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Clearwater Nebraska History

History of Clearwater, Nebraska

This history is drawn entirely from the Clearwater Centennial Book 1981, compiled by Walter H. Patras for the Clearwater Chamber of Commerce and published for the village's one hundredth birthday in June 1981. Patras, born and raised in Clearwater and a member of the high school class of 1945, was given six weeks to assemble the book from old newspapers, letters, county records and history books, working at night after his job while his wife Roberta — Bobbie — did the daytime running. "I am not a writer nor a historian," he wrote in his preface, and then produced the only sustained account of the town's first century that exists. Everything below comes from his pages, and where he was uncertain that uncertainty is kept.

Contents

The Railroad and the Birth of Clearwater Station

Clearwater exists because of a railroad bargain struck in 1879. The Fremont, Elkhorn and Missouri Valley Railroad had built west as far as Norfolk by that spring and would clearly continue up the Elkhorn valley, but it was free to miss the existing towns and buy townsites of its own. To prevent that, the Twin Grove precinct carried a railroad bond on October 3, 1879 in exchange for construction to Oakdale, with a depot and passenger service there and at the east line of Antelope County. The road reached Oakdale that December and Neligh by August 1, 1880, and in October 1880 it platted Burnett at the east edge of the county, a place later renamed Tilden because the original name caused trouble with the mail.

That made three depots in Antelope County; the agreement called for four. Rather than take one of the small settlements west of Neligh, the railroad bought a townsite ten miles west on the south side of the Elkhorn, just above where the Clearwater Creek entered the river, on land belonging to Francis M. Snider in Section 1, Township 25 North, Range 8 West of the 6th P.M. Clearwater Station went up in 1880 with a windmill and water tower for the old steamers, and on the 31st of May, 1881 the first passenger train ran through on its way to O'Neill City, returning the next morning. The village itself was not platted until October 13, 1881, by H. L. Phelps, Practical Surveyor, his certificate recorded five days later in Book 1, page 6 at the Antelope County courthouse — nearly a year after the trains began running.

Several buildings already stood. One of the first houses was John Anderson's, west of the plat at what is now Second and Iowa Streets, its lumber hauled from Niobrara City where supplies came in by river boat. Planks were laid along the track for passengers to walk on, later replaced with paving bricks, and a space was cleared east of the water tower where travelers could get off and eat the food they carried with them. The country had been settled before the town: the G. McGee sawmill, built in the summer of 1871 a short distance east on the Clearwater Creek, cut most of the lumber for the area, and small settlements stood within four or five miles in every direction.

The First Merchants and the Clearwater Mill

Miss Mary Macauley told Patras how her father, B. M. Macauley, began a hardware and implement building as soon as track started west from Neligh; when the plat came down on the south side of the tracks he moved it to the corner of Second and Main, where it was still standing almost a hundred years later. Finding no local records of those first years, Patras wrote to the Archives in Washington for the Clearwater entries in Wolfe's Nebraska Gazetteer, which he reprinted with the warning that they contain errors. The 1884–1885 listing credits the place with two hundred people and names Benjamine Calder's livery stable and the Calder House, J. H. Kelsey's hotel, O. A. Richey's meat market, Joseph Uphoff the blacksmith and F. M. Snider in furniture.

Uphoff, who came to town with the railroad, built on the northeast corner of Second and Main with living quarters above the shop. He did a large credit business, often taking hay and oats in payment, and when a good customer paid cash he would send back silver half dollars with the invoice and a note: "Treat yourself and friends at the saloon next door." His son Anthony remembered the cavalry camping east of town along the railroad in the winter of 1890–91; his father shod the horses and the government paid him twelve dollars, the biggest day's wage he ever made. In 1886 George McGee asked Francis M. Snider, who had built the first grist mill at Oakdale and the McGee saw mill in 1871, to help him put up a flour mill on the Clearwater Creek a mile south of town. It opened that summer with a capacity of twenty-five barrels a day, but being so far from the railroad it was abandoned after a few years, and from the disappearance of its advertising Patras concluded it closed in 1889.

The Post Office

Patras wrote no separate chapter on the post office, but its thread runs through the book. The office was established at Clearwater in 1880, before the town was platted, and E. A. Knievel is listed as postmaster in Wolfe's gazetteer for 1882–1883 and 1884–1885, keeping the mail in his general store. On the 29th of November, 1901 Postmaster Snider moved the post office out of the bank building into the large new building he had just finished on the west side of Main Street. By about 1914 the office was in the Fannon building with J. F. Fannon as postmaster, Stanley Hemenway as postal clerk and three rural routes going out of Clearwater. That building caught fire at about four o'clock on a Sunday morning in September 1921; the upstairs was completely gutted, but the post office below took nothing worse than water damage. A photograph of the staff in 1951 names Wayne Patras as postmaster, with Walter Snider among the carriers.

The Headlight, the Message and the Record

Clearwater's first newspaper appeared on September 8, 1886 as the Headlight, with C. E. Field as editor and proprietor. A month later the paper had, as Patras put it, started beating the bushes, adding the physicians G. W. Chamberlain and Alfred Stevens and John Marwood's temperance billiard hall.

