggest toad in the puddle there. They gave a play every once in a while and Pa and Ma were both in those and we children went sometimes we slept thru most of it, but we were there!

We had Sunday School in the old school house and also in the new one and Pa hitched up and took us all until we got big enough to go alone. The neighbors’ children would stop by our place and we would walk along together. Before we left Kansas they had begun "preaching services" in the school house. There was a "Dunkard" who lived east of the school, a "Campbellite" over north in Nebraska, a Methodist from Franklin, Nebraska about one time a month, and a Baptist, who was holding a series of meeting in the schoolhouse west of us came over several times to preach. The last I heard the whole country was "Baptist," the others having gradually dropped out, but that was after we had moved away.

Once when I was nine years old I was out taking care of the children as usual. Mother called me and met me in the yard. I was bareheaded so she put her sunbonnet on my head and told me to go over to Wharton’s (the neighbors who had bought Doc McCammon’s place) and to tell Mrs. Wharton that she wanted to see her. The little ones all wanted to go along with me so she let them go and said that if Mrs. Wharton came we could stay there until she returned home. Mrs. Wharton was anxious to know what Ma wanted and asked me if Ma was sick. I said, "No, she just wants to see you." So Mrs. Wharton left and stayed away a long time. It began to get dark and I thought we should all go home but Mrs. Wharton’s 18 year old daughter, Rena, said, "No your Ma said for you to wait until my Ma came back and that you can stay all night if it gets dark before she comes back." So Rena put us to bed early with her own little sister and in the morning her mother was still away and didn’t return till 4 in the afternoon!

Mrs. Wharton told us we could all go home now and that Ma wanted to show us something we would all like. She wouldn’t tell us what it was. On our way home we were all trying to guess what the surprise could be, the younger ones having in mind some toy they hoped it would be. Suddenly when we were near home I cried - "Oh, I know, I bet it is a baby brother or sister!" Then we all began running and shortlegged little Chauncey was left way behind crying. We bounced into the house and asked, "Where is it, Ma?" But there stood Mrs. Goodman, another neighbor, in the doorway to the next room. We asked her, "Where’s Ma?" She replied, "She’s in the other room but you can’t see her until Chauncey gets here because you’ve run off from your little brother and he is going to be the first one to get to see the surprise." Then she took Chauncey by the hand and led him to Ma’s bed and put a little baby sister in his arms. The baby was your Aunt Zetta, and Chauncey was about five years old. (Zetta Loshbaugh, born May 7, 1885).

After a while the house began to need repair so Pa took the old roof off and put on boards and covered the boards with sod. It didn’t seem to be as heavy as it should be and the wall began to fall out, so he boarded the wall up in front. The twins, Hiram was creeping, and Almon was walking at the time. Hiram would pull himself up beside the door on the inside and Almon would toddle outside so they could peek in at each other through a hole in the wall. One day Hiram stuck his finger in the hole and poked Almon in the eye.

We kept the table in the middle of the floor, just opposite the door, and the cupboard sat against the wall back of it and in front of an old fireplace in the wall. One day when we had company and the rest were through eating dinner and I, who had to wait, was just sitting down to eat mine, Ma noticed a bulging place in the plaster of the back wall and heard a sound like the rattle of falling dirt behind the cupboard. Everyone rushed out and up the bank behind the house to see what they could see. The babies started to follow and so did I. I met the folks coming back and turned around just in time to see one of the twins, our Uncle Almon, run out the door and the clock, that had been fastened to the top of the cupboard, come tumbling after him! But there was your Uncle Hiram, sitting in the doorway, with his lap full of "greens" and other food off the table, the wall had caved in, tipped the cupboard against the table, pushing it over and sliding all the stuff to eat into Hiram’s lap!

Pa had been working at carpentry for two or three years, mostly in Reamsville, Kansas. He built Doc McCammon’s drugstore and residence and most of the oldest frame building that are there now -- not all alone, of course, as he had a partner some of the time. He would leave home Monday morning and come home Saturday night. He walked to and from Reamsville (9 miles) and on Saturdays he often carried a large sack of flour home on his back!

