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History of Winnetoon, Nebraska

History of Winnetoon, Nebraska

This history draws heavily on “The History of Winnetoon,” researched, compiled, and written in 2006 by lifelong Winnetoon resident Gayle Neuhaus for the Winnetoon Historical Society, built in large part around the 23 surviving diaries (1914–1939) of local farmer and merchant A.W. Crandall, discovered in 1994. Gayle’s own family threads through this story from beginning to end — and, as noted at the close of this page, she is very much part of Winnetoon’s history herself, not just its chronicler.

Contents

Origins and the Name Winnetoon

Long before Winnetoon had a Main Street, it had a name. Sometime between 1872 and 1896, Oscar Norton homesteaded the land where the village now stands and opened a small store there, calling it “Winnetoon” — a word local tradition traces to a Native word meaning either “big water,” for the broad slough that once lay north of the site, or “dividing of the waters,” describing how runoff splits toward the northwest on one side of town and the southeast on the other. Both translations still have their defenders, and Gayle Neuhaus, researching the town’s history in 2006, noted that whichever meaning residents preferred, everyone agreed on one point: theirs is the only Winnetoon in the United States. A rival explanation, published decades earlier in a Nebraska place-name study, credited a railroad official named W.F. Fitch with naming the town after a Wisconsin farm — but a 1966 letter from the Nebraska State Historical Society to local resident G.L. Prochaska found no record connecting any Wisconsin farm to the name, and Winnetoon families have generally preferred Norton’s story since.

Seth Jones and the Founding of the Town

The town as it exists today was platted by Seth Jones, who arrived from Wisconsin in 1888 already looking for a townsite along a rail line the Chicago and North Western was surveying through the area. Jones first bought land along the railroad’s initial proposed route, only to watch the company shift its survey elsewhere; in 1891 he bought a half-section from Oscar Norton and, rather than discard a name the community already knew, kept “Winnetoon” for his new town. The Chicago and North Western reached the site the following year, and for a time the depot was nothing more than a boxcar set beside the track, with Jones himself serving as the first depot agent and Julius Chedell as section foreman. Jones surveyed and sold building lots through the 1890s and into the 1900s — a Creighton newspaper noted in 1907 that he was busy surveying still more lots to meet demand — and the village formally incorporated in 1900. Jones and his wife celebrated their 85th wedding anniversary in Winnetoon in 1924, still very much fixtures of the town they had founded; their Victorian-style home, built in 1903, still stands.

The Big Store and Early Main Street Merchants

Jones’s 1891 store, expanded in 1897 into “The Big Store” on the corner of First and Main, anchored Main Street for the next half-century, passing through a long line of owners and partnerships — Jones & Company, Jones & Weigle, Jones & Emick, George Thompson, Mix & Venhaus, Schwartz & Nicholaisen, Pete Wilson, Felix Jelenick, Novotny, and Alfred Meyer among them — each reflecting the town’s shifting cast of merchants. A bad storm tore the roof off the newly finished building in 1897 and carried it a mile south onto Gilbert Olson’s farm. Around it, Main Street filled in quickly: hardware dealers Ralph Clare and A.W. Jewell ran a shop together as Clare and Jewell Hardware; Joe Papik photographed the town from the Olson Photo Gallery on East Main; George Darnell ran a shoe and harness shop out of the cement-block building through the 1930s and ’40s until his son Delbert was killed in the Pacific during World War II; saloons operated on Main Street both before and after Prohibition, closing and reopening under different owners as state law changed; and a lumberyard — built in 1901 by Edward and Bradford and later known as Great Plains Lumber and then St. Anthony and Dakota — supplied timber for the town’s houses and barns for decades, its former site now the town park. The grocery trade later moved into a second building for a time — James Kocina bought it in 1947 to house his own grocery after the bank moved back into the original brick building, though he ended up renting it out instead — and most families kept running charge accounts there, settling up weekly or whenever the bill grew too large to ignore.