The Headlight suspended publication in May 1887 and the Clearwater Message took its place on the 8th of July, 1887 with Fred E. Seeley as editor. Seeley promised a paper that would be "Straight" Republican in politics but above all "a good, live, newsy local paper, devoted to the best interests and up-building of our thriving little village." His first issue surveyed a town of some three hundred people, ten miles from any other railroad town, and traced the grain trade closely: W. R. Wilson and Co.'s new ten-thousand-bushel elevator, opened in December 1886, bought near seventy-five thousand bushels in its first eight months. The Message burned in the fire of 1896. By June 1901 the Clearwater Record was being published by F. S. Delanoy, a deaf printer educated at the Omaha Institute for the Deaf, and H. W. Mitchell closed a thirty-year newspaper career in August 1934, turning the Record over to Don Shortt and M. H. Snider. Very little is known of the 1890s, Patras noted, because most of the old papers were destroyed.

The Boom of 1888 and the Railroad That Never Came

Clearwater boomed in 1887 and 1888, and the reason, Patras suspected, was printed in the Message. On January 6, 1888 the paper announced that "every indication points to the building of a cross railroad from Sioux City to Denver next season crossing the Elkhorn just northeast of Clearwater." By August 17 it insisted that "Clearwater is going to get her cross railroad there is no further doubt, all contrary reports notwithstanding." No cross railroad was ever built. Patras found nothing further on it and allowed himself one aside: "When it is my turn to go, I want to go to the same place a lot of these old residents went, for by the time this book is written, I am going to have one heck of a lot of questions to ask someone."

The building, meanwhile, was real. T. H. Utterback opened a flour and feed store in Block 1 in March and the other merchants turned their remaining flour over to him; J. F. Fannon and Co. built a new general merchandise building next to the bank in Block 4, and in September C. F. Clark sold the City Meat Market to J. S. Burnett of Ewing. The Clearwater Cemetery Association was formed and a new cemetery started north of town that year, and the Message was soon complaining that it was doing nothing at all: "If a person dies the friends and relatives must either be subjected to the horrors of following their dead during a half day's drive to some neighboring town or else bury in some discarded sand lot." The old cemetery had been on the hill at the west edge of town just south of the tracks, and in June 1888 A. J. Matter was moving the bodies to the new ground. When the state took dirt from that hill in the fall of 1980 for highway fill, Patras told the village board it had once been a cemetery, and added that he had never been sure all the graves were moved.

The Banks

The Message of 1887 named one great want: "One of the great needs of Clearwater is a banking house." That December parties came to look over the ground and promised a substantial building with vaults on the latest improved plans; Patras noted drily that the paper had promised a two-story affair with a public hall overhead, and that what went up was a single story and very small at that. The Bank of Clearwater opened for business in May 1888. It lasted a little over two years, closed during 1890 for reasons Patras could never find recorded, and Clearwater went eleven years without one.

The stockholders of the State Bank of Clearwater met on Monday morning, December 2, 1901 and organized with Geo. N. Seymour president, R. S. Payne vice president and H. M. Stockwell cashier, opening the doors at eleven o'clock that same morning in the building the first bank had used. By 1907 they needed more room and bought Lot 3, Block 1 from M. A. Decamp and his wife Susan for a stone and brick building; that same year the Citizens State Bank was organized and built in brick on Lot 9, Block 2. Both did well, and arguing in 1910 for a second elevator the Record pointed to them: "The deposits of the old bank are larger now than they were when they were running without competition." In February 1928 the Citizens State Bank bought out its rival and moved into the 1907 building.

On Monday morning, October 21, 1929, the Citizens State Bank failed to open its doors; the closing of the Antelope State Bank at Neligh the week before was thought to have reacted on it. Many people lost their savings and in some cases their homes and farms. Patras wrote that some still said the bank need never have closed and that the good paper had been carried off to other banks by some of the officers; he did not know, but he knew that many never got back on their feet and wanted no part of a bank afterward. After seven months it reopened on May 24, 1930 under new management, with Dr. J. W. Bennie as president and H. D. Miller as cashier. Harvey D. Miller spent fifty-five years in banking, all of them in Clearwater, and served for years on the village board and the school board besides; he retired as president and moved to Lincoln, where he died in 1971.

Fire on Main Street and the Water Works

Buildings of highly combustible material heated by a tin stovepipe run up through the roof gave Clearwater the disaster it feared most. At eleven o'clock on the night of October 20, 1896 the Clearwater Message went up in flames and five other business buildings went with it; the east side of Main Street from First to Second burned, and only the City Meat Market and the old Bressler drug building were left standing. The cause was never established, though some thought mice had gotten into matches.

Thirteen years later, on the night of the great Fourth of July celebration in 1909, the fire bell rang at about twenty minutes to midnight and people coming out of the Opera House could see what looked like the whole west side of Main Street afire. The John L. James hardware, furniture and undertaking store was destroyed before the alarm had well sounded. The only equipment was a chemical engine that could not be recharged once discharged; some of the women pumped for the bucket brigade until they were exhausted, and a few fainted and had to be revived by the doctors.

Less than a month before that fire the Record had argued for a water tower and mains, warning that Clearwater could be like Elgin, which had lost a block of its business section that April. Sixteen days later the town nearly burned down. On August 13 the paper laid out the committee's plan: an elevated tank a hundred feet up, a gasoline engine, a triplex pump, several wells, a brick engine house and a thousand feet of hose, all for $7,500. "On the day of the election, August 16, 1909," it finished, "if you cast your vote against the water bonds, that vote might be the one that would defeat those bonds, and if your house burns don't blame anyone but yourself." Eighty-seven votes were cast, seventy-eight for and nine against.

