History of O'Neill, Nebraska
Long before O'Neill had a courthouse square or a Main Street lined with brick storefronts, the ground it stands on was simply a well-watered bend of the Elkhorn River valley that a scattering of homesteaders were only beginning to notice. The first white settlers to reach that stretch of country arrived in the spring of 1870, when M. Ford, an elderly settler, and Johnny Devlin, a traveling Irish tinker, staked claims near today's Ewing, a few miles inside Holt County's eastern edge. That same May, Tennessean James Ewing brought his wife Sabrina and their small daughters to a spot near the forks of the Elkhorn, broke sod for a garden, and unknowingly became neighbor to Ford and Devlin, whom the family discovered only by accident. Within two years the young settlement recorded its first birth, first marriage and first death — the marriage of sixteen-year-old Anna Elfreda Ewing to Isaac Davidson, whose son Guy was born January 31, 1872, not long after old man Ford had died on his own claim. It was into this thin scatter of dugouts and sod cabins that, in 1873, a colony out of Sauk County, Wisconsin, led by H. H. McEvony, pushed twenty-two people and five wagons up the valley, arriving at Bill Inman's cabin on July 13 after missing their Fourth of July target by a week. McEvony staked his own claim about a mile southeast of what are now O'Neill's city limits, never guessing that his hospitality that autumn to a traveling Civil War veteran would determine what stood on that ground for the next century.
The visitor was General John O'Neill, and by any measure he was one of the more improbable town founders in Nebraska history. Born in Drumgallon, in the parish of Clontibret, County Monaghan, Ireland, on March 9, 1834, his father died shortly before his birth, and his widowed mother eventually left him with his grandparents to sail for America with her older children, settling in Elizabeth, New Jersey. John rejoined her in Virginia at age fourteen, opened a Catholic bookstore in Richmond in his early twenties, then sold it to join a cavalry regiment. Sent west in 1855 to help suppress the Mormon uprising in Utah, he found the posting dull, deserted, and made his way to California, where he joined the First Cavalry at the outbreak of the Civil War. He fought through the Peninsular Campaign of 1862, was commissioned into the Fifth Indiana Cavalry, was wounded at the Battle of Cumberland Gap in December 1863, and briefly commanded a company of Black infantry before his old wound forced a second resignation in November 1864, the same month he married Mary Crowe of San Francisco and settled in Nashville as a government pension agent.
It was there that O'Neill's restlessness turned toward Ireland's cause. In 1866 he joined the Fenian Brotherhood, an organization of Irish-American Civil War veterans determined to strike at British power in Canada as a lever toward Irish independence. Leading Fenian forces across the Niagara frontier near Fort Erie, O'Neill won the Brotherhood's most celebrated engagement, the Battle of Ridgeway, against Canadian militia commanded by Colonel Alfred Booker, before the failure of reinforcements forced his men back across the border into the custody of a U.S. gunboat. He rose to become president of the Fenian Brotherhood, and in 1870 led a second, smaller raid across the Vermont border toward Eccles Hill, Quebec, for which he was arrested, briefly imprisoned, and then pardoned by the president. A third and final attempt, a raid on a Hudson's Bay Company post at Pembina in Dakota Territory in October 1871, ended the same way — swift arrest, swift release. O'Neill later wrote bitterly of the wealthy Irish-Americans who had "proclaimed on many a St. Patrick's Day festival their willingness to spend their last dollar and shed their last drop of blood in the cause of Ireland's liberation" and then withheld help when it counted.
It was during his imprisonment at Burlington, Vermont, after the Eccles Hill raid, that O'Neill's ambitions shifted from armed struggle to something more durable. Appalled by the poverty of Irish immigrants crowded into the mining towns and tenements of the eastern seaboard, he began to dream of settling them instead on free farmland in the American interior. "I have always believed," he wrote, "that the next best thing to giving the Irish people their freedom at home is to encourage such of them as came to this country either from choice or from necessity to take up lands and build homes in America." Through 1872 and 1873 he scouted Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, Missouri and Nebraska before settling on the Elkhorn Valley, then toured the eastern cities lecturing to prospective colonists. It was this campaign that brought him, in the fall of 1873, to McEvony's hospitable homestead, where he borrowed horses to explore the surrounding country for a site of his own.
By the spring of 1874 the general's eastern recruiting had paid off, and in early April his first colony — a group that included Neil Brennan, Patrick Hughes, Timothy O'Connor, Henry Cury, Thomas Connolly, Michael McGrath, Thomas N. J. Hynes, Michael Dempsey, Thomas Kelly, Robert Alsworth, Ralph Sullivan, Patrick Brennan, Thomas Cain, Henry Carey and Patrick Karney, along with two women and five children — set out by rail through Omaha, Blair, Fremont and Wisner, then by stage and whatever conveyance they could find the rest of the way to what settlers were then calling Holt City. A Lincoln civil engineer, Thomas J. Atwood, had already platted the townsite, and the first colonists reached it on May 12, 1874. Within a week they had built a sod house thirty-six feet long, its roof timbers hauled eighteen miles from Redbird Creek, the nearest stand of trees. Someone promptly dubbed the crude shelter the "Grand Central Hotel," a name that would come back to embarrass the town the following year. That same Independence Day, two footsore new arrivals, John Grady and John Mayberry, walked into the middle of the county's first Fourth of July celebration; Grady went on to claim the homestead where O'Neill now stands, and the southwest corner of Mayberry's adjoining quarter section became the heart of the town's future downtown, the spot where the Golden Hotel would later be built. The community's post office, first petitioned under the name Rockford, was soon renamed O'Neill in the general's honor.