One time Christmas came on Sunday and he was snowbound and couldn’t get home for Christmas Eve, well Santa Clause didn’t get to our place until he did, a week after Christmas! We had gotten a sumac tree and trimmed it. What a disappointment it was when he didn’t come.

Another time we were snowbound (I think it was January 2nd 1885) the snow buried us so we couldn’t get out. We had a scoop in the house and a new door that Pa intended putting up between the two rooms. Ma opened the outside door and got it through the snow. Then she dug out enough snow to leave a hole wide enough to put the new door through and bore down on it until she could climb out on it and shovel and pack down the snow to the woodpile at the edge of the yard to get wood to build a fire. She made us stay in bed all that time. We couldn’t get out to the stable to care for the stock until Uncles Hiram and Almon Drake (after whom my twin brothers were named) came and dug a track in the snow as deep as their heads. Then we couldn’t find the chickens for three weeks! It had been daytime when it began snowing so they were out somewhere. Pa was walking on top of the snow up on the bank between the house and the haystacks behind the stable and broke thru the snow with one foot. He could hear the chickens. The heat of their bodies and their scratching had made quite a space under the snow for them. They were all alive and lively as you please. They were poorly when we got them out, but they had been eating snow for water and Pa threw some grain in for them and they stayed there another week after we found them.

I must tell you about "Grandpap" Buster. He was Aunt Hattie’s (Hattie Drake Buster) father-in-law. Uncle Dave Buster and Jane (Mrs. Goodman) were his only children, I guess, at least all that were there, and he put in his time between them mostly though he liked to come and see us because Ma was Aunt Hattie’s sister. He was a Union Soldier and his daughter’s husband was a Confederate Soldier. My Grandpa Drake was a Union Soldier and he used to visit among us all, too, only he walked and "Grandpap" Buster drove and old gray mare - a horse as old or older than our old gray Jack. When we saw him and old "Nellie" coming over the hill we knew we were going to have company for he always stayed all day. One time I noticed they gave him a cup of coffee and that when the cream and sugar was passed he said, "No thanks. I take my coffee barefooted." I remembered that, so whenever I got a cup of coffee and anyone wanted to thin it with milk I wouldn’t let them, I insisted on taking my coffee "barefooted" like "Grandpap" Buster. We didn’t get coffee very often in those days, but when I was 9 years old Ma gave me a cup of coffee for breakfast and said that was my birthday present and that I could have it every day now if I wanted it! I always took it clear, of course they didn’t give it to me very strong. I was grown up and married before I would use cream in my coffee and I still don’t use sugar.

Pa traded his farm and Grandpa Drake his (160 acres each) and Mr. Schwartz of Reamsville traded in a half-section with them for Eagle (or Egle) Mills, 2 1/2 miles over north of Riverton, Nebraska, one summer and on the 28th of September 1888 we left Kansas and went into the milling business. Mr. Schwartz had half interest and Pa and Grandpa each had a fourth.

Eagle Mills was an old flour and meal burrgrinding mill. The waterwheel was under the back end of the building, run by the water from what they call a tailrace, made by building a dam across a creek and digging a ditch from the end of the mill back into the creek. They took out the waterwheel, repaired the old dam, turned the creek into the tailrace, then went to the far side of the creek, which ran along the foot of a big hill that was faced with black rock and dug a pit for the wheel and put it down in there. They built a little house over it, attached a pulley at the top and connected it with the mill and began to make meal, bran, shorts, etc., while they were getting the mill ready for full duty.

They built a dam of heavy timbers across the creek bottom and put in six gates that could be raised and lowered to control the flow of the water, with a footbridge over the top so they could get to the wheelhouse. Then they threw up a levee about as long as the dam, with teams and scrapers. Then they turned the water back into its course and filled up the tailrace, but not before Mr. Schwartz’ little boy got drowned in it!

They had the burrs in the basement, built a platform on the first floor and put in new rollers and connected them up with the rest of the machinery, elevators flour meal and grain bins, and the sifters on the top floor, all that was necessary for a first class roller flour mill that made three grades of flour, cornmeal, chop, middlings, and bran. They would take in a man’s grist and take a toll of one-third for the mill and two-thirds for the man, and they sold flour all over the country out of what they took in for "toll." Of course they had to buy some wheat.