Moving a House: The Schwartz Farm Story

Not every building in early Winnetoon stayed where it was built. When Joe and Lucy Schwartz decided to farm land two and a half miles from town rather than build new, they hired house-mover Bill Louzier to relocate their home whole. Louzier began jacking the house up in September 1918, set it on three rows of wheels, and pulled it into the street behind a team of horses walking in circles around a capstan — a vertical drum that wound cable and dragged the house forward a couple hundred feet at a time before the rig had to be reset and a fresh pair of horses swapped in. The Schwartz family kept living in the house throughout: a daughter, Elaine, was born in it while it sat parked in the middle of the street that November, and the whole operation paused for several days so Louzier and his crew could join the rest of town celebrating the World War I Armistice. Frozen ground stopped the move for the winter; Louzier resumed in February, when frost made for easier hauling, until the wheels were pulled out from under the front end too early one day in March and the house dropped hard enough to send dishes flying while Lucy was in the middle of baking bread. It took two weeks with hand-cranked screw jacks to lift it back up, and when the route crossed a stretch of thawing pasture, Joe — who ran a sawmill on the home place — laid planks from his own barn lumber the rest of the way. The house finally reached its new foundation around April 15, 1919, seven months after the move began. Lucy went on to clerk for years at the Jones Store; Joe later held Winnetoon’s John Deere dealership.

The Post Office

A post office opened in Winnetoon in 1891, a year ahead of the depot, and moved through a succession of storefronts and postmasters over the following century — the office spent years attached to the drugstore run by Charles Pearce, later moved into the Pearce family’s newspaper office, and in the mid-1950s came under postmaster Hazel Ganz, who held the position for more than a decade. In September 1930, thieves broke into the garage, the pool hall, and the post office in a single night, prying open the post office’s cash drawer for roughly fourteen dollars — the same night pool halls in both Verdigre and Verdel were also robbed. Decades later the post office building itself, with its original clerk’s station and mailboxes still intact, would become the heart of the present-day “World’s Only Winnetoon” shop, described further below.

Churches: Methodist and Bethesda Lutheran

Faith organized as quickly as commerce. The Methodist congregation built its first church in 1894 and rebuilt on a larger scale by 1948, calling more than a dozen ministers over the decades and hosting, among other things, an initiation ritual for the local Modern Woodmen of America lodge that longtime members still remembered decades later. Winnetoon’s Danish families organized their own congregation in 1913, after Gilbert Olson — son of pioneer settler Ole Olson, who had also donated the land for the town cemetery — gave an acre at the south edge of town for a church; roughly two hundred people attended Bethesda Lutheran’s dedication that September, and the congregation held services partly in Danish until the late 1920s. The first wedding held there united Axel Andersen and Nina Jensen. Bethesda merged with Zion Lutheran Church in Creighton on Easter Sunday 1970, and the following year the old building became a Lutheran youth camp under Pastor Paul Banitt, a role it continued to serve for years afterward.

The Brick School

Winnetoon’s citizens voted, after what one resident recalled as “many hot meetings,” to fund a new brick schoolhouse in 1913; the bond issue passed by only two votes, but the building opened for classes on January 1, 1915, and educated the town’s children — through all twelve grades and kindergarten, in the leanest years — for decades to come. The Winnetoon Wildcats fielded well-regarded boys’ and girls’ basketball teams through the 1930s and ’40s, and the high school glee club once sang at the dedication of the new Knox County courthouse in Center. Longtime students left vivid memories of those classroom years. Janitor Art Schroeder became something of a town institution himself — he timed the ringing of the school’s outside bell to the exact second with a stopwatch each morning, and twice daily adjusted the two-part window shades so precisely that it distracted more than one restless student. One former pupil, Gayle Neuhaus, remembered raising her hand on warm fall days, writing her name on the blackboard as her excuse, and slipping out the long cement sidewalk to the girls’ outhouse rather than sit still while the bees hummed outside the open windows. Christmas brought the school’s biggest yearly event: a program of songs and recitations rehearsed for weeks and performed at the City Hall, where Santa arrived with jingle bells and reindeer talk to hand out gifts to the whole community. As the district’s population declined in later decades, Winnetoon’s building was eventually reduced to the lower grades, with students and teacher sharing one classroom and an occasional trip down to the basement for music hour, before the school closed altogether and its remaining students were sent on to Creighton.

