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Title: Seeing Lincoln
Author: Longman, Anne
Language: English
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*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Seeing Lincoln" ***
SEEING
_Lincoln_
_Presented by_
Gold & Co.
LINCOLN, NEBR.
Written for The Nebraska State Journal
By Anne Longman
No. 1—O street
[Illustration: {uncaptioned}]
Come with us, all you who are new to the city or you who bid fair to
live and die in Lincoln without ever having seen her various faces.
We’ll teach you in—well, we don’t know how many lessons—something about
the city in which you are living.
Maybe we should begin with the capitol, known over the world for its
beauty. But we think we’ll start with that handy starting and stopping
place, O street. Lincoln is often described as an overgrown country
town, O its Main street. But even New York has its lapses into the
primitive, and who doesn’t like, in medium doses, the simplicity and the
friendliness that spell country town.
When Lincoln was only a handful of blocks flung down on the prairie for
hasty habitation by early salt seekers, restless young Civil war
veterans, the railroad advance guard and those with an incurable pioneer
fever, it huddled within the confines of what is now the most downtown
part of Lincoln. Along O from Eighth to Fourteenth were its beginnings.
The town spread slowly, like extremely cold molasses, into an indefinite
shape with an undulating circumference at the present time of about 20
miles.
So, here’s O street, looking from Tenth east. Most of Lincoln’s buses
head up O to Tenth, rolling around government square and then rolling
back to O again. You can’t get lost in Lincoln. Just keep one foot, or
at least an eye, on O and say your alphabet north and south. Or on
Thirteenth and say your numbers east and west. And then there are a few
streets on the edges with fancier names, just to make it a little
harder.
No. 2—The Lincoln Statue
[Illustration: {uncaptioned}]
This city is one of 25 cities or towns in the United States sharing the
name of Lincoln. Sixteen of these 25 were named for Abraham Lincoln. It
is perhaps not unduly vain to say that Lincoln, Neb., is most noted of
these Lincolns. To begin with, it is the capital of a state, and that
state is the geographical center of the North American continent.
Among other things which have drawn attention to this city of 81,000 are
its illustrious one-time citizens. From the home base of Lincoln William
Jennings Bryan spattered the country with silver words about the silver
standard. General Pershing was one of the Atlases on whose shoulders the
weight of the first World war rested. Charles G. Dawes, a dynamic young
lawyer of Lincoln in the 80’s, eventually became a vice president. Willa
Cather, precocious university student in the 90’s, at the height of her
writing career was conceded to be this country’s most gifted woman
writer. Charles Lindbergh is claimed by Lincoln after a fashion and with
some degree of justification. It was here that he learned the art of
flying, after trundling into town unobtrusively on a day in April—April
Fool’s day in fact—1922. And there are many other notables whose names
are in some way linked with the city.
The famous sculptor, Daniel Chester French, left behind him several
famous statues of Abraham Lincoln. One of these has stood on the capitol
grounds since its dedication, Sept. 2, 1912. As the new, and fifth,
Nebraska capitol burgeoned slowly it elbowed off the grounds every
vestige of the outgrown capitol with one exception—the Lincoln statue.
It is something difficult to outgrow.
No. 3—Old Butler Mansion
[Illustration: {uncaptioned}]
Lincoln was chosen as the capital of Nebraska in the summer of 1867 by
three young men, David Butler, John Gillespie and Thomas Kennard, who
had been named as a commission to do this task. They have become almost
legendary figures in the minds of Nebraskans—three men in tall silk hats
silhouetted against the prairie sky as they pounded their ponies over
the countryside in search of a capital site.
They were very actual people, however; Butler was the state of
Nebraska’s first governor; Thomas Kennard, first secretary of state and
Gillespie first state auditor. Interestingly, the homes built by these
three men still stand, perhaps the three oldest houses in Lincoln.
Herewith is shown the one-time mansion of Governor Butler, which has
stood at Seventh and Washington for almost 75 years. At that time of
course there were no such streets. The mansion was a country home, from
which the governor drove to the capitol and back in state.
The original house was square and high. Built of blocks of brown stone
with a cupola and a front stoop instead of a porch it was considered
very imposing. Here Governor Butler lived from about 1867 until his
impeachment in 1871. The impeachment by the legislature came about
because of Butler’s borrowing $17,000 from the school fund. Land which
he had deeded to the state was said to have more than paid in value the
amount borrowed, and great bitterness resulted from the legislature’s
action.
“Lord” Jones, a rich Englishman, purchased the building in the early
70’s. Thirty years later the Lincoln Country club took it over and added
wings. The mansion has been used variously since as the home of the ku
klux klan, a radio broadcasting studio and a dance house. Now, hands
patiently folded, it awaits the auctioneer’s hammer.
No. 4—Kennard House
[Illustration: {uncaptioned}]
Like the Butler mansion, the Kennard house at 1627 H was built in the
late 60’s. Exteriorly it has been little changed and indicates fairly
well the style of the more pretentious houses of that period.
Thomas Kennard was a colorful figure of the times. On the streets of the
raw prairie city he sported a frock coat, black velvet vest and a silk
hat, which was perhaps legitimate dress for a man of his importance. He
had helped select Lincoln as the capital of Nebraska. Later he was
railroad attorney, state senator and an appraiser of Indian lands for
the federal government. In 1890 he organized the Western Glass & Paint
company, still in existence. In 1898 he was appointed by President
McKinley receiver of public moneys at the U. S. land office in Lincoln.
Choosing a site for the capitol was not as simple as it sounds 75 years
later. Omaha clung to the honor with grim fingers. Ashland was bitter at
not being chosen. The $50,000 bonds of the commissioners had been filed
with the chief justice, but not with the state treasurer, as the law
specified. Disgruntled Omaha people said the commissioners therefore had
no legal standing and they planned to prevent the removal of the state
papers, and in fact the capital, to Lincoln by having an injunction
issued. Gov. Butler and Mr. Kennard formulated a plan. On Sunday morning
Mr. Kennard drove to Omaha, entered the state house, took the seal of
state, wrapped it up carefully and put it under the seat of his buggy.
He arrived in Lincoln next morning after stopping in Ashland overnight.
The governor’s proclamation, ready and waiting, that morning announced
that the capital was now removed.
Mr. Kennard lived to celebrate his 90th birthday. He was by that time a
gentle old man in quiet dress, yet about him still hovered, one felt,
the aura of the empire builder.
No. 5—Official Milestone
[Illustration: {uncaptioned}]
The official milestone of Lincoln, standing in front of the city hall at
10th and P, has caused considerable comment, mostly favorable, since it
was placed there in 1926. The suitability of the covered wagon idea and
the manner of execution are not questioned. This very portion of Lincoln
was alive with prairie schooners, not always drawn by oxen however, in
the first 30 years of the city’s existence—tied to the hitching posts,
relaxing in government square for the night. The editor of The Journal
often put his head out the window and counted the wagons on the square.
Then he drew it back and sat down—not to his typewriter, in those
days—and told his readers how many new settlers were coming into the
state. Sometimes they needed encouragement, when grasshoppers were thick
or dry dust piled high.
The only critical note indicated in comment is the fact that the prairie
schooner is headed east instead of west. That seems to indicate the
back-home defeatist attitude rather than the on-to-victory pioneer
spirit.
The city hall itself was built early in the city’s history ... 1874. For
50 years it grew dingier and dingier. Then a sandman polished it off and
it showed up as an attractive edifice made of limestone—quarried near
the Platte river. The texture of its surface contrasts pleasingly with
the smoother face of the postoffice building.
The city hall was first Lincoln’s postoffice. Not until 1906 was the
first section of the present postoffice built. Until then the city
edifice was on the present site of the municipal building on Q street.
No. 6—Nebraska State Journal
[Illustration: {uncaptioned}]
Today The Journal stars itself in this column. Justifiably, we believe.
For it was 75 years ago—Sept. 7, 1867—that the first issue of the paper
was brought forth, at Nebraska City, five weeks after the capital of the
state of Nebraska was declared to be in existence. The next and all
subsequent issues came out in Lincoln.
The present Journal building, at Ninth and P, has stood here almost 60
years. The life story of this world has pulsed thru it ceaselessly.
Daily, feet have stormed up and down its steps, bearing humdrum news or
perhaps a local bombshell of information. Loftily above, news from the
outside has poured in over singing wires, every day occurrences of the
world or sometimes catastrophic tidings.
On these steps stood Willa Cather, journalist of the nineties, a
dauntless young female who nevertheless gazed about her fearfully after
nightfall. For Ninth street in the nineties, and after dark, was a
dubious spot. Up these steps to write his daily column reeled Walt
Mason, for he had not yet reached Kansas and fame, and reform at the
hands of William Allen White.
Noted people of the day sometimes came and went—sometimes a person with
a grievance and a club. For newspapers of earlier days were amazingly
flatfooted in their remarks. But come threat, come flood, come wars or
disasters, the presses turned on, into the new century and now almost
half a century past the turn.
No. 7—St. Paul Methodist Church
[Illustration: {uncaptioned}]
Of Lincoln’s downtown churches, St. Paul Methodist is most completely
downtown. At 12th and M, the tides of business and everyday life flow
all about it. It has weathered into its place, a hospitable building
where passersby are welcome. St. Paul has been a boon to Lincoln during
a good many years, at periods when the city was short of meeting
places—and these periods have been frequent. St. Paul’s is big, it is
very conveniently located. At the price of a crushed rib (and admission)
one has been able to hear many stirring performances—Paderewski and
other famous musicians, addresses of the great.
The crushed rib should not, however, be charged against the Methodists.
Their serious purpose in 1867 was to organize a church in the new city.
They expected to fling their doors open principally for church comers,
and, sadly, huge entrances are not necessary to take care of the average
church congregation.
The first church was put up in 1868—the First Methodist Episcopal church
of Lincoln. In 1883 a new structure was erected and the name changed to
St. Paul Methodist. In 1899 this building burned and two years later the
present structure was completed. Among attractive features of the church
are its two great windows on the east and south.
Dr. Walter Aitken, who resigned in 1942, had been pastor of St. Paul
church 22 years.
No. 8—County Courthouse
[Illustration: {uncaptioned}]
The photographer surprised us with this attractive picture of the
Lancaster county courthouse, a testimonial to his art or to our lack of
perception. Our initial impression of the courthouse was gained from the
third story of The Journal building in the days when it still wore a
conventional round dome, on top of which was perched a sad castiron
statue of Abraham Lincoln. Once a painter clambered up and gave the
statue a coat of bright red paint. Protests poured in. It developed that
the red was only preliminary to a more suitable bronze. But eventually
dome and statue disappeared, with pleasing results.
In its 55 years the courthouse has seen drama. The most sensational
trials held within its walls were during the tumultuous 90’s—the John
Sheedy, Irvine-Montgomery, George Washington Davis and Lillie cases.
