History of Atkinson, Nebraska
Hy Nightengale, who grew up on the prairie north of town, liked to ask people, later in his life, if they remembered the old hitching posts on Main Street, the holes horses had stamped in the dirt waiting for their owners, the echoing plank sidewalks, and the pump in front of Frank Bitney's store where the country children lined up for a stick of candy. A generation after him, John Olson set down what a Saturday night in Atkinson looked like in 1917: farm families crowding the diagonal parking along the curb, ranchers gathered in Frank Keating's implement store arguing about the price of cattle and the state of the roads, women and children two deep at Will Schultz's soda fountain, the fourteen-piece town band tuning up without a uniform among them, and the town marshal's flashlight blinking down an otherwise empty street after the midnight train had whistled out and the light plant began dimming the bulbs for the night. It is a vivid enough picture that it is easy to forget the town had almost not existed at all, and that for its first several years it existed twice, in two different places, under two different names, before it ever amounted to more than an idea staked out with cedar pegs.
The first idea belonged to a missionary priest named Father Fanning, out of Omaha, who is said to have looked at the bend of the Elkhorn River and pictured a town there he called Fanningville. It never came to anything. The second attempt belonged to Colonel John Atkinson, a friend of General John O'Neill and, by all descriptions, a striking figure — a stalwart military man with long black hair who rode a black stallion nobody else could handle, out of Port Huron, Michigan. The Colonel picked a quarter section just west of the Fanningville site, had a settler named Jim Donnelly break furrows around the whole quarter and then plow two wide furrows east and west for what he intended as the town's Main Street. He had the ground surveyed into blocks and lots, all staked with cedar pegs. The trouble was that the land was low and swampy, with some sixty acres of buffalo wallows across the south half, unsuitable for building in a wet spring. Even so, when the Fremont, Elkhorn & Missouri Valley Railroad ran a preliminary survey across the property, the Colonel platted his paper town right alongside the tracks. Not one building was ever raised on a single one of his lots.
Real settlement started almost by accident nearby. In March of 1876 a man named John Crimmins made the first claim on what is now the Atkinson townsite, built a sod house at the corner of what would become First and Main, and began digging a well. After nineteen feet through solid clay he broke into loose sand, and with no lumber on hand to curb the hole, he gave up the site and moved two miles down the river. Prescott Schultz filed on the abandoned claim and hired Sam Wolf and Neil McElravy to put up a frame building on the southwest corner of the quarter in 1877, meant to serve as living quarters and a store. Sickness in the Schultz family kept him from ever running the business himself; that task fell to Bill Dickerson, who opened Schultz's freighted-in goods and sold the very first purchase to a settler named John Carberry, then took charge of the first mail that arrived days later. Dickerson's brother-in-law, Frank Bitney, soon traded for the store outright and hired Charles Bauman, who owned a big yoke of oxen, to haul a load of lumber up from a sawmill on Long Pine Creek so he could build living quarters onto the back of it. A second building went up just north of the store, doing double duty as schoolhouse and meeting hall. It is one of the small ironies of Holt County history that while Colonel Atkinson's platted town sat empty across the river, this unplatted little cluster of buildings was thriving.
Bitney made it official. He offered the railroad forty acres of his own land if the company would run its line through his settlement, and — in honor of the Colonel whose paper town had failed — he named the place Atkinson. He hired John O'Dempsey Nightengale to survey the townsite properly and then gave away corner lots to anyone willing to build a home or business on them. Ahead of Bitney had come James and Charles Donnelly, John O'Connell, and William Charles, along with John Carberry, who took higher ground north of the river; Robert Alworth, Sherrill Sagendorf and Peter Cassidy soon followed. Bitney filed his townsite on August 7, 1880, and the railroad arrived the following year. According to local histories, the little settlement had grown to something like eight hundred people within just a few years, as farm families poured in from Illinois, Ohio, Kentucky and Pennsylvania to break sod on the surrounding prairie, and on quiet days the sound of hammers building new frame houses could be heard for miles.
The town's first school had actually opened two years earlier, in the summer of 1878, when Ellen Hovey taught a term in the Bitney home. The community's civic spirit showed itself early, too: by July of 1879 Bitney had organized a real Fourth of July celebration, complete with two tall poles hauled in from Long Pine Creek and fitted together into a flagpole by James Davis, a young settler who had learned woodworking back in Nova Scotia. At sunrise a crowd of settlers watched the flag go up while the local blacksmiths fired an anvil salute, one boom for every state in the union. The parade that followed included a Civil War veteran in full uniform, a hay rack bearing a girl dressed as the Goddess of Liberty and children representing each state, a prairie schooner carrying a pioneer got up as Horace Greeley under the banner "Go West Young Man," and a band of riders in outlandish costumes calling themselves the "Calathupians." That original flagpole stood at the northeast corner of block seven on Main Street for decades, on very nearly the spot where the town's old public well had once refreshed travelers and animals passing through.