By the first of June, 1910 Clearwater had its first real fire protection, and Patras observed that seventy-two years later that same tower was still the only water storage the village had. After two bad fires in 1933 and 1934 the firemen built their own pumper out of a cut-down 1927 Chevrolet truck, working at it for weeks in Tom Duncan's blacksmith shop. By mid-1946 that pumper was outdated, and the farmers within six miles agreed to help finance a new truck, which Chas. Claassen and Ralph Moser fetched from Chicago in October 1947. In 1951 the farmers formed a Rural Fire District so equipment could be bought through taxation and maintained by the volunteers for town and country alike. By April 1981 the department ran two rescue units, two pumpers and four tankers, with twenty-four active members, fifteen of them trained emergency medical technicians.

The Calder House and the Livery Barn

Of all the businesses begun in 1881, Patras judged none more important than the Calder House and the livery stable just west of it. Benjamin Calder's two-story hotel on the corner of First and Main stood close to the depot, which made it the town's commercial floor: salesmen came in on the train, set their goods out at the hotel, and the local merchants came to look and order. In January 1909 Jenkins and Company became the owners and added to it, and it was said then that Clearwater had one of the best hotels along the railroad. The building ended as a rooming house, and on its final day in February 1945 it stood three stories high and four times its original size before William Griffiths took it down.

In July 1946 Ralph Moser and Martin Clark began a concrete block building fifty by one hundred feet on the hotel lot, which housed M & M Motors, dealers in Dodge and Plymouth, from September 27, 1947. In June 1960 Mr. and Mrs. Jeff Hinze bought the building and turned it into a six-lane bowling alley, and Patras called that one of the major improvements for the village: every night of the week Main Street seemed full of cars. When Art Melcher announced in April 1974 that the alley would not reopen, the American Legion Post 267 bought Clear Lanes, fetched alleys from Decatur and, with a good deal of local help, laid them down in time for bowling in October.

The livery barn was shorter lived; with the coming of the auto in 1910 and 1911 the need fell away each year. In November 1935 the Clearwater Sales Company took possession and remodeled it with new pens, up-to-date scales and a sale ring seating a large crowd. It operated until the mid 1940s, then became a hog buying station until October 1950, when the old barn came down after almost seventy years.

The Opera House, the Fraternal Hall and the Palace

No building in Clearwater gave more entertainment than the Opera House and Fraternal Hall, built of yellow pine by the Woodmen and Workmen lodges in the spring of 1900 at the south end of Main Street, with a large lodge room above and the Opera House and its stage below. An anniversary dedication on the 18th of April, 1901 drew an estimated six hundred people into the streets by two in the afternoon, and the committee on dish washing, G. W. Myers and W. F. Moses, reported three hundred plates washed. By 1910 the hall was too small; the lodges voted to widen it sixteen feet, and the new auditorium opened on Monday night, May the 22nd, 1911, with a local play, a specialty act by Tommy Elliott and receipts of $210.00.

Movies arrived in August 1916, when Fred Libby fitted up the B. M. Macauley building at Second and Main and bought an eighteen-horsepower engine from Chas. Neiderheid to run the show. The "Palace" stayed there almost four years, until M. M. Hanson rented the Opera House in February 1920 and moved the equipment to the auditorium. In November 1928 Hanson sold the picture show to Wm. J. Asmussen and Murrel P. Simpson. Told that talking equipment would cost several thousand dollars, the two men modified the machines themselves, and on Saturday night, October 19, 1929 sprang a one-reel talkie on the audience to long applause. In March 1930 the Palace received a bronze Award of Merit Tablet from the Exhibitor's Herald-World of Chicago for proper sound reproduction — the smallest theater so honored in Nebraska and the first in Antelope County.

When Neligh suffered a million-dollar fire in March 1944 that damaged the Moon Theatre, its manager Walt Bradley moved what equipment he could save to the Palace and played to full houses; Patras ran the projectors for him, under orders to keep running until the last person got up and left. In June 1945 a film caught fire near the close of the second show and was put out by Darryl Hoffman, but at about half past two in the morning the alarm went off and the fire had considerable headway. The front of the building was practically ruined and the Hall Association decided not to rebuild. Fred Wupper rebuilt it in 1946 into the best theater Clearwater ever had, but by March 1956 television was keeping people at home, and the old Palace came down in February 1965. The new fire station was begun on its site that September.

The Churches

Catholics in the area first attended the Frenchtown church north of Clearwater. A priest began coming from Creighton and O'Neill in 1885 and Mass was said in private homes until a building was obtained in what is now the Wolfe residence on Utah Street. In October 1887 the contract for a new church on Nebraska Street went to Joseph Spenner, under V. Rev. M. F. Cassidy of O'Neill and J. C. Still, architect of Norfolk, and Rev. Leichtlightner held services in the nearly finished building on the 22nd of November. The first child baptized was Joseph Lichty and the first marriage was between Thomas Shultz and Theresa Ruterbories. Father August Heimes, pastor from 1905 to 1907, was the first assigned to St. Theresa's; the rectory was built in 1913, and the parish cemetery north of town was a gift of the John J. Thiele family.