Sheedy was Lincoln’s kingpin gambler of the 90’s, a large handsome
person who was found at his office with skull crushed. His beautiful
young wife and a Negro, Monday MacFarland, were tried and acquitted. W.
H. Irvine was tried for the fatal shooting of C. E. Montgomery, a
Lincoln banker, and exonerated. Mrs. Lillie, found guilty of killing her
husband at David City and later pardoned by Governor Mickey, here forced
the Woodman company to pay her insurance for the death of the husband
whom a jury had convicted her of killing.
George Washington Davis, a Negro, loosened part of the Rock Island track
southeast of the penitentiary with the idea of notifying the company and
securing a job as a reward. He notified them too late. There was a train
wreck and 12 were killed. Davis was convicted.
A later incident was the trial of iron-faced Frank Sharp, found guilty
of the brutal hammer murder of his wife.
No. 9—O Street Columns
[Illustration: {uncaptioned}]
Hats off! The flag...! Shade your eyes down this vista and summon your
imagination. Do you see, falling across these columns, the shadow of a
great president and hear out of the past the distant marching of feet
and the sound of muted fife and drum?
These columns at the O street entrance of Antelope park, between 23rd
and 24th, were once a part of the old federal building in Washington.
Standing between them Abraham Lincoln once reviewed the Civil war
troops. Easterners, who live in an atmosphere crowded with reminders of
the historic great, would smile at such a thin fancy—at attempting
somehow to draw Abraham Lincoln across the Missouri river. So far as
history shows, the east bank of the Missouri is as far west as Lincoln
ever traveled. In the early years of the 60’s he was the guest of
General Dodge in Council Bluffs, invited there to help decide where the
eastern terminal of the Union Pacific should be. As we recall an early
account, Lincoln stood on the bank of the Missouri and gazed westward,
but even “on a clear day” such as we like to boast of from the Missouri
on west, he could hardly have seen the little village which later would
bear his name.
When the treasury building was remodeled in 1907 these sandstone columns
were bought by Cotter T. Bride of Washington, a personal friend of
William Jennings Bryan. He presented them to the city of Lincoln in
1916.
Halfway between the columns is a bronze tablet relating the origin of
the pillars. The tablet, weighing 450 pounds and made from material
saved from the battleship Maine, was presented to the city by the U. S.
W. V.
No. 10—City Library
[Illustration: {uncaptioned}]
Of the 2,811 libraries which Andrew Carnegie magnanimously scattered
over this globe before his death in 1919, five stand in Lincoln—a
generous proportion, surely. Perhaps we would not have shared his bounty
so fully had it not been that libraries in University Place, College
View and Havelock were secured when these sections of Lincoln were still
towns in their own right.
Before Mrs. W. J. Bryan interceded to secure a Carnegie building for
Lincoln proper the library was as wandering as a poor sharecropper, and
burned out about as often. It ceased its nomadic life in 1900, beginning
in that year a dignified and permanent existence at Fourteenth and N.
We have it from the librarian, Magnus Kristoffersen, that as many as
2,000 people have been known to walk up the library steps in one day—to
take out books or to linger and read. That sounds like a great many
people and it probably doesn’t happen often. Even so, the library is
doubtless one of the city’s valuable assets. The building is richly
lined with 160,000 volumes, written by the great, the near great or the
fleetingly great authors of all time. No wonder readers come often to
draw mental and spiritual sustenance therefrom.
An attentive staff and a carefully worked system make access to books
easy at any of the library buildings. Two branches not mentioned above
are Northeast at 27th and Orchard and Bethany at 1551 No. Cotner.
Any Lincoln resident, any child attending Lincoln schools, anyone
attending college here or anyone owning property and paying taxes to the
city will be issued a borrower’s card, good at any of the city’s
libraries. In addition to regular activities, service is given the three
principal Lincoln hospitals. A still newer feature is the bookmobile,
which makes five stops in the city.
No. 11—Normal Methodist church
[Illustration: {uncaptioned}]
William Jennings Bryan, who spotlighted Lincoln from the nineties on,
died in 1925, shortly after the famous Scopes trial in Tennessee. He had
gone to that state to thunder disapproval of John T. Scopes, who was
being tried for teaching evolution, contrary to Tennessee law. It is
believed that Bryan’s death was hastened by his vigorous efforts in
behalf of fundamentalism.
It is interesting to gaze upon this modest church—Normal Methodist, 55th
and South—which Bryan attended after his removal to Fairview, and
reflect that here, doubtless, were built up the religious convictions
which accompanied him—perhaps hastened him—to his grave. Not always did
he occupy one of the old fashioned stained oak benches. Often he spoke
from the carved pulpit, his hand upon the old metal-clasped Bible, his
pontifical and mellow voice filling the little church.
What W. J. Bryan believed he believed with great sincerity and
articulateness. First intimations of his gifts as an orator came with
the impassioned silver speech in 1896 in which he declared: “You shall
not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns; you shall
not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.” His contemporaries did not
always agree with the Great Commoner, but they could not do otherwise
than respect his sincerity. He fought for the silver standard, for
peace, for prohibition, for fundamentalism, often losing but never
giving up the fight.
His lion’s face and mane, his broad hat, his golden voice, are gone, but
gashes of his reform ax may still be seen on the surface of the
commonwealth.
No. 12—City Mission
[Illustration: {uncaptioned}]
For years preceding and following the turn of the century 9th street was
definitely a street of wickedness. In fact it was dedicated to the ways
of wickedness—it and the shadowy region west, extending down to about K
street. There was a law on the books against the sort of houses that
filled the redlight district, but instead of enforcing it the police
exacted tribute. Every first Monday of the month proprietresses in silks
and plumes rustled into the city hall and majestically laid down their
gold. As the rate was, we are told, about $15 for inmates and $25 for
managers per month, they left a considerable stack on the municipal
desk. Most of it went into the public school coffers.
This noisome neighborhood kept police busy. No mere saunter up to the
station for a list of parking offenders was the police run in those
hectic days. Often a brief telephone call—murder or/and suicide at
Rose’s or Rae’s or Kitty’s, took police and reporters hopping. The
district was finally closed by the expedient of enforcing the law. The
man undertaking this revolutionary method of procedure was Co. Atty.
Frank Tyrrell.
One of the well known notorious houses, known as Lydia’s place, stood at
124 So. 9th st. This same building, cleansed in purpose and aspect, was
a number of years ago turned into the City Mission by interested Lincoln
churches. At the top of the house a lighted star now beckons shabby
wayfarers to a free meal and night’s lodging. Looking in at the mission
any evening one may see, not parading painted women in short skirts,
smoking cigarets—unmistakable marks of sin in the 80’s and 90’s—but
seated derelicts lending their cauliflower ears to the nightly religious
service.
No. 13—Aeronautical Institute
[Illustration: {uncaptioned}]
When a blond young man, silent and tall, brought his smoking motorcycle
to rest in front of E. J. Sias’s airplane and flying school at 2415 O,
on April fool’s day, 1922, he probably had no idea, and certainly
Lincoln had no idea, that what he learned at the flying school would one
day catapult him into fame. Unnoticed Charles Lindbergh traversed the
streets of Lincoln, quiet and untalkative.
After his spectacular air voyage of May 20-21, 1927—spectacular and yet
on his part made as quietly as his entrance into Lincoln five years
before, the flying school suddenly became a mecca. Young men were
siphoned out of Australia, Scotland, China, New Guinea and dumped at the
door of the school—young men talking in divers tongues but speaking the
same language aeronautically. Since the war started men in uniform have
almost cracked the walls of the aeronautical institute.
The name of E. J. Sias is synonymous now with the words flying school.
But 30 years ago he was the energetic young minister who plucked
Tabernacle Christian church out of a cocked hat before the startled eyes
of south Lincoln. One day, June 21, 1912, he and a group in his home
thought up a Christian church in that part of the city. Two days later
they met and planned a building and 60 men volunteered to put up a
structure between morning light and evening dark. The heat of late June
prevented quite this much of a miracle, but anyway, on June 30, nine
days after the initial meeting, the tabernacle was ready for occupancy.
Rather, it was occupied—by 800 people listening to the dedicatory
sermon. This building sufficed its congregation ten years. By that time
Mr. Sias was deep in something else—flying.
No. 14—Lincoln Postoffice
[Illustration: {uncaptioned}]
The postoffice is a noble building, filling half a block on P street
between Ninth and Tenth. But, mysteriously, filtered thru a
picture-taker’s lens it takes on the appearance of a toy model still
sitting on the architect’s desk. This is most deceiving. It is really a
handsome and majestic building, of Bedford stone, standing very
massively on its green lawn.
It isn’t just a postoffice, as you learned when you were initiated into
the Income Taxpayers lodge. Also, if you want to ask how about that
money you’re going to get from Uncle Sam when 65, how about a loan for
putting up a hog house, how about keeping the black dirt on your farm
from drifting into the Missouri, how about enlisting in the army or
navy, you go to the postoffice—and also the FBI will reach out from the
postoffice and get you if you don’t watch out. If the United States
wants to try you for some federal offense, that’s where the trial will
be. Having steered clear of this court, the only case we recall offhand
is the Nye committee hearing in the Grocer Norris senatorial case.
The first federal court was held in November 1864, in a log building on
the south side of O between Seventh and Eighth. Elmer S. Dundy was the
judge. The postoffice was run by Jacob Dawson in conjunction with a
grocery in the front end, so that office and courtroom were enlivened
with the smell of codfish, coffee and tobacco. Somewhere within the log
cabin and between the codfish and the cases at bar Mr. Dawson kept
house—it may be with the help of a Mrs. Dawson, but one can read early
histories of Lincoln from preface to index without finding mention of a
woman, so thoroly was the sex still in subjugation.
The postoffice began taking on dignity in 1879 when it moved into its
new building on government square, now the city hall. The first section
of the present building was put up in 1906; the last, which made it the
impressive edifice it is today, only a year or two ago.
No. 15—Old Oliver theater
[Illustration: {uncaptioned}]
Some day when you emerge from the Varsity, 13th and P, and look up at
the weather your eyes may come to rest on “The Oliver” in old fashioned
lettering on the battlements of the ancient building, and for a moment
you may idly wonder about the playhouse’s past. It does in truth have
considerable past, reckoned in terms of famous actors who trod its
boards, of orators who thundered in debate over silver and gold
standards, suffrage for women and other problems of the past.
The theater, first known as The Lansing, opened in 1891 with Ed Church
in charge, and with Lillian Lewis and her company gracing the stage in
“L’Article 47” with the sinister subhead “The trail of the serpent is
overall.” Yet Gen. Victor Vifquain, rhapsodizing in the opening night
souvenir booklet, said: “The Lansing will become an athaeneum where a
husband can take his wife and daughter, the brother and sister without
fear of bringing a blush upon the cheeks of those whose modesty is of
priceless value to them and to the community of which they are the
ornaments and the pride.” Anyway, it was a good old chest-expanding
sentence.