Bank, Newspapers, and the Pearce Family

Winnetoon supported a bank from its early years, but the First State Bank failed in 1927, a blow longtime residents remembered alongside the town’s other Depression-era troubles; a Winnetoon Co-op Credit Association eventually filled part of the gap — one veteran recalled depositing his Army mustering-out pay there as his very first bank account — and today a branch of Brunswick State Bank serves the town. The town also had its own newspaper almost from the start — the Winnetoon Pioneer, published for years by Mary Pearce after the 1921 death of her husband and longtime editor Charles Pearce, who had also served for years as Winnetoon’s postmaster; Mary’s own 1929 obituary called her one of the most prominent women journalists in the state. The Pioneer folded that same year after eighteen years, and was quickly succeeded by the Winnetoon Eagle under H.G. Frey. When Frey sold out two years later, the Eagle’s name and subscription list passed to The Verdigre Citizen, which ran Winnetoon news as a standing section for years afterward.

Telephone and Electricity

Farmers’ Union Telephone Company connected Winnetoon’s homes and farms on party lines threaded through a central switchboard operated around the clock by an operator like longtime fixture Alice Truesdale, who ran the board for more than twenty years. A single line often served ten to fifteen farms, each with its own distinctive ring, and five long rings meant an emergency — a lightning strike, a fire — serious enough to summon the whole neighborhood. The company’s own bylaws capped any call at five minutes, banned “common conversation” when the line was needed for business, and warned subscribers they’d be billed for any non-subscriber who used their phone without permission — rules that did little to stop neighbors from listening in, since picking up during a general alarm was the whole point of the system. Electric service came to town gradually in the early twentieth century — A.W. Crandall’s diary records the bank and other Winnetoon businessmen buying an electric light plant from Creighton in 1918 — and reached the surrounding farms only after the Rural Electrification Administration extended lines west of Winnetoon following World War II; residents who grew up before REA arrived remembered kerosene lamps and evenings without power as simply how life was, until refrigerators and freezers became possible for the first time in the mid-1940s.

The Automobile Era: Winnetoon Garage and the Oil Companies

The automobile reached Winnetoon around 1919, according to A.W. Crandall’s diary. The Winnetoon Garage that grew up to service the new machines was built in 1924 by Carl Scheer; in January 1927 Orin Glimsdal and W.K. Lane bought out Scheer’s tools, fixtures, and equipment outright and ran the shop together as Glimsdal & Lane until 1940, when Lane took it over alone and ran it until 1975. Bill Lane was known across the region for his welding — construction crews brought broken equipment to him from all over Nebraska — and he built his own working pickup by cutting the back off an old 1928 Buick, which he used to pull people out of snow drifts. The garage’s best-remembered story dates from Bill Lane’s years: Roy Koppelman was helping in the shop one day when Lane called out what sounded like “turn on the…,” and Roy did — except Lane had actually shouted “turn off,” and the machine sliced off Lane’s thumb. Roy rushed him to the nearest doctor in his rendering truck, only to be asked, “Where is the thumb?” He raced back to Winnetoon and searched the garage in a panic before spotting Henry Beckman showing the severed thumb to Lane’s wife, Mildred; Roy grabbed it and roared back to the doctor, who successfully reattached it. After Lane, the garage passed through Marlin Drobny (1975), Gordon Kotrous, Lloyd Beckman, and Albert Larsen before Gayle Neuhaus — daughter of Bill and Arlene Neuhaus, who had run Bill’s Tavern and Cafe on Main Street for twenty years — took it over in 1997 and ran it into the new century; Gayle had also taken over Village Woodworks from her father in 1982. Fuel came first from the Mutual Oil Company, whose agent Walt Clare ran a horse-drawn tank wagon starting in 1912 until Orin Glimsdal introduced the town’s first motorized tank wagon in 1918. Continental Oil arrived in 1922 and cycled through several local agents — Fred Schneider, Ed Herbert, and E.C. “Sam” Clare among them — before A.W. Jewell took on the agency in 1942, after two decades in the hardware business; his assistant, Delmar Andersen, began working for him in 1949, served two years in the Army, and returned to buy the Conoco business outright in 1955, running it for decades afterward. Willis Crandall, for a time, ran Mobilgas pumps of his own in front of the bank.