The Clearwater Christian Church, later the Clearwater Church of Christ, records sixteen charter members in July 1909, meeting at first in the town hall and the schoolhouse with tent meetings conducted by John L. Stine, L. W. Myers and C. M. McClure. Dr. J. W. Bennie deeded the congregation a lot on Main Street just south of his office in 1913, and on the 28th of July that year fifty men and women pulled a plow across it to break ground. The first minister was J. W. Elliot of Creighton, and much of that account was written for the book by Mrs. Grace Jefferies.

Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints families moved into the county from western Iowa in the early 1880s, and Elder Levi Garnet helped establish a church three miles northeast of Clearwater, dedicated on November 4, 1883 by Missionary Charles Derry. The building was moved into Clearwater in October 1910. By 1931 only a few members were left and services moved to the library basement at Neligh, but in 1944 seven women of the branch began meeting in homes to study, and in 1945 the congregation bought the Lutheran church building on the east edge of Clearwater for $1,000.

Concordia Lutheran Church is the union of two older congregations. Zion, southwest of town, began about 1880 among families who had homesteaded in the 1870s, with the Rev. A. Leuthaeuser coming out from Norfolk to hold summer services in homes and in a log schoolhouse on the old Mennebroker farm; its first church, on ground given by F. Trennepohl, burned in 1897. Immanuel, in town, was organized on September 10, 1905 with Fred Loewe, Herman Meyer, Frank Noffke and Otto Ahlers among its charter members, and built its own church in the eastern part of town in 1908. Both voted for merger in 1943, and the Zion building was moved into town beginning in January 1944, bogging down a quarter mile short in bad weather before its dedication shortly after Easter under the name Concordia, which means harmony. On December 20, 1971 a damaged gas line regulator overheated the furnace and set the church afire; the Rev. D. L. Braunersreuther and his wife found it as they walked home from the Christmas program.

The Congregationalists built and owned a church in Clearwater before there was any Methodist preaching; their last minister, McClary, left in 1902. Rev. E. T. George of Ewing began preaching to the Methodists in the schoolhouse in 1893, they rented the Congregational building in 1894, and after the evangelist May Phillips held a great tent revival in 1896 they were strong enough to buy the church in 1902 for $350. It was moved in 1914 and burned on February 25, 1934 from an overheated furnace; the second church, built with the $3,000 of insurance and personal contributions, was dedicated free from debt that December with Rev. Otto Fink as pastor. The Ladies' Aid, organized in 1891 under Mrs. Grace Hildebrand, carried much of the church's finances, its best Lord's Acre Sale bringing in $3,082.43 in 1962.

The Schools

In 1882 Putnam Miller began holding classes in the back room of the drug store, with as many as one hundred and five children on some days. A school board was formed and a two-room building went up on Lot 5, Block 4 about 1884. By 1890 it was overcrowded; the old building was sold to Frank Hall, who moved it to the southwest corner of First and Nevada and made a home of it that stood until 1980, and a four-room schoolhouse with a bell tower at the peak of the roof replaced it on the same site.

"District 6 has out-grown its swaddling clothes," the Record wrote on July 22, 1910. On the 14th of June, 1915 the board voted to add the eleventh grade, and an election on the 28th carried a $13,500 bond by 126 votes to 35; Patras noted that the women went out in their automobiles to bring voters to the polls and that without their work the tally might have been different. A special meeting that November settled the site, after Uncle Em Chace offered forty acres if they would build on his claim in South Dakota, which brought the house down. The voters chose the E. Luther site on higher ground at the west edge of town, and school opened there in the fall of 1916 with forty-six pupils in the high school and eighty-four below it.

In 1935 the board applied for a federal grant toward a $15,000 auditorium and gymnasium, the government paying $6,000 and the district $9,000, and the bond carried that November by 174 to 11. In February 1965 Dr. Merle A. Stoneman told the board that Clearwater must build or lose its school, and two hundred eighty ballots were cast on the 5th of April in what was believed the largest turnout in the community's history, approving a $197,000 bond by 184 to 93; the new elementary building and gymnasium were in use for the fall term of 1966. Writing as the village went to the polls again in 1981, this time over the seven percent lid on school spending, Patras set out his own view plainly: "if we should have to give up our school at some later date, then we are giving up our town."

The Cornet Band and the Ladies IXL Band

By the summer of 1915 the men's Cornet band had forty members, and during the week of the 8th through the 14th of May they built a bandstand in the public square at the intersection of Second and Main. "It is a dandy," the Record said on the 14th, "and it is really an ornament to the city." The Ladies IXL band followed that December under Prof. Weber; most of its members had no previous training, but they made their debut at the Opera House on the 25th of February, 1916 and brought the audience to its feet, and at another concert that November a traveling man was heard to say, "That is the best ladies band in Nebraska." Membership was hard to hold through the 1920s as people moved away to find work, and a group of businessmen pledged monthly donations to keep the band going. The concerts lasted until the start of the Second World War, after which the bandstand was in bad repair and the village fathers had it removed, over the objection of older residents who said it was a landmark.