A Journal man who has attended shows at this theater off and on for 50
years gives us the following list of famous players he recalls having
seen at the Lansing (later Oliver): John Drew, Ethel Barrymore, Edwin
Booth, Laurence Barrett, Joe Jefferson, Emma Eames, Sol Smith Russell,
Blanche Bates, Billie Burke, George M. Cohan, Weber & Fields, Willie
Collier, Otis Skinner, Maxine Elliott, Robert Mantell, Elsie DeWolfe,
Nat Goodwin, Dustin Farnam, Minnie Maddern Fiske, Trixie Fraganza,
DeWolfe Hopper, Virginia Harned, Elsie Janis, Margaret Illington, Mary
Mannering, Julia Marlowe, E. H. Sothern, Lillian Nordica, Alice Nielsen,
Chauncey Olcott, May Robson, Eleanor Robson, Stuart Robson, Madame
Modjeska.
Vividly connected with the history of the theater, as it is with Lincoln
itself, is the name of Frank C. Zehrung, to whom death came recently.
For almost 70 years a citizen of Lincoln, he was for perhaps half that
time manager of the Oliver.
No. 16—Dr. Harry Everett’s home
[Illustration: {uncaptioned}]
Before winter puts out a white hand to stay us (which we trust won’t be
soon, altho there are hints of early frost), it would be pleasant to
make a tour of Lincoln gardens. However, we wouldn’t want to flatten our
sight-seeing noses against front windows, and the gardens which can be
seen entire from the street are few. In a simpler day, we Americans put
our iron deer and dogs, petunias and hollyhocks in a big front yard and
then naively sat on our big front porches to see passersby and have
passersby see our elegant homes and lawns. Now that we have grown more
subtle and English and hide gardens in the back and put inscrutable
faces on our houses, seeing gardens on a tour isn’t so easy. But the
gardens are there and one can get pleasing glimpses.
Imagine a Lincoln in which all the houses perched desolately on barren
lots. Not a tree, not a curving path, not a flower. Then you will indeed
appreciate those patient and imaginative garden lovers who with a few
rocks, seeds, hoes and hoses turn desert lots into oases. There are
pretty little gardens around modest houses, large beautiful gardens
around mansions, altogether making Lincoln a charming lady of gardens.
Peer with us thru Dr. Harry Everett’s gates at 2433 Woodscrest for a
glimpse of his delightful ivory complexioned house with its maroon
awnings and blue windows, and his formal garden. Dr. Everett is an iris
specialist and is or has been president of the national iris society.
So charming is this quiet scene, with the September sun falling in bars
across the lawn, the soldierly evergreens silently on guard, that even
the sudden appearance of five beautiful senoritas on the five balconies
would be an intrusion not to be desired.
No. 17—L. C. Chapin Home
[Illustration: {uncaptioned}]
Doubtless you know the delightful and intimate sound of rain which only
a staunch immediate attic roof keeps off your face. Walking into the
Chapin home at 3805 Calvert one has a similar pleasurable sensation. It
is a beautiful house, and of course actually very protective, yet one
has the feeling of being near the earth—still in the garden. This
possibly comes from walking into it levelly from broad low flagstones.
Inside one looks out thru great wide-eyed windows so flawless that he
seems not to be separated from the rock garden and its mountain stream
or the green plush lawn which falls away into the wood.
We grew up near the woods, but “the wood” seems more suitable for this
fairy house (glorified French peasant). And the nicest thing about these
trees which circle the Chapins’ two and a half acres is that they are
original ones and came along free with Nebraska. Luckily the recent dry
years—do you remember them—did not affect the small forest, in which
hundreds of birds sing.
Inside, as the earth slowly turns, the Chapins can watch the seasons as
on a stage, or as a great framed picture turning slowly from green to
russet and brown, from brown to white. On the sloping green outside a
silver gazing globe pictures the lawn in miniature.
One could exclaim over many things—the garden to the north, where a
thousand gladioli grow—the balcony from which one half expects a pretty
peasant girl or a blessed damozel to lean.
No. 18—Student Union
[Illustration: {uncaptioned}]
What, in the words of the atrocious daily puzzle of that name, is wrong
with this picture? Very easy indeed. No angels in flat heels and
sweaters are ascending and descending the stairs. Actually, they have
begun the continuous zigzag on the Student Union steps for the season.
They may be going to or coming from a spot of lunch in the Corn Crib, a
friendly coke, bridge or pingpong, time out on the marshmallow
upholstery of the lounge, or a late afternoon hour dance.
And cease your sighs and murmurs that when you and I were young we had
lessons to get and nobody put us up a Student Union building. For one
thing, the tots may have mastered all lessons up to and including next
Tuesday morning. For another, the building is theirs, or will be in
80,000 easy payments. At six dollars a year, 10,000 university
educations laid end to end ought to about close the Student Union books.
Incidentally, it’s well worth two and a half cents a day to city campus
students, especially the ones who have made no entangling alliances with
fraternity or sorority, and they’re in the great majority—probably 75
percent. Here’s a place to do almost anything you can think of—or they
can think of, which is more comprehensive.
In the basement are offices of student publications, Awgwan, Cornhusker
and Daily Nebraskan and a ping-pong room. Office of building manager,
grill room, cafeteria, lounges and book nook are on first. On second
floor are offices of alumni association, university foundation and
University speakers bureau, ballroom, dining rooms, game room and
faculty lounge. Dining rooms and student organization rooms occupy the
third floor. Mortar Board and Innocents have fourth-floor dormer rooms.
No. 19—Memorial Stadium
[Illustration: {uncaptioned}]
To get the desired three by four inch view of Nebraska’s stadium a
photographer might walk around it seven times and his pursuit would
still be in vain, for it ovals away from him endlessly. One could get a
pointblank shot at it from the air, but empty seats, even people
enmasse, bundled in blankets, aren’t as attractive as arched windows,
which lend beauty to the mammoth structure. In the foreground of this
picture is the military department’s reviewing stand, which furnished
not only requisite proportions but perspective suitable to the times,
war now having put college athletics in the background with no gentle
hand.
The stadium, which holds 30,000 without the bleachers, is a memorial to
U. of N. men who have died in the nation’s wars. The half million dollar
cost was defrayed by students, faculty, alumni and friends. Many a
tonsil shredding joust has taken place within the stadium’s great arms.
The following from the helpful typewriter of Walter Dobbins gives
details:
“The first game played on stadium sod was with the Oklahoma Sooners,
Oct. 13, 1923, just a week before dedication of the bowl. With its
building Nebraska became a ‘big time’ football school. Games were
scheduled with top flight teams from north, south, east and west. The
largest crowd ever packed into the home field witnessed Nebraska’s 7 to
0 victory over Indiana Oct. 20, 1937.
“Some of Nebraska’s gridiron triumphs have been recorded at the stadium,
including the amazing 14 to 7 victory over Notre Dame’s Four Horsemen in
1923; the 17 to 0 win over Rockne’s eleven in 1924 and the last of the
11 game series with the Fighting Irish. New York U.’s national title
hopes were blasted on the same field in 1926 and 1927. Greatest of all
victories, however, are later ones—the 14 to 9 defeat of Minnesota in
1937 and the 6-9 win over the Gophers in 1939.”
No. 20—University Hall
[Illustration: {uncaptioned}]
This decapitated building may look ready for the scrap heap, but
sentimental Nebraskans would indignantly refuse to have it scrapped, for
it is the remains of the original campus building. Once it housed the
university entire, even offering sleeping room on the two upper stories
for men students.
First recollection invoked is of “Miss Bishop,” Bess Streeter Aldrich’s
filmed story of primitive university life, which had its premiere in
Lincoln. Another is Oscar Wilde’s visit to the university in the
eighties. There, garbed in his eccentric finery, he walked unhappy as a
strange cat, distressed by the uncouthness of Nebraska and its
university and especially by the ugly castiron stove which heated the
premises. After expressing this distress, along with his regular
lecture, Wilde, in knee breeches, buckled slippers and velvet coat,
shuddered his way back to the Arlington hotel, 841 Q, and was soon lost
to this region forever. Nobody was depressed over his disapproval and
irrepressible Journal reporters put him and the castiron stove into
facetious rhyme.
The cornerstone for U hall was laid Sept. 23, 1869, with
ceremonies—Masonic ceremonies, in fact. An Omaha brass band led a
procession and a thousand people banqueted—which must have more than
depopulated residential Lincoln—then danced until 4 in the morning.
Lumber for the building was shipped from Chicago to Nebraska City and
thence came slowly over the hills in wagons. Brick was burned in a kiln
on Little Salt creek. On Jan. 6, 1871, the doors swung open and in
walked ninety young men and women. Rumors that the building was unsafe
continued off and on for fifty years. Every now and then some propping
was done. Finally the two top floors and belltower were taken off, but
classes are still held on the remaining first floor.
No. 21—Don Love Memorial Library
[Illustration: {uncaptioned}]
The beautiful new library, now North Thirteenth’s visual shortstop, will
make 1871-1942 students brothers to the pioneer who slept, ate, cooked,
played and quarreled in one room. The new edifice has a student lounge,
auditorium, social studies reading room, general and humanities reading
room and browsing room. Those who did their lounging, their browsing,
their studying of the humanities and their date making all in one big
room under an uncompromising row of green shaded lights will feel
outmoded indeed.
But casting envy aside, this generous gift, one of several from the late
Don Love, is a welcome addition to the campus and the city. True, it
turns its back on the city as it communes perpetually with its sisters
of The Quadrangle—teachers’ college, social sciences and Andrews
hall—but it is a slender ribbed, sightly and aristocratic back. Earlier
buildings were sardine-packed on a small campus. Later edifices, given
space on the avenue, took on social graces. To the north of the
quadrangle, Memorial mall forms the center of another group of
aristocrats—Morrill hall, Bessey hall, Memorial stadium and the
Coliseum.
The new library is not yet completed. We had wondered if, when the day
of occupancy came, the former library would go the way of the old cannon
which once stood guard beside it. This cannon, brought to the campus
from the fortress of Havana at the end of the Spanish-American war, was
dedicated with ceremony as a memorial to Nebraska students who had
fought for Cuban freedom. The cannon had stood in Seville in the time of
Charles III of Spain.
A few weeks ago the cannon was ignominiously trucked off for scrap,
without ceremony or apology. But the library is to remain and will now
house the university’s extension department.
No. 22—Grant Memorial Hall
[Illustration: {uncaptioned}]
That rugged old warrior, Grant Memorial Hall (campus, 12th and S) now
resounds to commands no more stirring than a set-up singsong to which
co-eds stretch muscles and limber joints in accordance with university
physical education requirements. It was built, however, for sterner
purposes. Once the shuffle and click of guns could be heard within its
soldierly exterior as Lt. John Pershing sang out brisk orders to his
cadets. The hall was erected in honor of Nebraska’s Civil war veterans
in 1887, when those veterans were comparatively young men. Pershing was
commandant from 1891 to 1895. The military department is now housed in
Nebraska hall, a block to the north.