Pool Halls, the Butcher Shop, and the Implement Company

East Main Street saw one building change trades almost as often as owners. Built in 1905 as a butcher shop under W. Brooks and Ed Beckley, and then Emil Bonge and Lee Crum from 1906 to 1913, it became a restaurant and pool hall under Earl Dobson (1913), Andrew Finke (1917), and Howard Crandall (1918), then a pool hall and lunch counter run in turn by Emil Bonge, Elmer Schwartz, and Archie Bonge before it was finally torn down in 1926. A separate pool hall and billiard parlor, Sam’s Place, sold lunches, candy, cigars, and newspapers under Sam Breeden until he relocated his operation to Creighton’s West Main Street in 1929; the property later passed through a tax sale to the village, and eventually to a phone company, which still maintains an office there today. Just up the street, Winnetoon Implement Co. sold farm equipment under a rotating cast of managers — Schwartz & Sorensen in the early 1920s, then Joe Schwartz Implement Co. from 1928 to 1932, and finally Dan Kelley and Andrew Stubben — before the building was torn down around 1938 or 1939.

The Winnetoon Hotel

The Winnetoon Hotel stood at the north end of Main Street, its porch wrapping the entire north and west sides of the building. During H.J. Frey’s time managing it, the hotel doubled as a front for a bootlegging operation — though residents were careful to note that a Professor Lenger who boarded there was not involved. Newlyweds Tom and Martha Dvorak took the train up from Verdigre in 1920 to spend their honeymoon at the hotel. Sometime before World War II, Fred VanBrocklin bought the aging building for its lumber and hired local help to tear it down board by board and haul the salvage out to his farm — one of the young men who worked the job later joked he must have pulled a million nails out of that wood. The site became a free outdoor movie park in the 1950s, the projector powered by an extension cord run out a nearby store window.

The Jail

Winnetoon’s village council authorized a one-room concrete jail in 1907, its interior metal grill door forged by local blacksmith Ernest Scheer Jr. and still bearing his stamp; council minutes from that year also record the clerk being instructed to order a pair of handcuffs for the village marshal and, a few years later, granting the marshal permission to keep a cot inside for overnight use. The building saw little serious use for its stated purpose — minutes show the village paying Bill Fricke a dollar in 1932 for lodging two transients overnight, and jailing local man Vern Teipel for fighting in 1937 — and doubled, by more than one resident’s memory, as an unofficial clubhouse for teenage boys skipping school, at least until school principal E.J. Humann caught a group of them smoking and using it as a hideout during the Depression. It was also a favorite target for Halloween mischief: one year Clark Smith and a friend put a cow inside, and another year John Van Camp and Willis Kienow hauled a wagon up onto its roof. The jail earned a listing on the National Register of Historic Places in 1995, one of the small handful of surviving structures marking the village’s earliest years.