The Fourth of July, the Park and Free Days

Because the Fourth fell on a Sunday in 1909, Clearwater celebrated on Saturday the 3rd. Clearwater's boys beat Neligh ten to three, the Hon. Silas R. Barton, Auditor of the State of Nebraska, spoke at eleven, and R. F. Marwood read the Declaration of Independence. Frank Fehige won the fat man's race, Ocea Morris the ladies' race, Geo. Fosburg the sack race, and Mervin Butler climbed highest on the greased pole. The Royal band played all day to a crowd estimated at three to four thousand, without doubt the largest gathering ever held in the town. Asked how so many people got there, the old-timers told Patras: by train. The railroad added extra cars that day, and the locals put up the horses that overflowed the livery barn.

The town's first park came in May 1923, when the people built a tourist park on land belonging to Thomas Marwood where travelers could rest and cook a meal. By mid-July there were automobiles from New York, Utah, Iowa and Colorado, and on the 18th the town installed electric lights for late travelers. Karl Steffins of the Norfolk Daily News described five acres of giant shade trees a block from the business section, with the big chautauqua tent in one corner. Contois Brothers bought twenty acres including the park in April 1928, and the village acquired it in October 1947 to secure room for wells and an airport.

"Free Days" meant the carnival. The earliest annual celebration Patras could find ran on the 18th, 19th and 20th of July, 1912, when the businessmen brought in the National Amusement Company and then hastily arranged more attractions: a booster trip to Ewing in five automobiles secured the Ewing ball team and an agreement from John and Mat Savidge to bring their homemade flying machine. Mat Savidge took off at 5:45 on Friday, flew south over the creek and came back "as easy and as gracefully as a sandhill crane," eleven minutes in the air. On Saturday the air was worse; both brothers made short flights and reported dead spaces, and the crowd agreed they had done well enough. "What did you say? Clearwater dead!" the Record wrote on the 26th. "Well, we guess not."

The Doctors and Dentists

Dr. Alfred Stevens appears to have been the first doctor in Clearwater, arriving in 1884 or 1885. Dr. G. W. Chamberlain came in the summer of 1886; born at Bradford, Vermont in 1853 and a graduate of Dartmouth College in 1880, he fell ill in May 1888 and died that September of heart disease at thirty-five. Dr. G. H. Hildebrand, born at Greenville, Virginia in 1852, practiced at Plattsmouth before moving to Clearwater in March 1891, and it was with his push that the town board built the water works in 1909 and 1910. After an operation for cancer in September 1913 he was thrown to the floor of a train car and partly paralyzed his right arm, but told people uptown that if they needed a prescription they should come to the house, as he could write with the other hand. He died on the 7th of September, 1914.

Dr. M. F. Hall came from St. Joseph, Missouri in February 1904 and in March 1912 took in a young physician from Detroit, Dr. James Walker Bennie, as a partner; the two did not see eye to eye, and Hall left that August for Neligh. Dr. Bennie stayed forty-three years, dying at Orchard on the 2nd of April, 1955, having delivered over two thousand babies. He was chairman of the board of education for thirty-five years and president of the Citizens State Bank after its reorganization, and he built an eight-hole golf course south of town where boys hunted lost balls and brought them to him for ten cents apiece. Patras remembered him sitting up all night with one of his own children and saying that if the boy were no better by morning "we will take them down to Omaha" — not send, take. He was the last resident doctor in Clearwater's history.

The Telephone and Electric Light

The telephone came in 1902, when George Mead put in the first exchange; at first no one could talk beyond the town and the country close by. Mead bought the old bank building after the State Bank moved out in 1907 and put the telephone office in it. On the first of January, 1940 the exchange went to twenty-four hour service. Calls went through an operator, with as many as nine or more people on a line, and it became an unwritten law not to call after ten at night unless the matter was important, because the night operator slept at the board. Patras remembered calling home from the service and hearing Mary Kelly or Esther Prater say that his people were out at so-and-so's if he wished to talk to them there. "Without fanfare or celebration Clearwater officially received dial telephone service at 8:15 Wednesday," the Record reported on October 16, 1958, adding that a few minutes later the local operators of the old system went off the job.

Before electricity there was almost no light in Clearwater after sundown — a kerosene lamp seen faintly through a window, gas lamps piped into the Methodist Church and a few businesses, perhaps a lantern at the hotel or depot door. In September 1914 the village installed four gasoline lamps on the corners of Main Street. Late in 1916 Henry (Billy) McDonald started the McDonald electric lighting company with large dynamos in the old Noffke blacksmith shop, in full operation by the 4th of January, 1917, starting at dark and shutting off at midnight. By 1923 he had two outfits side by side so he could throw the switch if one failed, but appliances were coming onto the market and the plant could not carry the load. The village passed Ordinance No. 145 on the 11th of February, 1925 declaring a transmission line necessary, and on the 12th of March the voters approved a contract with the Tri-State Utilities Company and bonds of not more than $15,000. Poles were set in July and the line run from Neligh, the current coming from Minnesota along with the supply for a hundred and seventy-two or more other towns.

The Automobile Comes to Clearwater

Nothing since the railroad changed Clearwater as much as the automobile, which began appearing in 1910 and 1911 and took people to towns the trains did not serve. A. J. Scholz was one of the first to sell cars, bringing Buicks over from Elgin, and in 1915 Leo Rose took the Ford contract for the territory and opened a garage, the two forming Rose and Scholz. In April 1916 they invited every car owner in the country to come in on Saturday the 6th of May to be photographed, offering free cigars for the men and candy for the women and children; about a hundred and ten Ford cars turned out along with forty of other makes, and Clearwater had its first automobile show.