The mill did really well for two or three years and then things began to go down, we sold out our share to Mr. Schwartz for very little cash and the promise to get our flour there for the next two years. We got flour for about six months, then the mill burned to the ground. No one ever learned the cause of the fire. So none of us came out on the venture financially and we were all poorer than when we left Kansas.

We had moved up the creek from the mill and lived there a year while Pa worked with a railroad gang in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Then we moved to Riverton. Pa bought a house and lot and tax title for two additional lots joining. He built an addition to the house. That was our home until some of us were married and until our parents died. Ma died in 1899 and Pa died in 1904. We sold the place after Pa died and each got a share.

When we moved over to Eagle Mills I was past twelve and of course we reentered school there. We thought it was an awfully small schoolhouse compared to the one in Kansas but I think it was just the same size, except that it had an entry hall where we hung our wraps and that took up 3 or 4 feet. Then, there weren’t so many seats or scholars until we got there. There were 4 of us and 4 of the Schwartz bunch and that made it pretty crowded. The schoolhouse may have been a little narrower, for there was no aisle between the outside rows of desks and the walls as there was in the Kansas school.

Our school games had been "Blackman," "Dare Base" and the like, baseball for the older ones, playhouse and marbles for the younger. Over here it was "Skip the Maloo" and all kinds of singing, dancing, and "kissing" games, for most of those in school were in their teens, and there were only 2 or 3 little children. Every song we knew they sang to a different tune. We thought their way was wrong and they said ours was! We went to school there from the fall of 1892 when we moved into the town of Riverton.

We attended town school until Olive graduated from the 10th grade in May of 1896. She and I had always been in the same class until the last two years when the professor urged her to take three grades in two years. I couldn’t make it so that left me alone for my last year and I just got married then instead. I wasn’t very strong or healthy enough to teach school but thought I’d had enough schooling to help hold down a homestead so that is what I did next fall instead of going back to school. Olive went on to teacher’s institute and to teaching school.

I was the first to marry, in 1896, and we lived in Smith County, Kansas, for nine years. Then we came to Colorado and I’ve been here (Kit Carson County) ever since. Tom (Campbell) used his homestead rights in Kansas on 80 acres and so could file on only 80 acres in Colorado. This he did and after a time a new law was enacted that gave a man the right to file on an additional 160 acres if it joined the original. Only 80 acres joined ours and he was ready to file on that when he died. As his widow I could have filed on it but I didn’t. Sometimes I wish I had and at other times I’m glad I didn’t. I didn’t have the money for the filing fees then and I would have had to "prove up" for seven years, since the time was up on the other 80 acres, and I didn’t want to hold down the homestead all alone. As it was Scott and Zetta (Ready) nearly had "spells" about my being alone the little while I did stay on at Tom’s place after he died - so I mortgaged the place, bought lots in town and built a house there, Stratton, Colorado. For two years I rented the farm and got only $8.75 one year and $9.50 the next! The men were honest enough, they just couldn’t raise any crops.

I built a two room house on my lots here in town and after living here a year sold the farm to the man who held the mortgage for $500.00. Later I learned that if I’d kept the farm until spring I could have gotten twice that. The man kept it with a lot of other collateral and turned it all in on one big deal and then he told me that if he made anything on it he would divide the profits with me. A couple years later, after I had married John (Blackmar) this banker told John to have me bring my bankbook down and he would make a deposit in it for $50.00. A year later he did the same, so I finally got $600.00 for my place..

Well, the homestead days are over now -- and we who grew up together there are scattered far and wide -- your Aunt Zetta, your mother and I in Colorado, Henry in Wyoming and California, and Chauncy in Arkansas, Olive in Iowa, and the twins, Almon in Idaho and Hiram in Iowa. A baby brother, Willie, our sister Viola, and our parents have gone to settle a new homestead in a more beautiful land."

Aunt Inez spent her declining years as an invalid. She died 18 November 1944 at Denver, Colorado and is buried at Stratton, Colorado.