The Fire Department and Notable Fires

A volunteer fire department organized alongside the jail, fighting the ordinary run of small-town fires recorded across the decades in council minutes and A.W. Crandall’s diary — chimney fires that once sent schoolchildren scrambling into a bucket brigade while classmates were kept inside to watch from the windows, a lightning strike that burned the Sorensen family’s grain elevator during a heavy 1921 rain, a garden-weed fire that got away from the Jewell family and ran to the Lutheran Church’s horse shed before it was beaten out with pails of water because the hose couldn’t reach, a small blaze at Scheer’s garage that was quickly put out, and the total loss of a Clark Street rental house — vacated shortly before by Julius and Jeanie (Jacobson) Sorensen and then occupied by the telephone company manager’s family, who escaped safely — in a January 1930 blaze. The department still displays its original 1909 hose cart in the old firehouse, now the City Building. In the early 1950s, volunteer firemen staged their own Fourth of July celebration, complete with a hired dance orchestra and a fire-hose water fight between teams, specifically to raise money for the town’s first real fire truck; firemen led by Sam Clare eventually drove to Plainview to buy one secondhand. Winnetoon’s truck was sold in the 1970s, when the village came under Creighton’s fire department instead.

Civic and Social Life

The Methodist Ladies Aid Society, organized under charter member Martha Jones, anchored the town’s social calendar for generations, hosting quilting bees, potluck dinners, and fundraising sales — though it didn’t start under that name: a 1901 meeting at Julia Jones’s home voted to rename the group the Winnetoon Sewing Club, with 32 members on its rolls. During World War I, Winnetoon organized its own Home Guard company, drilling on the school grounds several afternoons a week and fining any able-bodied man between 18 and 46 who failed to show. The company traded visits with Home Guard units from Center, Bloomfield, Creighton, and Brunswick, turned out more than a hundred strong at the depot to see off local men headed to camp, and gathered again, somberly, when a soldier’s body came home by train, met by an honor guard who carried the flag-draped coffin off and, after the burial, presented the flag to his mother. Fourth of July celebrations remained a fixture of Winnetoon life across the decades — hay-wagon parades, peanut tosses, a live-duck fishing game, and in 1941 a girls’ marching drill organized by piano teacher Esther Beckman — even drawing a Native American encampment and dance exhibition to Main Street in some years.

The Blizzard of 1948–49

No single event tested the town more than the blizzard winters of 1948 and 1949, when snowdrifts piled as high as the telephone poles and Winnetoon went weeks at a time cut off entirely from the outside world. Cars belonging to Fred and Willard Ayers, Murray Jensen, and Orlie Herrick sat buried in a snowdrift east of town for a full week before a crew — the Ayers brothers, Murray Jensen, Charles Herrick, and neighbor Joe Neyens with his tractor — spent two days digging them free. Leonard Boggs got his own car stuck in a drift between Winnetoon and Bazile Mills driving home from visiting his wife and newborn son at the Plainview hospital, with neighbor Charlie Frank along for the ride, while Charles Herrick and Mrs. Orlie Herrick made a nearly hundred-mile round trip to Creighton to bring home several stranded family members, one of them sick. When the grocery truck couldn’t get through for three weeks straight, Herrick and Roy Koppelman finally drove to Norfolk themselves the moment a road opened and hauled a truckload of supplies back for the local store. The town’s longtime telephone operator, Alice Truesdale, resigned around the same time after more than twenty years running the switchboard, citing her health following weeks of treatment in Omaha. Farm families walked in from stranded cars, students boarded in town rather than risk the roads, and neighbors dug each other out one drift at a time until county road crews finally caught up with the weather that spring.

Founding Families

Winnetoon’s history was, in the end, written by its families — the same names recur across every business and institution on this page, married into each other generation after generation until the line between “founding family” and “town” was hard to draw. What follows is not exhaustive, but it is a fuller record than a short town-page summary allows.