During the university’s middle years convocations were held in Grant
Memorial. The pipe organ in the west half of the second story came from
the Mississippi exposition held in Omaha in 1898. It was a gift from
alumni who purchased it for $2,500. For years Carrie Belle Raymond, for
whom one of the girls’ residence halls is named, played the organ for
convocation. Thousands of graduates recall her always smiling face as
she sat high above them, fingers hovering over the organ keys.
In Grant Memorial also are housed the U. of N. radio studio and the
department of architecture.
No. 23—The Temple
[Illustration: {uncaptioned}]
With the exception of the school of music, which began as a private
institution, The Temple, at 12th and R, is the only university building
which does not stand on the campus. The reason for this seeming
ostracism of the Temple—indeed, actual ostracism at the time it was
built, is that it was a gift from John D. Rockefeller, jr. The time was
1906, when muckraking and Rockefeller reviling were at their height.
Rockefeller had been a student at Brown university when E. Benjamin
Andrews, in 1906 chancellor at Nebraska, was its president.
The name of Rockefeller and the smell of oil were offensive to those who
had to do with accepting and placing buildings, but the gift was not
quite to be refused. The Temple was delicately dropped outside the
gates. However, the Temple has been a useful and busy edifice these 35
years, and but for reporters with fingers always crooked hungrily over
typewriter keys old ghosts would not have been disturbed. The Y. M. C.
A. has used the Temple for headquarters and other innocent activities
have been housed therein.
Principally, however, the building is known as the theater of the
University Players, Lincoln’s theatrical stock company, personnel of
which consists of instructors and advanced students of dramatic art. Six
plays are presented each university year. Here Fred Ballard’s “Believe
Me Xantippe” had its premiere—Mr. Ballard being a university student
some 35 years ago. His more recent “Ladies of the Jury” also appeared
here, but not the premiere. A number of the players have become known
elsewhere—Zolly Lerner, Augusta French, Jack Rank and others. The name
of Miss H. Alice Howell, for years director of The Players, is
inevitably connected with this organization.
No. 24—Art Gallery, Morrill Hall
[Illustration: {uncaptioned}]
Morrill hall, 14th and U, is a spot on the campus where everyone is very
welcome. In most of the campus buildings, while by no means barred, one
is likely to be run down by a horde of young things charging to a class.
As they outstrip one on the stairs he is left acutely aware of his
brittle old bones and the fact that from college days he can recall
offhand only two French verbs and one theorem.
In this hall—named for Charles H. Morrill, Nebraskan who did a great
deal for the university—you may saunter and look, and look and saunter.
The art galleries are in the two top rooms, the museum on the two below.
Dwight Kirsch of the university art department caught this particular
slant of sun into the upper art gallery.
Like the native Chicagoan who never heard of Hull House, we know too
little about what we have at our own doors. The Nebraska art association
has built up a fine collection of paintings. Each year it holds an
exhibit, and the fact that it buys one or more pictures every year
brings in a collection worth inspecting. The late Mr. and Mrs. F. M.
Hall of Lincoln bequeathed their collection to the university, also a
fund for further purchases.
Among the valuable paintings by modern artists owned by the art
association are the late Grant Wood’s “Arnold Comes of Age,” one of
Thomas Hart Benton’s vigorous paintings, “Lonesome Road” and John
Steuart Curry’s “Roadmender’s Camp.”
No. 25—Morrill Hall Entrance
[Illustration: {uncaptioned}]
Most impressive, perhaps, of the many interesting rooms in the Morrill
museum—two lower floors of Morrill hall—is Elephant hall. In this quiet
room time yawns, and down her great throat one sees the endless vista of
the years. Here animals of all eras, usually clad only in their bones,
confront one. If you are sensitive to the ghostly whispers of the past
you might well bring a companion. To span millions of years alone in an
afternoon is too much; the winds between as the centuries whirl are too
vigorous.
Last Saturday we gazed, alone we believed, at a beautiful pair of albino
coyotes (Wheeler county, Nebraska, 1940) with touching blue eyes; at a
Peruvian mummy (pre-Inca)—a baby with its little skull resting on moth
eaten arms; at the skeleton of a dawn horse, no higher than your knee,
dug up in Sioux county, and were kneeling intent before a reconstructed
dodo when we turned suddenly and encountered the saturnine eye of the
ever present guard.
Rightly, the museum takes no chances. Elephant hall contains one of the
best collections of modern and fossil elephants in the world, and in
addition real or reconstructed animals of many ages. Backgrounds for
these reassembled bones of animals which sniffed the earth when it was
new were painted in delicate tints by Elizabeth Dolan. The late Gutzon
Borglum, stepping into Elephant hall in a woolly camelskin coat, stopped
in his tracks among the ancient bones and murmured paradoxically and
appreciatively, “A new world.”
One of the activities of the museum has been research on the antiquity
of man in North America. Many discoveries have been made in Nebraska,
and one of the few existing collections of Yuma-Folsom artifacts is to
be found here.
No. 26—Carrie Belle Raymond hall
[Illustration: {uncaptioned}]
The pattern has changed since grandmother attended the University of
Nebraska in 1871. Today’s co-eds glide thru their four years of college
with a minimum of discomfort. Grandmother undoubtedly led a more
vigorous life, tho it cost her less (but again, money was money then).
Lincoln’s few citizens were urged to be kind to open up their homes to
farmers’ daughters bent on education. Or she could stay at “ladies
hall,” which our sleuthing has led us to believe stood at 14th and U,
for 50 cents a week if she toted in her own bedstead. Wherever she
stayed, chances are she often had to crack ice on the water pitcher
winter mornings. And crossing the pasture toward University hall in
temperate seasons she ran the risk of falling over someone’s
tethered-out cow.
In the evening grandmother lighted her kerosene lamp in a chilly room
and sat down to her lonely studies—perhaps with her chilblained feet
asoak. She was more or less isolated, as phones were still missing from
the Lincoln scene. If it had been arranged in advance, she might meet
other young men and women for a candy pull or sleigh ride.
Now, in Carrie Belle Raymond, Julia L. Love and Northeast halls—on No.
16th—the way of the co-ed is smooth. She may roam at large over an area
predigested as to temperature, blossoming with deep chairs, radios,
cardtables, piano, shampoo rooms, dancing halls and tennis courts.
Fifteen sororities in the region of the campus furnish approximately the
same sort of living for grandmother’s granddaughter. Others take their
living places where they find them. But even at the worst those living
places are much superior to what was the common lot in 1871.
No. 27—Old W. J. Bryan home, 1625 D
[Illustration: {uncaptioned}]
To old timers, the Bryan home is not the nurses’ residence at Bryan
Memorial hospital, but the house at 1625 D. It was while an occupant of
this house that fame suddenly embraced William Jennings Bryan. From it
he went to two national conventions, returning from each with the
democratic presidential nomination. On his return he addressed his
people. A sea of faces strained upward on D from 16th to 17th as the
sound of his mellifluous voice flowed out from the balcony on which he
was standing.
Here his two younger children were born. From it, in a one horse surrey,
William Jennings Bryan, in broad black hat, with his wife and children,
sallied forth each Sunday afternoon for a drive. In the backyard the
children—Ruth, later U. S. congresswoman and minister to Denmark,
William jr. and Grace dug an elaborate cave which was the envy, and the
daytime abode, of neighbor children.
As late as 1935—when the above picture was taken, the house was much as
it had been built originally. Now the square tower is gone the way of
the porch and balcony. The edifice is corseted tight as an armadillo in
white asbestos shale. We offer the original so that, driving past, you
may attempt to trace it in the modern version. At least it is an
interesting example of a 50 year old house rejuvenated.
Seven years ago the department of the interior suggested the old Bryan
home as a historical American building, worthy of careful preservation.
There was some talk of making a national shrine of the home in which the
Great Commoner had experienced his greatest triumphs. But the movement
drooped, and the old dwelling is now tamely serving as a four family
apartment house.
No. 28—Cadman Home south of State Hospital
[Illustration: {uncaptioned}]
Standing lonely on its hill this old house, doubtless one of the oldest
in the region, is the only visible evidence of one of Lancaster county’s
early and to be noticed citizens, John F. Cadman. As time has shorn him
of earthly glory, so has it shorn the house of pretentious tower and
galleries which graced it in its original elegance as manor house of
Silver Lake farm. In those days it was embellished with laid-out garden
and tree plots, even a fountain.
Mr. Cadman was a man of vigor and action. Coming to Lancaster in 1859,
he entered a quarter section of land on Salt creek, south of Lincoln.
His first move was to open a cut-off (from the Oregon Trail) from
Nebraska City to Fort Kearny, which he completed in time for 1861 spring
travel. This was of great benefit to farmers on the Salt and Blue. In
addition to his farming operations he established a trading post at the
point where the cut-off crossed Salt creek. The post was also a station
for the Lusbaugh line of stages between Nebraska City and Fort Kearny,
where they connected with overland stages to California. He served in
the territorial legislature, also the state legislature, first term. In
1867 he was a leading advocate for removal of the capital to Lancaster
county—only he wanted it at Yankee Hill, south of Lincoln.
An old biography of Mr. Cadman says proudly that he never drank a glass
of liquor in his life, not indicating, we hope, that he was a rare
exception to a general rule. All in all he was a hardy and
to-be-relied-on citizen, a worthy rival of salty old Elder Young, who
founded the town of Lancaster and used his influence to get the capitol
into Lancaster’s successor, Lincoln, instead of at Yankee Hill, where
John Cadman wanted it.
No. 29—Marker on Burlington Station
[Illustration: THE FOUNDING OF
LINCOLN
ON JULY 29 1867
IN SESSION AT
THE FRONTIER HOME OF
CAPT. W. T. DONOVAN
LOCATED 166 FEET NORTH
638 FEET EAST OF THIS SPOT
THE NEBRASKA STATE
CAPITAL COMMISSION
DAVID BUTLER, GOVERNOR
JOHN J. GILLESPIE, AUDITOR
THOMAS P. KENNARD
SEC’Y. OF STATE
LOCATED LINCOLN
CAPITAL CITY OF NEBRASKA
ON THIS PRAIRIE
ERECTED BY NEBRASKA SOCIETY
SONS OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
JULY 29 1927]
On a hot afternoon in July, 1867—the 29th—Commissioners Butler, Kennard
and Gillespie emerged dripping from the attic of Captain W. T. Donovan’s
house. Standing on its east side to avoid the blazing sun Butler
announced that henceforth Lincoln would be the capital of Nebraska. The
severely fashioned Donovan house stood at the northern point of a
triangle which would have included the Journal building and the
Burlington station had they been built at that time. Why the
commissioners took to the attic to vote on the site is not certain, but
possibly they did not want to be rudely interrupted by those who had
been insisting that it be located at Ashland, Seward or Yankee Hill, or
be left in Omaha.