Joe and Arthur Contois sold their pool hall, bought the Rose and Scholz garage and took possession on July 8, 1916, and by March 1917 the firm was Contois Brothers. Their service station at the head of Main Street, opened in July 1928, had shower baths with hot and cold running water for tourists camped in the park and lights under the canopy that made it look like daylight. In December 1961 Contois Brothers ended more than forty-five years as Ford dealers in Clearwater and moved to Neligh, keeping only the repair shop, which Orval Hankla bought in May 1962; his son Steve took it over and purchased the building in March 1981.

M. M. Hanson, who with V. S. Walters had taken the Maxwell agency in 1915, bought out his partner and finished a new garage a block east of the State Bank by December 1919, later giving up Maxwells and Overlands for Chevrolet and taking the John Deere dealership from the Rundquist brothers in 1933. He died in August 1937 and his son Max took over, selling the John Deere line to Fred Nolze in February 1948 and continuing in automobiles until his own death in 1959, by which time the Clearwater Motor Company was one of the largest Chevrolet dealers in Nebraska. Hal Loewe and Max's son Gary ran it until an explosion and fire at the noon hour in May 1966 gutted the interior, and the Chevrolet franchise was canceled effective the 1st of January, 1967.

The Depot and the Main Street Crossing

The original depot went up in 1880 and 1881 with the windmill and water tower; all three were torn down in October 1955 when the railroad went to diesel. In 1903 the Fremont, Elkhorn and Missouri Valley became part of the Chicago and North Western, and by 1905 six trains a day were scheduled through Clearwater. Almost everything the town consumed came by rail: baby chicks, morning newspapers, fruit and vegetables in iced refrigerator cars, mail, machinery, livestock, furniture, caskets, and even bodies for burial in the Clearwater cemetery.

On Sunday the 12th of November, 1933, at about twelve o'clock, fire broke out in the west room of the depot warehouse in a fifty-mile gale. The firemen had three streams on it and could not save the landmark of fifty-two or fifty-three years' standing. Nothing was saved but the books and the typewriters; Joe Hague, the helper who lived upstairs, lost nearly a hundred dollars in saved-up coins, and the next day they washed the ashes through a sieve and recovered about twenty dollars, most of the pennies melted together. The railroad shipped a new depot in sections by flat car from Shawnee, Wyoming the following May, and that one was torn down in October 1966.

The long grievance was the crossing. In 1905 the railroad closed the Main Street crossing and extended its platform across it to the water tower, holding that the crossings at the east edge of town and a quarter mile west were enough. On the 24th of March, 1915 the case came to trial in federal court at Norfolk, with M. F. Harrington representing the town and twelve witnesses proving the crossing had been in use from 1880 or 1881 until 1905. Superintendent Reynolds argued it would cost the company $5,000 and would endanger the public to have a crossing twenty or thirty feet from the depot, whereupon Harrington got him to concede that Battle Creek, Tilden, Oakdale, Neligh, Ewing, O'Neill and Atkinson all had exactly that. The evidence went to the judge and nothing further was ever heard. People crossed at the alley by the Farmers Elevator instead, and men would build a crossing at Main Street in the night for the section crews to take out the next day. In May 1920 the railroad offered to put it in if the town paid $1,200; the town settled on $500 as a free will offering, and on the morning of the 26th of July, the last day of grace, the company started work. "It has been a long drawn out fight," the Record wrote, "but we hove got the crossing and we'll bury the hatchet." Passenger service ended in July 1958, and a "Save the Trains" committee worked for several years without success.

The Blue Pole Highway, U.S. 275 and the Airport

Roads were wagon trails along section lines, impassable in sand and mud, and strangers asking directions often could not be told how to reach the next town. On the 24th of April, 1916, Dr. Bennie, Frank Mapes, V. H. Uridel and Mont Moses took yellow and black paint, got into a car and marked fence posts along the routes they knew were passable to Ewing, Orchard and Royal. By 1923 the Blue Pole Highway ran from Neligh to Clearwater, and the town wanted the six and a half miles west to the Holt County line. At seven o'clock on Monday the 28th of April, 1924, seven fresnos broke sod in a line before a large crowd, and clay was hauled by horse and wagon from a pit two miles west and a mile and a quarter north. The state designated the finished route Nebraska No. 8, and within ten years the traffic had worn it out.

The replacement was built as a federal aid project through late 1936 and 1937, and Patras remembered what the jobs meant: men and boys who had been unable to find work of any kind got paychecks, "that little extra buck on the table after so many years of making do." The road men left in October 1937 with the Clearwater–Ewing stretch finished, and by late summer of 1939 the Neligh section opened as U.S. Highway 275.