Andersen. Danish immigrant Harald Andersen came to America in 1909, married Linie B. Jensen in 1916, and that same year bought out the Ernest Scheer blacksmith shop, running it until 1957. Their son Delmar married Ruth Mueller and ran Winnetoon’s Conoco station from 1955 onward; their children were Taryn, Brock, Derek, and Stacy.

Beckman. Henry “Heinie” Beckman, son of Fred and Caroline Horstman Beckman, married piano teacher Esther Ida Jacobson in 1936 and worked for years at Lane’s Garage — the same Henry Beckman who found Bill Lane’s severed thumb during the garage accident recounted above.

Bennett. Bruce Bennett, born 1932 to Roy and Mabel Rohrer Bennett, married Ruth Meyers, worked for Continental Grain in Winnetoon, and later built his own feed business while the family lived in the former Seth Jones home.

Boggs. Twin brothers Edwin and Edgar Boggs came from Wisconsin to farm north of town and both enlisted for World War I; Edgar returned to Wisconsin afterward, but Edwin stayed, married Caroline Kumm, and moved the family into Winnetoon in 1957. His son Leonard and Leonard’s wife Elaine went on to run Len’s Garage and Elaine’s Tavern side by side — Elaine also serving on both the school board and the village council.

Bonge. Claus Bonge and Matilda Voss homesteaded south of Winnetoon after emigrating from Illinois in 1883 and retired into town in 1905; Claus later sued the village over a standpipe built too close to his house. Of their eleven children, only six survived to adulthood.

Brooks. Edward L. Brooks came to Winnetoon in 1911 to serve as cashier at the First State Bank and died just two years later; his obituary called him “the best friend Winnetoon ever had.”

Christensen. Pete Christensen, from a Danish community near Verdigre, worked for the Horstman family, married their daughter Emma, and for a time lived in the house built too close to the Bonge standpipe before moving to the Winkleman place northeast of town.

Clare. Ralph Clare, born in Wisconsin in 1856, moved to a dugout southwest of Verdigre in 1878, organized Winnetoon’s first Sunday School in 1904, carried the rural mail route for 24 years, and co-owned Clare and Jewell Hardware. His son E.C. “Sam” Clare served in World War I, sold for Continental Oil and later Moorman Feed, sat on the school, cemetery, and village boards, and led the trip to Plainview to buy Winnetoon’s first fire truck.

Clough. English immigrant Joel Ezra Clough homesteaded west of Winnetoon in 1881 and was active in the Telephone Company; his son Harry worked at the Glimsdal Store and First State Bank and served as postmaster in 1911, while son Bert was village marshal from 1912 to 1918.

Finke. Andrew Finke came to Knox County from Wisconsin at 16, married Edith Kienow in 1897, and built a home in Winnetoon around 1915; he also ran the pool hall and restaurant on East Main Street for a time in 1917.

Fredrickson. Henry Fredrickson, born in Germany in 1844, homesteaded southeast of Winnetoon in 1875; his son George married Faye Hubbard and stayed in the area, their daughter Arlene later marrying Bill Neuhaus.

French. WWI veteran Walter French moved into Winnetoon in 1935 to run the feed store and cream station; the town’s free outdoor movie screen once stood just north of his store.

Fricke. Henry Fricke Sr. and his wife Alvina came from Wisconsin by covered wagon in 1880 and homesteaded northwest of town. Their granddaughter Lavon Fricke taught school for years in and around Winnetoon; another branch of the family, Vernon Fricke, came to Winnetoon in 1952 to run a grocery store.

Ganz. Robert and Hazel Ganz came to Winnetoon in 1932 and took in their grandchildren in 1952 after their eldest daughter died. Hazel served as the town’s postmaster from 1956 to 1967, raising the children in the same building where she sorted the mail.

Herrick. Orlie “Pat” Herrick and his wife Edna arrived from O’Neill in 1937 with a monument-carving business that Pat ran until his death in 1958; his son Charles took it over, later ran the town’s grocery store with his wife Evelyn in the late 1940s, and eventually moved the monument works to Ainsworth.