Captain Donovan came to Lancaster county in the mid-fifties. Captain of
the steamboat Emma, one of the boats which plied up the Missouri as far
as Plattsmouth, he was drawn to this region by the possibilities of salt
in the Salt creek valley. His son was the first white child born in the
county, his daughter the first Lincoln bride. He took the first
homestead in the county under the 1862 homestead law. He stuck to his
claim during the Indian scare of 1864 and helped protect settlers who
had the courage to remain. The tablet was erected by the Nebraska
Society of the Sons of the American Revolution.
No. 30—Marker at 14th and O
[Illustration: LOG CABIN
BUILT IN 1864
THE YEAR OF THE FOUNDING OF
THE VILLAGE OF LANCASTER.
THE FOUNDATION PIER UNDER THE
COLUMN UPON WHICH THIS TABLET
IS PLACED RESTS OVER THE DUG WELL
THAT STOOD BEFORE THE DOOR OF THE CABIN.
THIS TABLET IS ERECTED UNDER THE
AUSPICES OF THE LINCOLN CHAPTER
OF THE SONS OF THE AMERICAN
REVOLUTION.]
The name Luke Lavender seems inevitably to have been coined by some
feet-on-the-desk writer of westerns, perhaps as a brother in literature
to the outlaw Violet in MacKinley Kantor’s “Gentle Annie.” But Luke
Lavender was not invented. He was a rather important citizen of
Lancaster and Lincoln, often referred to as “Judge” and apparently also
a builder of carriages. He put up the first house in Lincoln, at what is
now the southeast corner of 14th and O—in 1864. It was a neat log cabin
with two leantos, and to the south and east stretched Mr. Lavender’s
farm.
Try, for a moment, to erase with one giant gesture all that now means
Lincoln. Visualize a bit of lonely prairie, hummocky and irregular. A
creek ran along the M and L street region. A hill of considerable height
rose where the postoffice now stands. The silence was rarely broken.
Light-footed antelope made no sound as their feet lightly trod the
grasses and their delicate ears pricked at the sound of an occasional
interloper. The night, however, was sharply punctured at intervals by
howls of wolves and coyotes. To the west was the illusion of perpetual
snows, for Salt basin was covered with an incrustation of salt about a
quarter of an inch deep.
Mr. Lavender was an Englishman who came here with Elder J. M. Young in
1863. Among the party were Jacob Dawson, who a little later built half a
mile to the west of Lavender, Dr. McKesson, Edwin Warnes, Thomas Hudson,
John Giles, Uncle Jonathan Ball and others. These settled elsewhere in
Lancaster county. It was Elder Young, leader of the colony, who laid out
the town of Lancaster and a little later started a female seminary at
9th and P.
No. 31—Oak Creek Park
[Illustration: {uncaptioned}]
This is Oak lake, in Lincoln’s newest park—1st to 14th, Y to Oak, 279
acres. If you are unimpressed, please remember two things: First, a nice
expanse of blue water is never to be looked down the nose at, especially
in a prairie city. Second, it is a wonderful improvement on the
magnificently proportioned dumping ground which used to occupy the same
quarters, and over which roamed unfortunates peering and picking at bits
of refuse. Things have been done to Oak creek, so that its main channel
now runs thru the center of the park. Between it and Salt creek lies the
lake, which members of the Lincoln boat club rejoice in as a place to
hold races.
The park site was once a part of the great salt flats whose glistening
white blanket drew early settlers to Lincoln. In fact, these saline
lands took a prominent part in the early history of Lancaster county—in
the courts, in politics, and elsewhere. Both Governor Butler and J.
Sterling Morton were involved. Morton had put up a log cabin on the
flats and pre-empted the basin in 1861. In 1870 Butler leased the flats.
Endless complications and lawsuits resulted. In the end Butler was
forced to pay thousands of dollars to the state.
The salt industry, from which so much had been hoped, failed for several
reasons—importation of cheaper salt from Utah, the difficulty of forming
large areas into drying pans, and the destructive rains and overflows
which for 80 years have bedeviled the Salt creek bottoms. The last named
situation the sanitary board has been battling with renewed vigor since
the disastrous flood of May, 1942, with considerable promise of success.
Returning to the subject of parks, Lincoln is liberally sprinkled with
them. We have 22, in assorted sizes.
[Illustration: CITY OF
LINCOLN
_includes_
STREET CAR AND BUS LINES
HIGHWAY ROUTES]
No. 32—Pioneers Park, West Van Dorn
[Illustration: {uncaptioned}]
One day in 1928 John F. Harris, a New York financier who had grown up in
Lincoln in the seventies and eighties, met a boyhood friend who still
lived here. The rusty gate of memory swung back—it had been 40 years
since Harris left Lincoln—and sharply accentuated before him stood the
past. In a rush of deep affection for all that had gone into his boyhood
he immediately resolved upon a memorial to his parents, to be located in
the city in which he had grown to manhood. The result was Lincoln’s
largest park. His boyhood friend—George Woods—picked out the 600 acre
site and Mr. Harris came to Lincoln and approved. He was urged to use
the family name for the park, but when he visited the site of his old
home at 16th and K and stood at the graves of his parents in Wyuka, he
decided on another—one which would name his parents in a broader sense
and include all these with whom they had toiled in the
wilderness—Pioneers.
George Harris, the father, came to Lincoln in the early seventies as
land commissioner for the Burlington, and as part of his work brought
thousands of people to the state. Later one of the sons, George B.
Harris, became president of the Burlington. John F. Harris went to New
York and became a successful financier. It was Mr. Harris’ wish not to
drive nature from the rolling stretch of prairie presented to Lincoln,
only to help her turn her most hospitable face to the city. One of the
hills forms a natural amphitheater from which many programs and services
have been heard. Lakes beautify the rolling surface of the park. Herds
of buffalo and elk are a reminder of the early days. Near the east
entrance stands a buffalo in bronze, also given by Mr. Harris, and made
in Paris by the famous sculptor, George Gaudet.
No. 33—Smoke Signal, Pioneers Park
[Illustration: {uncaptioned}]
The east entrance of Pioneers is guarded by a bronze buffalo, symbol of
the prairie when creatures of the plains drifted over her face scarcely
aware of the existence of human beings. Their cries, their calls, were
for themselves and the seasons. Yet they were not entirely alone. In and
out of their orbit moved the Indian, as drifting as were the birds and
the beasts. One day he might spread his camp in a valley, the smoke of
his campfire lifting to the heavens. In a month, perhaps, he was beyond
the horizon. The grasses rose slowly again and possession of the earth
came back to the buffalo and the deer, the coyotes and the meadow larks.
Then came the white man. An early Lancaster county settler, John S.
Gregory, wrote: “I reached the present site of Lincoln toward evening of
a warm day in September (1862). No one lived there, or had ever lived
there previous to that date. Herds of beautiful antelope gamboled over
its surface during the day and coyotes and wolves held possession during
the night.... About a mile west on Middle creek the smoke was rising
from a camp of Otoe Indians, and down in the bend of Oak creek, where
West Lincoln now stands, was a camp of about 100 Pawnee wigwams. I rode
over, and that night slept upon my blanket by the side of one of them.”
The placing of “The Smoke Signal” (by Ellis Burman) in Pioneers was a
suitable gesture. Its unveiling and dedication in 1935 was a
picturesque, even dramatic, occasion. More than 100 Indians attended the
ceremony. Chiefs of four Indian tribes which had roamed Nebraska sat
their horses thruout the dedication, grouped at the top of the rugged
hill which faces the west and the setting sun.
No. 34—Zoo in Antelope Park
[Illustration: {uncaptioned}]
Antelope park rambles loose-jointedly from the old federal treasury
columns at 24th and O south to Sheridan boulevard. It can be and is many
things to many people. Here families spread their fried chicken for a
blue canopied feast, here the children point their toes to the sky as
they pump up swings, here the band begins to play—evening and Sunday
concerts. Here the young people dance the evening hours away, the summer
Indians brandish their tennis rackets, the flower lovers stroll and gaze
at elaborately laid out beds of flowers.
Or, calling all ages, there is the zoological building on south 27th,
where the monkeys chatter and swing, the tigers shake their bars and
little creatures of all kinds peer out from their cages. Central in the
zoo is the scene above. Photographed thru the screen which surrounds it,
it has the dreamlike quality of a Chinese painting. Some of the birds
took to cover with the appearance of a camera. The scarlet ibis clings
morosely to a branch and an African crane, with seedy headgear, is in
picturesque tete-a-tete with another exotic bird in the foreground. The
stork, to the left, legging its way as usual on the heights, is
obliterated except for a beak and bit of curved wing.
The peace of this scene, with its pool, its rocks and flashes of bright
color, is seldom disturbed. When the keeper circles the ledge
symmetrically with dishes of bananas and grain the birds, big and small,
float noiselessly down and begin pecking at their food in genteel
manner.
No. 35—War Memorial, Antelope Park
[Illustration: {uncaptioned}]
Tucked here and there thruout Antelope park’s pleasant spaces—179
acres—are a number of statues and memorials, results of various impulses
and circumstances. We have mentioned the pillars at the O street
entrance. Roaming southward thru the park you will find others. One of
these objects is the fountain given to the city by the late D. E.
Thompson thirty or so years ago. It was placed in the center of 11th
street a few blocks south of O. As Lincoln’s herd of automobiles grew to
thundering proportions city officials realized that the fountain, very
suitable in the days when ladies nodded to each other across it from
phaetons and victorias moving on either side, must be transplanted.
After a number of accidents, some of them truly tragic, the fountain was
taken to the park. Neptune, on one side, had been permanently crippled
and the water nymph on the other was doubtless aged in spirit.
In 1936 the Lincoln park department sponsored the putting up of a war
memorial—a marble 23-foot shaft topped by a figure in ancient
armour—spirit of war and victory. On four lower pedestals Revolutionary,
Civil war, Spanish-American and World war soldiers look out, each
leaning on his instrument of death. When Mr. Burman and the park
department planned this statue they probably had no thought that it
would be so quickly outmoded. No niche has been provided for a warrior
of the present conflict.
Another figure in the park is The Pioneer Woman, donated by the Woman’s
club and the park board. The trees along Memory garden and Memorial
drive—north of Sheridan boulevard—were planted in memory of the Lincoln
soldiers who fell in the first World war.
No. 36—Nebraska Capitol
[Illustration: {uncaptioned}]
Nebraska’s capitol, designed by Bertram Goodhue, is one of the beautiful
buildings of the world. Twenty years ago, disputatious words were
circling round its budding tower—derogatory, complimentary, acrimonious,
laudatory. But the capitol rose silently thru this swarm of words and
today stands superbly in completed perfection. Controversy has died
away, and there are probably few Nebraskans who are not proud of the
capitol’s majesty and timeless beauty.
