History of Stafford, Nebraska
Before Stafford had a church of its own, its Catholic families gathered for Mass inside the home of a settler named Peter Ryan. It’s a small detail, but it says something about how the town actually worked in its early years — Stafford was less a finished settlement than a constantly improvised one, stitched together out of whoever’s parlor, granary, or platform happened to be available that week. The people who filled in those gaps left behind some of the richest stories in the record of southeastern Holt County, and their lives reach well beyond the depot and the hay barns.
Dan O’Donnell, the rancher credited with platting Stafford, ran cattle along the Elkhorn on a spread anchored by a spring-fed lake he had dammed and planted with trees himself. His son Jim got only as far as the fourth grade at the Stafford schoolhouse before he was needed full-time on the ranch — so small at first that he had to stand on a box just to harness a team. What Jim lacked in schooling he made up for as a tinkerer: in later years he bolted an old Oldsmobile engine to a wagon, rigged a buzz saw to it, and hauled the contraption around the neighborhood behind a pair of mules named Jenny and Polly, cutting firewood for half the county. The same engine, moved into a shop by his granary, later ran a feed grinder and charged the wet-cell batteries that powered the homemade radio he and a neighbor built from parts ordered out of a Sears Roebuck catalog.
Because the O’Donnell place sat close by the tracks running past Stafford, it became an unofficial stop for the drifters who rode the rails through the county. Jim’s wife Mary kept a garden big enough to feed all comers and raised several hundred chickens most summers just to have enough on hand for the men who showed up hungry. Once a band of twenty-five or thirty of them came trudging up the line together — the family locked the doors and watched through a spyglass until the group had passed safely on toward Inman. Gypsy families camped at O’Donnell’s Lake on occasion too, and one summer a girl who didn’t look quite like the rest of her band came begging scraps at the kitchen door; convinced the girl had been taken from another family, as the neighborhood rumor of the day insisted Gypsies did, Mrs. O’Donnell never did let her own daughter go down to the camp to play.
That daughter, Sarah, was judged too young to make the dangerous walk along the riverbank or the railroad grade to the country schools nearby, so her parents sent her instead to St. Mary’s Academy in O’Neill, boarding her away from home rather than risk the trip to Stafford. She graduated in 1929 and years later married Melvin Michaelis, whose own family had relocated from up near Chambers down to Stafford sometime in the 1920s — arriving, in other words, just as the town they were joining had already begun its long fade.
Stafford’s cattle country also produced one of Holt County’s best-known ranchers, John Carr, an Irish immigrant who filed a claim right at the spot where Highway 20 crosses Highway 275 today and built it, quarter section by quarter section, into an operation big enough to earn him the nickname “Cattle King of Holt County.” One of Stafford’s three big hay barns belonged to Carr, and in January 1896 he rode into the little post office to register his cattle brand, the Half Circle Bar, making it official business of the town itself. He and his wife Bridget, married in Ireland and brought back to the ranch, raised fifteen children there.
The Carney family had settled southwest of the eventual townsite even before Stafford existed — John and Susan Boyle Carney arrived from Philadelphia by way of Ireland around 1878, a couple of years ahead of Dan O’Donnell’s survey crew. After Susan died in 1901, her young son Patrick eventually landed with relatives near Inman, where he spent his boyhood summers on the river with the O’Donnell boys. He later described rigging a kerosene headlamp to the bow of their boat so they could spear fish on the Elkhorn after dark, floating down as far as O’Donnell’s Lake while friends worked a seine net along the banks. The same crowd of boys fielded a baseball team they called the River Rats, a lineup Patrick could still recite by name decades afterward.
Patrick Carney left Holt County for Norfolk in 1915, served in the Army during the First World War, and came home afterward to a career on the railroad — the same line that had once carried freight past his boyhood home at Stafford.