Jewell. A.W. (Arley) Jewell married Ethel Clare, daughter of Ralph Clare, and ran a hardware store with his father-in-law before the 1942 Main Street fire destroyed the business and he became Winnetoon’s Continental Oil agent instead. His mother gave each of her ten grandchildren a silver dollar wrapped in tissue paper every Christmas.

Kehne. August and Olive Kehne raised four children on farms south, north, and west of Winnetoon across four decades. Three eventually settled as far as Spokane, San Diego, and Minneapolis, but youngest son Harold stayed, built a house in town in 1979, and ran a fertilizer business out of the old Jones grain elevator; his daughter Peggy’s husband later ran a trucking company from the lot where the old hotel and cream station once stood.

Neuhaus. Bill Neuhaus, orphaned of his mother at 14, married Arlene Fredrickson in 1937, worked in California manufacturing through World War II, and returned to Winnetoon in 1948 to farm and later serve as village marshal, school janitor, and council member. In 1955 he opened Bill’s Tavern and Cafe, which he and Arlene ran until 1975. Their daughter, Gayle Neuhaus, is the same Gayle Neuhaus who compiled this history, ran Village Woodworks from 1982 and the Winnetoon Garage from 1997, and later served for years as the town’s postmaster — see below.

Olson. Ole Olson, a Norwegian immigrant, homesteaded southeast of the future townsite in 1872 with almost no other settlement nearby; his log cabin, built from timber hauled in from Niobrara, still stands in the village park. His son Gilbert donated the land for both Winnetoon’s cemetery and, later, Bethesda Lutheran Church.

Saunders. William Saunders took over his father’s hardware trade in Bazile Mills and built a second store in Winnetoon after 1906; he died in the 1919 Spanish influenza epidemic, after which his brother-in-law Asa Cave kept the hardware business running.

Scheer. Ernest Scheer Jr. sailed from Germany as a boy in 1882, built a blacksmith shop after moving into Winnetoon in 1903, and forged the metal door still bolted into the 1907 jail.

Schwartz. Henry Schwartz, a German immigrant who settled southwest of town in the 1880s, raised eleven children on a half-section plus seven or eight rented quarters, farming with a team of sixteen horses. His sons spread across the region as the family grew: Joe took over the local John Deere dealership (and moved the family house recounted above), John ran a livery stable and pool hall in Verdigre, Ed became both a barber and the elected sheriff of Pierce County, Elmer barbered in three different towns and later guarded the state penitentiary, and Bill stayed to farm the home place.

Winnetoon Today

Winnetoon’s population has fallen from a peak of roughly 289 residents in the early twentieth century to 54 at the 2020 census, and Main Street’s storefronts have mostly gone quiet, but the town has not disappeared. Its old boardwalk still stands, with several early buildings restored and identified — a barber shop, a general store, a livery stable, a newspaper office, and the one-room District #58 schoolhouse among them — and the original one-room post office building, its clerk’s station and mailboxes still intact, has become the village’s living-history hub.

That building’s recent story is, fittingly, also Gayle Neuhaus’s own. The same Gayle Neuhaus who spent 2006 gathering the letters, diary pages, and family memories that this page draws on — who had already taken over Village Woodworks from her father in 1982 and the Winnetoon Garage in 1997 — went on to serve as Winnetoon’s postmistress, a role she held until her death in August 2022. Her daughter, Traci Folck, has since reopened the old post office as an antique and gift shop under the sign “World’s Only Winnetoon” — a nod to the fact that, whichever translation of the town’s name residents prefer, there really is no other Winnetoon anywhere in the country. Each year, the community’s BBQ celebration draws roughly 1,500 visitors back to a village of only a few dozen residents — proof, longtime Winnetoonites say, that a small town’s history is worth far more than its population count, and that the work of preserving it — Gayle Neuhaus’s work — was worth doing.

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