Opening a forgotten drawer recently we came upon the dusty drawings of
Mr. Goodhue’s rivals in the capitol competition of more than twenty
years ago and found them yawn-provoking. Only the one chosen seemed
alive, rising into the sky, even on its yellowed paper background, as
tho from some inner compulsion.
The capitol has many moods. Sometimes she wraps a dark cloak somberly
about her. The next time one turns to look, she shimmers in a cloak of
light. The capitol is beautiful in all her moments—silhouetted against
the blue, against storm or twilight, or against the limitless background
of night.
No. 37—Front Entrance, Capitol
[Illustration: {uncaptioned}]
The inspiration for the capitol as a whole was Bertram Goodhue’s. He
first ran an architect’s pencil around its noble contours, in a moment
of exaltation flinging its tower toward to stars. But death drew the
pencil from his hand while many markings were yet to be made.
It is said that for no other building since the middle ages has such a
definite, complete and comprehensive symbolic scheme been worked
out—giving complete unity to the finished edifice. To Mr. Goodhue’s
immediate associates, of course, goes a great deal of the credit for the
capitol. William Younkin has been the supervising architect. Among
others who had a large part in the perfecting of the building are Lee
Lawrie, the sculptor, Hildreth Meiere, responsible for its mosaics, and
Hartley Burr Alexander, who planned the sculpture, wrote the
inscriptions and worked out the art symbolism.
The late Dr. Alexander, native of Lincoln and professor of philosophy at
the University of Nebraska until he went to Scripps college in 1927, was
familiar to two generations of students in Lincoln. A mild retiring
person with a furiously intellectual brow, he possessed great ability in
the field of poetry and philosophy, writing perhaps twenty books on
these subjects. The inscriptions of the building read unhurriedly along
its vast corridors, beginning with the hymn of the Navajo, imprinted on
the buffalo at the north entrance: “In Beauty I walk. With Beauty before
me I walk. With Beauty behind me I walk, with Beauty above and about me
I walk.”
No. 38—Capitol Panel, Signing the Magna Carta
[Illustration: {uncaptioned}]
The capitol is the story, in marble, of mankind. Its physical outlines
suggest this—sprawling inarticulate humanity drawn up finally into
strength and beauty. To amplify the story in words would mean great book
piled on great book. For every mosaic, every panel and every rising
pillar holds the tale of some great struggle or advance in the life of
man. At last the story is brought down to Nebraska—its pioneers, its
buffalo, its Indians, its corn and wheat. But before Nebraska comes the
whole great panorama of mankind. The upward struggle toward a high
ethical code, toward religion, is pictured in great movements or
incidents of history.
The western group of nine panels seen from the promenade describes the
development of law in the ancient world: Moses bringing the law to Mount
Sinai; Deborah judging Israel; judgment of Solomon; Solon giving a new
constitution to the Athenians, publishing of the law of the twelve
tables in Rome; establishment of the tribunate of the people; Plato
writing his dialog on the ideal republic; Orestes before the
Areopagites; codification of Roman law under Justinian. On the south
wall of the promenade are panels showing the magna carta, signing of the
declaration of independence and writing of the constitution. The eastern
group describes development of law in the modern and western world,
panels including codification of Anglo-Saxon law, Milton defending free
speech, signing of the Pilgrim compact, Lincoln’s emancipation
proclamation, the Kansas-Nebraska bill and admission of Nebraska as a
state.
At the upper corners of the tower eight sculptured figures represent
spiritual leaders of civilization, including the prophet Ezekiel,
Socrates, Marcus Aurelius, St. John, St. Louis, Isaac Newton and Abraham
Lincoln. Abstract virtues, Wisdom, Justice, Power, Mercy are represented
as human figures at the north entrance.
No. 39—Foyer of State Capitol
[Illustration: {uncaptioned}]
Today we shall give you a few facts which include figures—the latter of
which we have hitherto dealt out very stingily.
The lower part of the capitol is a square base, 437 feet each way, which
conceals four inner courts formally landscaped. The tower reaches into
the air 400 feet. The figure of the sower at the top is 20 feet tall and
stands on a 12-foot pedestal—a shock of corn on a sheaf of wheat. The
sower weighs about nine tons.
The four light colored pillars in the foyer are the largest single piece
marble columns in this country. They weigh approximately sixteen tons
each. The chandelier which hangs in the center of the building, is the
largest bronze chandelier of its type in the world. Its bell part is a
single piece of pure bronze, cast in New York City. The whole chandelier
weighs 3,500 pounds. It is 112 feet from the floor to the ceiling from
which the chandelier depends.
Gov. Samuel McKelvie broke ground for the new building April 15, 1922,
with Marshal Joffre of France as guest of honor. Dedicatory exercises
were held ten years later. The building cost $10,000,000 and is paid
for.
Guides who tell many interesting facts about the capitol make daily
trips thru the building, at 10:30, 2:00 and 3:30, excepting that on
Sunday the 10:30 tour is omitted.
No. 40—First Presbyterian church, 17th and F.
[Illustration: {uncaptioned}]
In 1863 Elder Young founded the town of Lancaster—to become Lincoln four
years later—on his own 80 acre tract, which cornered Luke Lavender’s
farm at what is now 14th and O. The village was to extend from 14th to
7th and from O to Vine. As the far-sighted elder bent musingly over the
white paper which represented the future town he saw a city strong in
church life—and even predicted that it would some day be the capital of
Nebraska. Another dream was of a female seminary—either to induce
families with young ladies to come to the new town or to make prairie
damsels into suitable wives and mothers for his churchly city. Hovering
over the platted town his pencil finally came to rest at 9th and P as a
site for the seminary.
Many of the lots into which his farm was ribboned he gave to county and
school districts. Money from the others went into the seminary. That
institution burned in 1867, but Elder Young’s dream of a city of
churches was more enduring. Between 1866 and 1870 Congregational,
Methodist, Presbyterian, Christian, Baptist and Catholic churches were
organized and built. These were forerunners of present downtown
churches. Lincoln now has about 80 places of worship.
The First Presbyterian church was organized April 4, 1869. Its first two
buildings were supplanted in 1927 by the present beautiful structure,
one of whose distinctions is having been planned by the late Ralph Adams
Crams. Thus may it lay claim to special brotherhood with the Cathedral
of St. John the Divine and St. Thomas’ church of New York City.
No. 41—Burlington Shops at Havelock
[Illustration: {uncaptioned}]
On July 4, 1870, while Lincoln citizens were celebrating the nation’s
birthday in shady groves, as was their wont, there came from the
northeast a strange cavalcade. It was a string of flatcars, over which
bowers of cottonwood branches had been arranged, pulled by a chortling
little engine named The Wahoo, which name probably echoed the cries of
the tugging engine rather exactly. Under the bowers sat travelers on
improvised seats, chatting excitedly. It was the first passenger train
to pull into, or almost into, Lincoln. The Burlington and Missouri rails
had been laid to within a mile of the town and the company celebrated by
offering a free round trip from Plattsmouth to Lincoln, which was made
at the exhilarating speed of 15 or 20 miles an hour.
Within the year George B. Harris became Burlington land commissioner and
began colonizing Nebraska on a grand scale. In 1870 Nebraska had 122,993
inhabitants, and most of them lived in the southeastern counties near
the Burlington’s 2,500,000 acres. The success or failure of the
Burlington’s land department depended largely on price and credit
policies adopted by the company. Mr. Harris was given a free hand.
Boundlessly enthusiastic over the possibilities of the state, he went at
the job like one seating himself at a great organ. Towns sprang up
wherever his creative fingers strayed. To the west appeared quickly a
string of alphabetical stations—Crete, Dorchester, Exeter, Fairmont,
Grafton, Harvard, Inland, Juniata, Kennesaw and Lowell. The “Mayflower”
colony, “Plymouth” colony, colonies from England and the east were soon
grouped over the landscape.
In the middle 80’s the Burlington shops were located at Havelock. Thru
the Burlington lines flows the bloodstream of that part of Lincoln. It
thrives or grows pale and listless according to the fortunes of its
railroad. The shops at this moment are employing 750 men—550 in the
mechanical department, 250 in the store. The shops build cars, repair
cars, overhaul electrical equipment used on the lines west of Lincoln
and overhaul working equipment such as steam shovels and pile drivers
for the whole Burlington system.
No. 42—Governor’s Mansion, 15th and H
[Illustration: {uncaptioned}]
One leap from the south entrance of the capitol (if he doesn’t mind our
accelerating his step in order to capture the attention of the audience)
and Gov. Dwight Griswold, in gray suit and fedora, plus black overcoat
the last few days, is home. Should he turn on the steps he might read
over the capitol entrance one of Dr. Alexander’s carefully considered
truths—Political society exists for the sake of noble living.
The house in which Governor Griswold lives, successor to one populist,
five democratic and seven republican gubernatorial residents, suggests
noble living. It is generously proportioned, deep bosomed, its wide
galleries edged with delicately wrought spindles. Memories jostle each
other pleasantly in the big house, which is acclimated to sudden
changes.
One republican governor and his wife, Mr. and Mrs. Sam McKelvie,
preferred to live in their home at 140 So. 26th, where indefatigable
Mrs. McKelvie threw off lightly, the actual work of caring for 21 rooms,
with oil painting and associate editorship of a magazine as pastimes.
For the rest, since 1900—before that governors had to look for places to
live, too—each governor’s retinue has moved in and fitted itself into
its surroundings in its individual way. Mr. Griswold, for instance, hung
his grandfather’s sword—its owner fell in ’61—in the front hall and his
collection of autographed photographs in the back parlor. Mrs. Griswold
marshaled treasured family antiques into the guest room against a
background of George Washington-Mount Vernon wallpaper.
Every governor’s wife handles with pleased fingers the beautiful silver
service with the aid of which light refreshments were once dispensed on
the battleship Nebraska. During legislative sessions especially, the
governor’s home is opened for many social gatherings.
No. 43—Nebraska Wesleyan
[Illustration: {uncaptioned}]
If you drive in a long slow arc from southernmost to northernmost
Lincoln, veering to the right as you drive, you will pass thru the parts
of the city which were not the result of growth of the original town but
sprang up a distance away from some special urge or circumstance. There
were five of them, like the isolated fingertip prints of a cupped hand.
As Lincoln spread the tiny towns spread also, until they finally all
met, embraced and became one.
Driving from one to the other thru these originally diverse sections we
feel subtle changes. It may be that thoughts and processes,
personalities of those once dominating each, are in some way imprinted
on each section. Or it may be only that we happen to know local history.
To the south is College View, its nucleus Union college (Seventh Day
Adventist). Next in the arc is Bethany, originally the background of
Cotner college (Christian) and next its sister, University Place, home
of Nebraska Wesleyan (Methodist.); Havelock, a little to the north, was
born of the Burlington shops. Last in the arc is Belmont, planned as a
beautiful city 50 years ago but now fallen from that high estate. Its
woolen mills burned down, the railroad came in the wrong way.