George Ezra Moor was nine years old when his family made the trip from Indiana to a homestead about four miles southwest of Stafford. His mother died not long after they arrived, one of the first burials in the new Inman cemetery, leaving his father to raise five sons and a daughter alone. The family broke ground for a timber claim with a team of oxen and hauled the lumber for their house all the way from Neligh. George stayed on that same homestead for sixty-four years, marrying Ewing schoolteacher Margaret Alice Davis in 1894 and raising three children there before the place eventually passed to the Fick family.
Catherine Fallon Morgan carried her family’s Stafford story all the way back to famine-era Ireland, where as a young girl she once stood on the bank of the Shannon River and watched an American relief ship sail past, and vowed to herself that she would someday cross the ocean to reach that country. Marriage before she turned sixteen delayed the promise for decades. It was finally her sister’s family, settled by then southeast of Inman, who wired money for passage, and in 1887 Catherine, her husband John, and their six children sailed on the steamship Rome and rode the train the rest of the way to Stafford, arriving only weeks before their youngest son was born.
The family was still living in a sod house that first winter when the blizzard of 1888 struck without warning. John was out at the barn when the storm hit, and Catherine, terrified he would lose his way in the whiteout, stood in the open doorway ringing a cowbell as hard as she could until he found his way back across the yard. The Morgans prospered afterward, eventually buying a farm west of Atkinson; one son, Joseph, went on to earn a law degree at the University of Nebraska and later served as a justice in Arizona. Catherine died in 1931, not quite forty-five years after she finally reached the “good land” of her childhood dreams — remembered by those who’d known her young as a strikingly handsome woman to the end.
When Vera Brittell’s family moved to a farm a mile and a half southwest of Stafford in the summer of 1920, the grass around the empty house had grown so tall that she and her sisters could barely take a step without startling up a toad or a frog. Her father, a butcher who had worked in O’Neill before the move, kept up the trade from the farm — peddling fresh meat by team and buggy through Stafford, Inman, and Page in winter when it would keep, and delivering straight to the hay and harvest crews in summer when it wouldn’t. Vera remembered the town that same year as already a shadow of its former self: two stores, a post office, the Catholic church, the schoolhouse, a hay office, two remaining barns, the depot, stockyards, and a section house — with only two or three houses left standing around it all, some forty years after the town had first been laid out.
Vera’s memories of growing up on that farm read like a scrapbook of small-town Nebraska childhood: her mother baking bread every other day in ovens big enough to feed a crew, garden picnics with fresh butter and green onions pulled straight from the ground, Fourth of July ice cream churned with ice her father had stored away in a hillside icehouse the winter before. In the depths of winter her brother rigged an old sled with a cardboard shell so the children could ride to school in something like comfort, and on frosted evenings the family traced pictures into the ice on the windowpanes with sewing thimbles, or gathered around a hand-me-down Edison phonograph, taking turns cranking it and picking out records until bedtime.
Not every memory from those years was so cozy. Vera recalled getting caught by an older brother just as she and a visiting cousin were about to hitch up a horse everyone else in the family knew to be a runaway — he scolded them both soundly and probably saved them a bad spill. On another day her father was called out to haul a couple of young men’s old Oakland touring car out of a mudhole near the farm — they had a couple of girls riding along with them at the time — and, unbeknownst to anyone standing in that mud that afternoon, one of those young men eventually became Vera’s husband. Her mother, meanwhile, kept the whole operation fed — by Vera’s count, some seasons required a dozen packed lunches every single day, for the schoolchildren, the hired hay crew, the section workers, and a boarder besides.
South of Stafford, along the South Fork of the Elkhorn, a single lone cottonwood stood for years on an otherwise treeless stretch of prairie, conspicuous enough that a later ranch built nearby simply took its name — the Lone Tree Ranch. Settlers came from miles around to snip cuttings from that one tree to start their own groves, seeding the shelterbelts and windbreaks that still mark old homesteads across the county today. It’s a fitting emblem for Stafford itself: the town is gone, the depot and the barns and the platform long since taken down, but the families who passed through it kept planting, and their stories are what took root.