By September 1880, a traveling correspondent for the O'Neill paper was already predicting big things: Bitney was postmaster and general merchant, Sherrill Sagendorf had put up three buildings including a hardware and drug store, Theodore Wheeler & Son had built the finest livery and feed barn in the region, and a newly arrived doctor, identified in the account only as "Dr. Ph. D. Paul," had set up an office prepared to handle anything "from prescribing a dose of physic to amputating a limb." The town's merchants promoted their new home on envelopes stamped "Atkinson, Neb., The Star City of the Upper Elkhorn Valley, Best in the West," a boast that, for a settlement not yet five years old, was mostly bravado but not entirely misplaced.
Much of what gave the young town its character came from the families who anchored it. John O'Dempsey Nightengale, an Irish-born surveyor who had walked the length of the Elkhorn Valley alone in 1876 before bringing his family out from Minnesota two years later, built what neighbors nicknamed the "Nightengale castle" — in truth only a plain fourteen-by-sixteen-foot frame house, but the first all-lumber dwelling in a community still mostly built of sod and log. It served as schoolhouse, dance hall and church all at once; Father Brophy said some of the earliest Masses there, and the outlaw Doc Middleton is remembered to have dropped in on a dance from time to time. Nightengale went on to help survey Atkinson, Stuart, Emmet and part of O'Neill before his death in 1901. His wife Ellen, known to the whole community as "Mom," survived a hog attack, a runaway wagon, and a buggy accident caused by a loose wire jabbing the horse, and lived past her hundredth birthday before dying in 1942 — three of her children lived past ninety as well. John O'Connell, an Irish immigrant who had walked out from a Wisconsin logging camp, built the log home that became the region's first finished structure and the site of the very first Mass said in the area; the historic cabin was later moved to the Stuart Historical Museum in 1965. Robert Alworth, who as a teenager had danced Irish jigs on shipboard to earn his passage to America, settled about a mile west of town, where his sod home had the first wooden floor in the district and hosted both early Catholic Masses and Saturday night dances; his wife Bridget helped raise the money for Atkinson's first church by hosting oyster suppers once the railroad made it possible to ship oysters in by rail. St. Joseph's cemetery, laid out a half mile northwest of the church on land John Carberry donated, took its first burial in August 1886, the infant daughter of Alworth's oldest daughter, Mary Crowley.
Not every pioneer story ended gently. Charles Bauman, before settling west of Atkinson with his brothers in 1878, had worked as a deputy marshal in the wide-open cattle town of Newton, Kansas, where he was shot in the hip during a saloon shootout and, as local history recounts it, later ran into a young gambler he'd once watched hanging around the gaming tables in a red velvet suit — grown into a stranger he shared a supper of antelope steak with on the Nebraska prairie without either at first recognizing the other. Conrad Boehme, who took charge of a railroad gravel pit west of town in 1881, was nearly cut in two after a careless train crew threw him under the wheels of a moving car, and survived three months packed in ice; he later became a local hero of sorts during a bad October blizzard, when he strung a rope from the depot to the schoolhouse so the town's schoolchildren could find their way to shelter, then repeated the rescue at the second schoolhouse. Bill and Bert Dexter, sons of blacksmith George Dexter, ran the "Dexter Brothers" shop for forty-eight years and became known for shooting enough wild fowl every fall to fill half the town's pillows and feather beds with down.
The blizzard of January 1888 left its mark on nearly every family in the area, as it did across the whole county. George Donnley, a neighbor of the Nightengales, wandered for ten hours in the storm before stumbling by chance into a house near Holt Creek. John Bauman lost most of his cattle and, discouraged, moved his family to Omaha for a dozen years before coming back to farm again. The Hitchcock family, homesteading five miles east of town, lost most of their herd as well. Northeast of Atkinson, Anna O'Donnell, left a young widow with a house full of children and almost no fuel, burned the straw out of the family's bed ticks to keep her children from freezing. Fourteen children stranded at the Bowen school during the same era of hard winters spent an impromptu overnight sleeping four and five to a bed at a neighboring farmhouse rather than risk the walk home. Drought years brought their own trials — area settlers recalled a nine-day prairie fire that darkened the sky at midday and sent chickens to roost early — and even after the worst of the frontier era had passed, sudden tornadoes continued to flatten barns and outbuildings on area farms well into the twentieth century.