Airplanes had used the Contois park and the Marwood pasture since the Savidge brothers flew there in 1912, but nobody considered an airport until March 1946, when Lester McKay, Milton Smith and Walter (Dutch) Patras bought a new two-passenger plane; in July the village bought twenty acres from Thomas Marwood south of the ball park. At about three o'clock on December 11, 1951 a United States Air Force C-47 circled the field and made what witnesses called a perfect landing, only to break through the sod and almost nose over as it came to a halt; none of the six men aboard was hurt. Eighty feet of steel mat was laid in front of it and jet boosters were trucked up from Norfolk, and on Friday afternoon a large crowd watched Lt. Birkland roll down the mat, cut in the four boosters and put the old C-47 into the air in seconds. Clearwater was listed on the air maps as having a field; what the maps did not show, Patras noted, was that part of the year it is under water and the rest of the year the water is within a foot of the surface.

The Flag Pole

The idea of a flag pole came in 1918, while many local boys were in the service. A town meeting on the 8th of October chose the hotel corner over the public square by forty-six votes to fourteen, and nobody was to give more than a dollar toward it. On the afternoon of the 8th of November the whole country turned out for the raising, with Fred Oetter as master mechanic, and the pole stood seventy-five feet high with a light at the top that could be seen for twenty-five miles. A few days earlier a young man had come to town claiming to be straight from the trenches in France; he became the hero of the hour, made a speech and showed an arm he said was shattered by shrapnel, and when he was handed the hat to pass and turned it over, at least twenty-five dollars had stuck to his pockets. He had eaten and slept as a guest of the leading citizens, and nothing was ever heard of him again.

The Thirties

William DeCamp summed up the decade for Patras: "There was once a time when I couldn't get the job that would even pay me five cents, nor did I have anything that I could sell that someone had five cents to buy." In the early thirties there was nothing for a man to do unless it snowed and he could scoop Highway No. 8 for five to fifteen cents an hour.

Children made their own amusements. Twenty or thirty would play under the street light at First and Iowa, and when they judged the forty-watt bulb too dim they stood a two-wheeled trailer on end with a barrel and a chair on top and put in a hundred-watt bulb; Rufus Bennett, who kept the bulbs, would climb the pole and put a smaller one back, until after a few rounds of that he gave up. At eight o'clock the curfew bell rang and Grant Wilcox, the town marshal, came toward that corner scraping gravel off the crosswalks with a shovel, and by the time he arrived the games had broken up. By the middle of the decade the WPA brought jobs, shelterbelts, park work, and in Clearwater the lowering and rebuilding of many of the water mains.

The Winter of 1948–49

It began on the 18th of November, 1948 with a blizzard and high winds, which was ordinary enough for Nebraska. What made it different was that the snow and wind did not stop. County crews worked around the clock and the drifts filled in behind them as fast as they opened; before long the drifts were too high for the equipment, cattle were stranded in the fields, fuel ran short, trains could not get through and farm families ran low on supplies.

In January 1949 President Truman declared blizzard-swept Nebraska to be in a state of emergency and sent the Fifth Army to clear the roads, with General Pick in command. By the 2nd of February half a dozen bulldozers were working, one of them north of Clearwater from the first day, where drifts of ten to twelve feet were common. A "Weasel" helped the Red Cross haul supplies and medicine, and Lewis Edwards and Maynard Stearns fitted skis to their airplanes and flew in and out of the field at the south edge of town. By the end of the first week in February they had flown 196 missions — forty-nine delivering fuel, 138 carrying supplies and nine taking medical aid or carrying someone to a doctor. The emergency was declared over at the end of February, and Patras noted that every winter since, farmers have moved in hay and feed early, just in case.

Natural Gas and the Sewer

In October 1950 the village board signed a franchise with the Kansas-Nebraska Gas Company, whose representative A. W. Peel hoped to bring service by the winter of 1951–52. Pipe laying did not begin until April 1953, but the system was in full operation by that fall.

The sewer caused more argument than any project in the village's history. It began at a Chamber of Commerce meeting on the night of the 4th of February, 1959, where twenty members agreed a system was necessary for any new industry. Clearwater's population was then estimated at 508 and its assessed valuation at $446,000. Fifty-eight citizens attended the public hearing on the 2nd of July, few objected, and the plan was approved at an estimated $115,732.72. Then no contractor would bid, and three lettings between December 1959 and November 1960 produced nothing the board would accept. In January 1961 a petition carrying some sixty signatures charged that the resolution of necessity was unlawful. The contract finally went on the 21st of February, 1961 to the Jansen Construction Company of Beatrice at $115,915, fifteen dollars below the engineer's estimate and twenty-five months after the idea was first raised, and the system was in use by August.

Clearwater, Home of Sir Winston Churchill

During the week of the 7th of February, 1963, Sir Winston Churchill was made an honorary citizen of the Village of Clearwater by proclamation of the mayor and joint action of the Chamber of Commerce. On the 15th a resolution was introduced in the Nebraska State Legislature designating Clearwater as Churchill's official residence in the United States, and in March the Antelope County Board of Supervisors made him a resident of the county, naming the Jack Middleton home the official residence and Middleton the official host and caretaker.

The Chamber then sponsored an essay contest open to all Englishmen, with a round trip ticket to Clearwater as the prize. Harold Pawsey of Salford, twenty-two years old and a former rugby and cricket player, won; a delegation of eleven residents met him at Eppley Airfield in Omaha at 10:12 on the morning of Wednesday the 16th of July. Almost two thousand people came for the beef barbecue at the celebration on the 19th and 20th, where Pawsey addressed the crowd on Saturday night. He stayed nearly a month and went home as the "Duke of Clearwater" and an Admiral of the Nebraska Navy, the latter conferred by Governor Morrison in Lincoln. In June 1965 Governor Frank B. Morrison called the Nebraska Churchill Freedom Foundation's plan to raise $250,000 for a memorial "one of the most significant developments in the State," and Pawsey returned that July to kick off the fund drive with a letter from Lady Clementine Churchill. The Foundation worked at it for a couple of years before dropping the project for lack of funds.