Above is the ivy covered main building of Wesleyan, an institution which
has stood sturdily for over 50 years, battling drouths and depressions
with one hand and serving the Lord and Methodism with the other.
Attesting the educational soundness of its program was a recent national
survey showing Wesleyan with a rank of 22 among 339 liberal arts college
in the proportion (36 percent) of its students going into graduate study
thruout the country. A greater proportion of graduates has gone from its
classrooms into theological seminaries than from any liberal arts
college in America.
No. 44—Scene of big bank robbery
[Illustration: {uncaptioned}]
When we downtown Lincoln lunchers gathered in groups at the board on
Sept. 17, 1930, we did not begin talking about the stock market or fall
fashions or unemployment or our neighbors or any of those things which
usually occupied our attention.
Even before reaching for the menu or the sugar bowl everyone burst out
with one identical topic—what had happened that morning at 1144 O. We
had heard remotely about gangsters and underworld affairs, but on this
fair September morning hands from that other world actually reached out
and touched quiet respectable Lincoln.
There were submachine guns but no killing. Three men quietly entered the
lobby of the Lincoln National bank, with a word turned employes and
customers face downward on the floor, scooped up currency, looted a
vault and were out again—into a waiting sedan and away. One of the
largest bank robberies ever to occur in America—$2,000,000 in currency
and bonds—it forced liquidation and closing of the bank.
Gus Winkler, big time gangster and member of Al Capone’s gang, confessed
to knowledge of the stolen bonds but established an alibi so far as
active participation was concerned. Tommy O’Connor and Howard (Pop) Lee
were tried and given long term prison sentences. Jack Britt was released
after two trials. Winkler offered to return $600,000 of the securities
in return for his freedom. After much discussion and comment on the
advisability of such action Winkler won the point. Bonds valued at
$575,000 were eventually returned. (Their return, Mr. Towle reminds us,
saved five small banks in Lancaster county.) In 1933 underworld enemies
caught up with Winkler and he went down fatally wounded by machine gun
fire.
No. 45—First Plymouth church, 20th and D
[Illustration: {uncaptioned}]
From the First-Plymouth tower, music floats out and soars upward like
birds shaken free by the great organ inside, grazing Mark, Matthew, Luke
and John at the top of the tower with their golden wings. As one enters
the church thru the large forecourt, his pleasant sense of gracious
earthly living and worship is heightened by the presence of this
heaven-looking tower.
First-Plymouth Congregational church, built in brick, cost half a
million dollars, was designed by H. Van Buren Magonigle and has become
widely known for its architectural freshness and beauty. A picture of it
illustrates “Religious Architecture” in Encyclopedia Britannica.
Among individual items of interest are three stones incorporated into
the building: The Bethlehem stone from the birthplace of Christ; Pilgrim
stone, gift of Plymouth, England, sailing port of the Mayflower; Martin
Luther stone in the base of the tower, taken from the home of the
reformer. In the singing tower—traditional name of the carillon harking
back to mediaeval times when watchers aloft blew warnings of invaders or
flooding of dikes, are the bells, made by the famous carillon builders,
John Taylor and Co., of Loughborough, England. The church celebrated its
75th anniversary in 1941. Rev. Raymond A. McConnell is its pastor.
No. 46—Cotner college
[Illustration: {uncaptioned}]
This is Cotner college—Cotner boulevard between Aylsworth and
Colby—back, back in the early days of existence. The grass around it
appears to be unbroken prairie growth. There are no walks around the
building, not even paths. And yet this is very much a picture of Cotner
now. After 1889, when the college opened, a tide of green washed up over
the campus—a whole grove at the north and big sheltering trees
elsewhere. And so also did a tide of youth sweep into the building to
give it life. Now both tides have receded. And still, Cotner does not
represent a totally lost cause. Young people who wish to attend a
denominational college have merely been deflected to other Christian
church institutions—Drake, in Iowa, for instance, nearest Nebraska.
A small church college is one of those anomalous places where students
in the morning gaze worshipfully upon a preacher professor and in the
evening plot to put his cow up in the belfry tower. Scattered over the
world as teachers, preachers and missionaries, Cotner students recall
happy days here, not only inspirational but full of pranks and fun. The
college was named for Samuel Cotner, who donated a large tract of land
in Bethany to the school. Closely connected with the school is the name
of W. P. Aylsworth, first chancellor and later president emeritus,
greatly loved and revered by the procession of students who passed thru
the college during his lifetime. He was killed a number of years ago, as
twilight was approaching—on Cotner boulevard, named for the college, and
near the street named for him—by a speeding driver who did not stop and
was never located.
No. 47—Union College
[Illustration: {uncaptioned}]
You may have heard that, in case you are absentminded on Saturday, on
Sunday morning you can get a loaf of bread or a roast in College View.
That is quite true, but such considerations reduce College View to its
lowest terms. The fact that most of College View observes its Sabbath on
Saturday is the result of a deep religious conviction which set up a
college and spread around it a sympathetic community.
Union college (Seventh Day Adventist) has 12 buildings and many
interesting features. One of the most interesting is its work program.
More than 90 percent of its students, which usually number around 450,
pay their way, at least in part, by working on the college farm or in
its shops and buildings on the campus.
For the first two-thirds of its lifetime—the college, like Cotner and
Wesleyan, was started in the late 80’s—the town was made up exclusively
of those of the faith. For longer than that—we are not prepared to say
definitely whether or not this is still true—much strictness was
observed in the life of the students.
The college now has a medical cadet corps (shown in the picture), part
of a nationwide program sponsored by the Seventh Day Adventist
denomination and operating under the approval of the surgeon general of
the U. S. army.
No. 48—Pershing home, 1748 B
[Illustration: {uncaptioned}]
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.
No. 49—Former Dawes home, 1301 H
[Illustration: {uncaptioned}]
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.
No. 50—Wyuka, 36th and O
[Illustration: {uncaptioned}]
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.
No. 51—State Penitentiary, 14th and Pioneers
[Illustration: {uncaptioned}]
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.
No. 52—Holy Trinity Episcopal, 1200 J
[Illustration: {uncaptioned}]
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.
No. 53—Lincoln High, 21st and J
[Illustration: {uncaptioned}]
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.
No. 54—Veterans Hospital, 600 So. 74th
[Illustration: {uncaptioned}]
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.
No. 55—Yankee Hill Brick Mfg. Co.
[Illustration: {uncaptioned}]
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.
No. 56—Whitehall, 5903 Walker
[Illustration: {uncaptioned}]
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.
No. 57—St. Mary’s Cathedral
[Illustration: {uncaptioned}]
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.
No. 58—Northeast High, Sixty-third and Baldwin
[Illustration: {uncaptioned}]
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.
No. 59—State Historical Society
[Illustration: {uncaptioned}]
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.
No. 60—Orthopedic Hospital, 11th and South
[Illustration: {uncaptioned}]
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)
Street Directory
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.
A—13th S of O Limit to Limit
Abbie—1st N of Oak 7th to 9th
Adams—29th N of O Limit to Limit
Alden Av—1st N of Van Dorn Winthrop Rd to Colonial Dr
Apple—10th N of O 27th to 40th
Arapahoe—33rd S of O 11th to 17th
Arlington—17th S of O 27th to 32nd
Avery Av—10th & V NE to 14th & W
Aylesworth Av—16th N of O 48th to 71st
B—12th S of O West 1st to 46th
Baldwin Av—25th N of O 31st to 50th & 56th to 78th
Bancroft Av—36th S of O 45th to 56th
Belmont Av—27th N of O 9th to 14th
Bluff—1st N of Benton 17th E to Milton
Bradfield Dr—28th E of 1st From South S to 27th
Burnham—39th S of O 14th to 20th
Burr—1st N of Van Dorn 14th to 17th
Burt—55th N of O 70th to 73rd
C—11th S of O 1st to 52nd
Cable—19th S of O 27th to 31st & 34th to 35th
Calhoun—56th N of O 70th to 71st
California Ct—1st S of Randolph 28th W to Victoria
Calkins—9th S of O Folsom E 4 Blocks
Calumet Ct—1st E of 27th Sewell to Stratford Av
Calvert—35th S of O Limit to Limit
Capitol Av—1st E of 20th Randolph S to E
Cedar Av—1st E of 25th Van Dorn S to High
Center—19th N of O 25th to 33rd
Charleston—11th N of O 7th to 14th
Cheyenne—32nd S of O 14th to 17th
Church—15th S of O From 1st W 1 block
Claremont—13th N of O 7th to 15th
Cleveland Av—28th N of O 34th to 65th
Clinton—15th N of O 19th to 22nd & 27th to 30th
Colby—20th N of O 48th to 70th
Colonial Dr—1st E of Winthrop Rd Alden Av N to Puritan Av