As the town matured it built the institutions of a settled community rather than a railhead camp. St. Joseph's Catholic parish anchored the town's largest congregation from its earliest days; a Methodist congregation organized in 1881 and a Presbyterian congregation in 1882, the latter drawing heavily on rural families northeast of town where the Reverend Donald MacLachlan, a Scottish-trained minister, farmed and preached simultaneously for decades. A Lutheran church organized in 1888 later burned, records and all, and was rebuilt in 1927. Frank Bitney, besides running his store for twenty years and later a livery stable, found time to help survey the Nebraska–South Dakota state line — during which a false report reached his family that he had been killed by Indians, a rumor it took three months to correct — and to serve as one of Holt County's earliest commissioners. In 1884 he put up the town's skating rink and opera house, a building that stayed in use for decades. Village government took shape as the population grew toward some eight hundred residents by 1883, and the town organized its own volunteer fire department, whose first equipment, as one longtime member recalled, was nothing more than a man-powered cart with a length of hose on it.
Business life in Atkinson through the turn of the century and after was dominated by a handful of enterprising families. Alfred "Al" Miller, who arrived by covered wagon in 1881, built a store for his uncle, later ran the town's leading hotel — the Merchants Hotel, known today as the Stockman Hotel — and in 1903 traded his homestead for the old skating rink-opera house building itself. In 1909, in partnership with station agent Charlie Goodell, he installed a gasoline engine and dynamo and opened the town's first moving-picture show, two-reel westerns paired with a one-reel comedy for a dime or fifteen cents; the biggest night in the Opera House's history came when "The Birth of a Nation" played with a fifty-piece orchestra. Miller's grandson, Arthur Glen "Tidy" Miller, was still running the Miller Theater generations later, giving the family something close to sixty consecutive years of providing the town's movie entertainment. Miller's sister, Minnie, graduated from Atkinson High at sixteen in 1892, went on to Peru State Normal, and was elected Holt County Superintendent of Schools in 1902, serving eight years before a long career teaching and writing as a small-town newspaper correspondent. Paul and Donatus Seger, sons of an early Illinois family that had arrived by covered wagon in 1880, bought a local farm implement business in 1909 and the next year opened what is remembered locally as the first Ford automobile agency west of Norfolk, running Seger Brothers for twenty-five years or more. Rural mail carrier Van Humphrey, appointed in 1910, covered a route that eventually stretched fifty miles and served a hundred families, working first by horse and buggy and eventually by Model T, before retiring in 1940 after three decades on the job.
Ranching and farming families out from town built their own institutions in turn. The Hendricks family, ranching sixteen miles north of Atkinson, built one of the area's best-known Black Angus operations and were early adopters of the automobile, memorialized in a family story about a six-year-old's first ride in a 1912 Ford whose driver had to be talked through stopping it. Sam and Vera Hickman, who bought a farm four miles east of town in 1902, built a poultry and turkey operation that shipped market birds, breeding stock and eggs not just across the country but to Puerto Rico, Hawaii and the Philippines, while Sam served on the Holt County Board of Supervisors and ran a creamery in town for a time. William Hayes, who came to the Atkinson area with his family as a young man in 1877 and helped organize Sheridan Township in 1892, later moved into town and served as its mayor during the First World War. The O'Connell family, descended from one of the area's earliest pioneers, sent five sons into military service across both world wars, including two graduates of Creighton Medical College who served decades in the Navy, and produced a Coast Guard veteran who later became a judge.
Atkinson's history, like that of most Holt County towns, was written as much in its losses as its growth. The Opera House that Frank Bitney built in 1884 stood into the late 1920s before it was gone; the town's Crystal Ballroom, built in 1926, became a center of its social life in the years after. Fires, blizzards, droughts and the Depression tested the town repeatedly, and yet the institutions that mattered — the Catholic and Protestant churches, the schools, the volunteer fire brigade, a Main Street full of family-run stores — kept being rebuilt rather than abandoned.
Today Atkinson remains a small but stable community along U.S. Highway 20, its population holding close to the 1,300 mark it has kept for the past several census counts, a remarkable steadiness for a rural Nebraska town of its size. West Holt High School and St. Joseph Catholic School still serve local families, continuing an educational tradition that runs back to Ellen Hovey's three-month term in the Bitney front room. Each August the town holds Hay Days, its signature community celebration, echoing in spirit the Fourth of July gathering Frank Bitney organized in 1879. Atkinson has sent a handful of notable names into the wider world, among them folk musician Jim Hendricks, U.S. Army Brigadier General Rodney L. Johnson, beauty-pageant titleholder Meagan Winings, and Jack Hoffman, whose story as a young cancer patient and fundraiser drew national attention.
It is worth remembering, walking Atkinson's Main Street today, that the town very nearly wasn't here at all — that a priest's dream called Fanningville came to nothing, that a colonel's meticulously platted grid of streets and lots sat empty in a buffalo wallow while an unplanned cluster of buildings a few hundred yards away simply refused to fail, and that everything that followed, the churches and the theater and the implement stores and the Saturday night crowds two deep at the soda fountain, grew out of a storekeeper's decision to name his town for another man's failed one. Whatever else can be said about Atkinson, Nebraska, it earned its Main Street the hard way.