Clearwater and Sports

If another town in Nebraska loved sport more, Patras had never heard of it. Clearwater had a baseball team from the 1880s that played the towns up and down the railroad, and won far more than it lost. Bowling was here by 1900, when the building most people remember as Rundquist's was put up for a pool room, bowling alley and cafe.

The 1917 boys' basketball team went to Lincoln in the days when a school simply sent a team if it thought it was good enough, provided the professor went along and the school paid its way. The boys boarded the train on the 6th of March, beat Central City ten to eight, beat Falls City twenty-two to nine, won the third game and lost the fourth by a point, one win short of the championship round; there were 119 teams at Lincoln that year. Clearwater won the Class B championship in 1938 by defeating Tilden, and though Elwood beat them thirty to twenty-one in the first round at Lincoln, the Record noted that the Cardinals set a record as the only team at the tournament with no personal foul called against them.

The town team of 1948 to 1954, playing under the new park lights, was among the best in the state, with Hal Loewe managing and at shortstop, Rockie Payne catching and Fred Nolze at first; Patras thought Max Hanson deserved the credit, since it was the Chevrolet dealer's money that bought the equipment and paid for the travel. In 1966 the boys' track team of Dennis Loewe, Bill Sanne, Steve Patras and Ron Herley scored eighteen points to tie Sutherland for first in Class D and bring home the school's first state trophy, and Kathy Hinze became the first girl from Clearwater High School to reach the state meet, in 1974. Larry Parker brought out twelve boys for wrestling in 1967, the first team the high school ever had, and that same year he and Steven Patras built a rodeo arena; fourteen years later the Chamber of Commerce was running the rodeo in an arena seating a little over two thousand, with sellout crowds over three nights in a town of under five hundred. And in the centennial year the girls' basketball team, coached by Larry Pease, came home from Lincoln as Nebraska Class D state champions — though the team of 1921–1922 had taken a regional championship long before them, playing all comers regardless of school size.

The Men Who Did Not Come Home

Patras dedicated his book to six men who gave their lives for their country in the Second World War and Korea. All of them had given their home address as Clearwater, and each died as a result of direct action with enemy forces.

Donald R. Yates, Fireman First Class, United States Navy, enlisted on the 1st of January, 1940. He was aboard the cruiser U.S.S. Houston when she was sunk by Japanese forces in the Battle of Java on the 28th of February, 1942. He was captured and died a prisoner of war.

Russell R. Johnson, Seaman Second Class, United States Navy, enlisted on the 22nd of August, 1942 and was aboard the U.S.S. Preston when she was sunk on the 14th of November, 1942 in the Battle of Guadalcanal.

Norman V. Kirchner, Private, United States Army, enlisted on the 12th of December, 1943 and was reported killed in action in France on the 8th of August, 1944.

LeRoy Elston, Private First Class, United States Army, enlisted on the 26th of May, 1943 and was killed aboard the English ship Leopoldville when she was torpedoed and sunk by German U-boats on the 25th of December, 1944.

Harold Sanne, Private First Class, United States Army, died of wounds received on Okinawa on the 19th of April, 1945.

Robert Miller, Private First Class, United States Army, was killed in action in Korea on the 4th of November, 1951.

Clearwater at One Hundred

The Clearwater Record printed a business directory on the 27th of September, 1929 that Patras reproduced because ownerships changed so often he could not otherwise keep track. It described a town of about six hundred people on the Chicago and North Western, boasting of electric lights, a telephone exchange, water works, a twelve-grade school with eight teachers, the best twenty-piece band in the state, five churches, a broom factory, an auditorium, a moving picture show and nine lodge organizations. What the town still wanted, the Record said, was a hospital, a creamery, a cheese factory, an alfalfa mill, a chick hatchery, a canning factory, and five hundred good farmers with their families.

Patras closed his book by going back further still, to a Record editorial of the 20th of June, 1902 written for readers who had moved away. It placed Clearwater six miles from the center of Antelope County on the banks of the Elkhorn, quoted grazing land at five to ten dollars an acre and farm land at ten to fifty, and counted up the town: four general stores, two hardware stores, a bank, a drug store, two implement houses, a blacksmith, two wagon shops, an elevator, a lumber yard, a saloon, two hotels, a furniture store, two churches, a newspaper, a butcher shop, one physician, a good four-room schoolhouse, a creamery and a feed mill, with a population of three hundred. "So much of the above still holds true today," Patras wrote. "Of course the businesses have changed as has the price of land, but we still welcome everyone to our little town."

He was honest about the arithmetic of a small town. The population reached its high point around 1940 and fell away after the war; the census of 1960 counted 418, and by 1981 the village was back to nearly five hundred. "What will the next hundred years bring to this little town we all love so well?" he asked. "None of us will be around to find out, but if the people who come after us do as much as the ones who came before, there is no doubt that Clearwater will still be here."