Conklin—3rd E of Burlington Av Calvert S to Park
Cooper—38th S of O 42nd to 63rd
Cotner Blvd—46th & South NE to 70th & Fremont
Court—16th N of O 12th to 17th
Cuming—50th N of O 70th to 73rd
Custer—53rd N of O 70th to 73rd
D—10th S of O 1st to 44th
Dakota—30th S of O 12th to 13th & 14th to 20th
Dawes Av—25th N of O 9th to 14th
Doane—17th N of O 32nd to 33rd
Douglas—47th N of O 70th to 73rd
Dudley—12th N of O 17th to 71st
E—9th S of O West 2nd to 56th
Eastridge Dr—1st N of Sumner 70th W to Foursome Lane
Edison—37th N of O 33rd E to Harrison
Elba—42nd N of O 7th to 14th
Eleanor—46th N of O 7th to 9th
Elm—31st E of 1st Alden Av S to Van Dorn
Emerson—21st N of O 11th to 14th
Epworth Park 1st & Calvert
Euclid Av—18th S of O 16th to 24th
Everett—15th S of O 26th to 42nd
F—8th S of O 1st to 46th
Fair—17th N of O Whittier E to 33rd
Fairdale Rd—1st S of Randolph Fall Creek Rd to Cotner Blvd
Fairfax—15th N of O 64th to 70th
Fairfield—38th N of O 1st to 20th
Fall Creek Rd—1st E of 52nd A to Randolph
Folsom—6th W of 1st F S to Calvert
Fontenelle—36th E of 1st Apple S to Vine
Foursome Lane—1st E of 63rd A S Eastridge Dr
Francis—18th N of O 48th to 73rd
Franklin—18th S of O 22nd to 58th
Fremont—36th N of O 45th to 70th
Furnas Av—29th N of O 9th to 14th
G—7th S of O West 2nd to 22nd, 40th to 44th
Garber Av—28th N of O 9th to 14th
Garfield—15th S of O 1st to 42nd
Garland—21st N of O 48th to 56th & 63rd to 74th
Georgian Ct—28th S of O 29th to 31st
Glade—22nd S of O 48th to 58th
Gladstone—33rd N of O 42nd to 70th
Grace Av—1st E of 32nd Holdrege to Potter
Grant—21st S of O 1st W to Folsom
Greenwood—30th N of O 42nd to 61st
Griffith—1st E of 32nd Fair N to St Paul
Grimsby Lane—3rd E of 17th Kings Highway to Pershing Rd
Groveland—35th N of O 1st to 22nd
Grover—4th W of 1st A North to McBride
H—6th S of O 1st to 40th
Hancock—2nd W of 1st South S to Buell
Harris—6th E of 14th Adams N 1 block
Harrison Ave—25th S of O 8th to 24th
Hartley—35th N of O 1st to 20th & 43rd to 69th
Harwood—19th S of O 16th to 24th
Hatch—22nd S of O Park Blvd E to 7th
Havelock Av—44th N of O 56th to 73rd
Hayes—12th S of O Ricketts E to Hancock
Helen—4th E of 14th Benton S to Adams
High—31st S of O 9th to 51st
Highland—45th N of O 7th to 14th
Hill—26th S of O 1st to 14th
Hillside—34th S of O 27th to 51st
Hitchcock—18th N of O 27th to Griffith
Holdrege—14th N of O 16th E to 78th
Hudson—21st S of O 12th to 14th
Huntington Av—24th N of O 30th to 74th
Idylwild Dr—From 35th & Apple NE to Holdrege
Ingalls—2nd E to Burlington Av Calvert S to Park
Irving—41st N of O 7th to 14th
J—5th S of O West 2nd to 56th
Jackson Dr—29th S of O 97th to 31st
Jeanette—25th N of O 24th to 27th
Josephine—27th N of O 14th to 20th
Judson—32nd N of O 3rd to Milton & 42nd to 70th
K—4th S of O 1st to 27th
Kearney—40th N of O 54th to 73rd
Kings Hiway—1st S of High from Pershing Rd W & NW to 18th & High
Kleckner Ct—Between Q & R 31st to 32nd
Knox—31st N of O 3rd to Milton & 44th to 70th
L—3rd S of O West 2nd to 56th
La Fayette Av—28th S of O 24th to 28th
Lake—24th S of O 11th to 44th
Lake View—1 mi W of 1st on P
La Salle—46th S of O 50th to 56th
Laura Av—Between Randolph & J 34th to 36th
Laurel—31st S of O 27th to 31st
Laurence—4th E of 14th Adams S to Josephine
Leighton Av—22nd N of O 27th to 78th
Lenox—3rd S of O 40th to 44th
Lexington Av—19th N of O 48th to 73rd
Lillian—8th E of 14th Adams S to Josephine
Lillibridge—25th S of O 52nd to 56th
Lincoln—(State Hospital) 1st E of Folsom Van Dorn S to Park
Lincoln Dr—2nd W of 70th A S to Sumner
Linden—44th S of O 50th to 56th
Locust—43rd S of O 50th to 56th
Logan—41st N of O 54th to 73rd
Lowell Av—40th S of O 46th to 56th
Lynn—8th N of O Whittier E to 25th
M—2nd S of O Burr E to 54th
Madison Av—27th N of O 33rd to 65th
Manatt—37th N of O 1st E to 20th
Manse Av—1st S of Sheridan Blvd 27th E to Van Dorn
Marion—21st S of O 14 to 16th
Marshall Av—Between 30th & 31st J to Randolph
Martin—17th N of O 48th to 56th
Maude—3rd N of Oak 7th to 9th
Mayflower Av—2nd N of Van Dorn Winthrop Rd E to Colonial Dr
Mead—3rd W of 1st South S to Buell
Mechanic—1st W of 1st B North to D
Melrose Av—2nd S of Van Dorn 31st to 37th
Memorial Dr—1st W of 33rd Sumner S Nine Blocks
Meredith—41st S of O 46th to 52nd
Merriam—1st E of 14th Adams S to Josephine
Merrill—20th N of O 27th to 33rd
Mohawk—12th S of O 32nd to 46th
Monroe—2nd S of O 20th E to 23rd
Morrill—42nd N of O 54th to 73rd
Morton—51st N of O 70th to 73rd
Mulberry—19th S of O 14th to 15th
Myrtle—24th S of O 50th to 56th
N—1st S of O Burr E to 44th
Nance Av—26th N of O 9th to 14th
Nelson—32nd N of O 3rd E to Milton
Nemaha—34th S of O 14th to 17th
New Hampshire—12th N of O 7th to 14th
Normal Blvd—From 30th & B, S E to 48th, E to 56th
North—47th N of O 14th to 27th
North Side Av—8th N of O 15th to 17th
O—Between N & P Limit to Limit
Oak—23rd N of O 7th to 14th
Orchard—11th N of O Stewart E to 71st
Otoe—28th S of O 7th to 20th
P—1st N of O West Limits E to 35th
Park Av—23rd S of O 8th to 27th
Park Blvd—7th & Peach SW to 1st & Van Dorn
Park—(State Hospital) 30th S of O Folsom to Lincoln
Pawnee—29th S of O 7th to 48th
Peach—18th S of O 6th to 15th
Pear—7th N of O 27th to 28th
Pepper Av—Between 26th & 27th Sumner to South
Perkins Blvd—26th S of O 16th to Worthington Av
Pershing Rd—20th & High thence SW to 1st N of Calvert
Pioneers Blvd—42nd S of O Limit to Limit
Platte Av—45th N of O Touzalin E to 73rd
Plum—19th S of O 7th to 15th
Plymouth Av—24th S of O Bradfield Dr E Three Blocks
Portia—1st E of 14th Benton S to Adams
Potter—15th N of O 21st to 33rd
Prescott Av—39th S of O 40th to 56th
Prospect—17th S of O 16th E to 20th
Puritan Av—25th S of O Stratford Av E to Colonial Dr
Q—2nd N of O Burlington Av E to 44th
Queen—2nd E of Burlington Av S to Small
Randolph—7th S of O 20th to 56th
Rathbone Rd—30th E of 1st from Intersection of Van Dorn and
Sheridan Blvd N to Plymouth Av
Rebecca—2nd E of 14th Benton S to Adams
Ricketts—7th W of 1st Hayes S to Wood
Ridge—30th E of 1st Plymouth Av N to South St
Roose—26th S of O 52nd to 56th
Rosalind—5th E of 14th Adams S to Josephine
Rose—17th S of O Limits E to 15th
Royal Court—1st S of Van Dorn 27th to 28th
Ryall—(State Hospital) 5th W of 1st Calvert N 3 Blocks
Ryons—21st S of O 17th to 30th
S—4th N of O ½ mi W of Burlington Av E to 36th
St Marys Av—1st W of 17th South of Lake, Calvert to Burnham
St Paul Av—26th N of O 32nd to 61st
Salem Av—1st S of Benton Milton E to 27th
Saratoga—22nd S of O 11th to 13th
Saunders Av—24th N of O 9th to 14th
Scott Av—Between 38th & 39th South S to Pawnee
Seward—39th N of O 49th to 74th
Sewell—22nd S of O 17th to 40th
Sheldon—13th N of O 22nd to 23rd
Sheridan Blvd—25th & South SE to 44th & Calvert
Sherman—32nd S of O 27th to 51st
Short—Between Whittier & 23rd W North to X
Sioux—31st S of O 14th to 17th
Smith—2nd N of Van Dorn 14th to 40th
South—20th S of O Limit to Limit
Starr—13th N of O 27th to 71st
Stillwater Av—23rd S of O 11th to 14th
Stratford Av—1st N of Sheridan Blvd 27th to Rathbone Rd
Summit Blvd—From 31st and Jackson Drive SE
Sumner—16th S of O West 2nd to 52nd
Superior Av—47th N of O 7th to 14th
T—5th N of O 1st to 36th
Taylor Av—1st E of Cotner Blvd R NE to 63rd
Theresa—27th N of O 24th to 27th
Thomas—4th W of 1st South S to Buell
Thurston—49th N of O 70th to 73rd
Touzalin—58th E of 1st
Trimble—8th W of 1st A S to Wood
U—6th N of O 1st to 33rd
Union—1st N of E 22nd to 23rd
Union Airport Rd—58th N of O 56th E to 70th
V—7th N of O 1st to 8th
Vale—43rd N of O Limit to Limit
Van Dorn—27th S of O Limit to Limit
Vine—7th N of O 12th to 70th
Virginia—22nd N of O 11th to 14th
W—8th N of O 7th to 71st
Walker Av—23rd N of O 28th to 71st
Washington—14th S of O Limits E to 42nd
Waugh—4th W of 1st Calvert N 3 Blocks
Weber—35th N of O 33rd E to Halstead
Wendover—23rd S of O Bradfield Dr E 1 Block
West Lincoln—2 mi NW of Post Office
Whittier—1st E of 22nd Vine N to X & Holdrege N to Fair
William—1st W of 33rd Sheridan N to Van Dorn
Winthrop Road—31st E of 1st Sheridan Blvd N to South St
Witham Lane—1st S of High 17th to Pershing Rd
Woodbine Av—1st E of 38th Sheridan S to Calvert
Woodland Av—52nd S of O 48th to 52nd
Woods Av—3rd S of O 33rd to 38th
Woodscrest Av—1st N of Van Dorn 22nd to Sheridan Blvd
Woodsdale Blvd—30th S of O 20th to 21st
Woodsview—29th S of O 16th to 17th
Worthington—1st E of 19th 1 block N of South S to Burnham
X—9th N of O 1st to 71st
Y—10th N of O 7th to 71st
A GREAT STORE
GROWING GREATER!
[Illustration: Gold & Co.]
1902 GOLD’S began business at 112-118 No. 10th St.
1912 GOLD’S expanded their No. 10th St. Store.
1919 GOLD’S moved to 1029 O St.
1924 GOLD’S built the beautiful Gothic structure on the corner of
11th and O St.
1929 In the Spring, South Annex completed. In the Fall, West Addition
was completed.
1931 3 Floors added to West addition.
1936 Entire Store Completely Air-Conditioned.
1938 50-Ft. more frontage on 11th St.... now Gold’s Super Food Basket.
The story of the growth of GOLD’S reads like the well-known tradition of
a small boy with nothing in hand but ambition and the Ideal ... for from
its humble beginning to its present Greater Gold’s is the realization of
the Ideal nurtured by its founder Mr. William Gold.
[Illustration: GOLD & CO.]
LOCALLY OWNED · LOCALLY CONTROLLED
GOLD & CO.
WE GIVE S & H GREEN STAMPS
Transcriber’s Notes
—Silently corrected a few typos.
—Retained publication information from the printed edition: this eBook
is public-domain in the country of publication.
—In the text versions only, text in italics is delimited by
_underscores_.
—In the HTML version only, added page numbers.
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