Word of a "Grand Central Hotel" awaiting them in a thriving town proved to be a costly exaggeration. A land agent named Patrick Fahy had promised General O'Neill $600 and town lots for bringing settlers to the site, and had written glowing letters describing a settled countryside and a bustling townsite complete with a proper hotel. When O'Neill's second colony of over a hundred men, women and children arrived in the spring of 1875, they found instead the same bleak sod building, no businesses, and a countryside still mostly empty — along with the unsettling discovery that fraudulent county bonds were already being peddled to eastern bankers in the name of the still-unorganized territory. Blamed by some colonists for the deception, O'Neill published an angry open letter accusing Fahy of leaving him "ashamed of not having a single house in O'Neill City," and announced that he and a new partner, Patrick Hagerty, were platting an addition of their own to build up in earnest. The letter, printed in the Irish World, restored confidence, and a public meeting on August 22, 1875, formally thanked the general for his efforts. A dispute over townsite rights with the earlier McEvony settlement — which by law had first claim to a village site in the area — was eventually settled amicably once O'Neill's neighbors were persuaded that his broader colonization plans gave the new town a far better shot at a railroad.
That October, John Mayberry, working under contract to Fahy, put up the town's first frame building, a general store that Hagerty immediately leased and stocked. Business boomed almost overnight, not from the colonists themselves but from the Black Hills gold rush then passing through; O'Neill was the last place on the trail north where prospectors could resupply, and Hagerty's store was said to employ up to twenty clerks and clear a thousand dollars a day at the height of the rush. General O'Neill, worried that his colonists would abandon their claims for the goldfields, urged them to put in a crop first — "the men who will raise produce to sell to the miners… will make more gold in the end than those who dig for it in the Hills" — but 1876 brought disappointment on both fronts: the mines left most fortune-seekers poorer than they started, and grasshopper swarms so dense they were compared to thunder devoured the valley's crops, in one recorded instance stripping a lush cornfield bare within minutes.
That same year, on June 29, 1876, Governor Silas Garber's proclamation finally organized Holt County in earnest, named for Joseph Holt of Kentucky, a former U.S. postmaster general and secretary of war. The temporary seat of government was fixed at the remote Lasser Lakes settlement, and when a permanent county seat election was called that December, the little settlement of Paddock, far off on the Niobrara in the county's northern reaches, won by a bewildering result that left both O'Neill and the newer settlement of Atkinson feeling shortchanged for years afterward. The contested vote produced four rival claimants to the office of county clerk before a visiting judge sorted out the mess, and legend holds that the county's early "safe" was nothing more than a board hollowed out of a settler's ceiling to hide cash and papers — the very artifact now preserved by the Nebraska State Historical Society. The rivalry simmered until a special election on May 12, 1879, when O'Neill won the county seat outright, 279 votes out of 391 cast. County clerk Sanford Parker hauled the records over from Paddock in a wagon that August, only to find, as he put it, no building or room ready to receive them; for the next several years the county's paperwork moved from a cramped rented room to a series of storefronts and bank buildings until a proper courthouse was finally built in 1886 for a reported $18,000.
General O'Neill did not live to see any of this settled. In the fall of 1877 he had led yet another colony — his fourth — northwest to found Atkinson in partnership with Colonel John Atkinson of Detroit, in addition to an earlier colony he had planted in Greeley County; he dreamed, according to the county history, of establishing as many as a hundred such settlements across Nebraska. That autumn, while lecturing in Little Rock, Arkansas, he caught a cold that aggravated the chronic asthma that had dogged him for years. Heading home to the small house he had built for his family in O'Neill, he suffered a stroke the first night after his return; his wife took him to St. Joseph's Hospital in Omaha, where he died on January 8, 1878, at the age of forty-four. He was buried in Omaha's Holy Sepulchre Cemetery beneath a granite monument, later erected by admiring countrymen, engraved with an open hand, an Irish harp, and an American eagle intertwined with shamrocks, and inscribed simply, "Hero of Ridgeway." Though he had envisioned a colony of Irish Catholics living apart, the town that carried his name quickly filled out with German, Bohemian and other settlers as well — among them the Gatz, Pfunder, Schram and Mack families — building, as the county history puts it, "the prosperous community John O'Neill had planned," even if not quite as he had first imagined it.
Through the 1880s the young county seat grew into a genuine trading center. By mid-decade it supported a creamery drawing milk from at least five hundred cows, two banks, a lumberyard, two hotels, four doctors, four attorneys and a dentist, and townspeople had begun agitating for basic sanitation, including the removal of hog pens from the business district. The county held its first fair at O'Neill in September 1885, and the new courthouse was finished the following June. New families arriving in these years — the Gallaghers, Manns, Gatzes and McManuses among them — built businesses that would anchor downtown for decades: Ed Gallagher and Mary Mann, who had known each other back in Wisconsin, married in O'Neill in 1889; her brothers John and Joe Mann ran the J. P. Mann Mercantile Company for a generation, while Gallagher went into lumber and banking, eventually serving as mayor from 1900 to 1903 and again from 1906 to 1909. German-born butcher Fred Gatz, who arrived by way of Baltimore and Columbus, opened a meat market and built the Western Hotel next door, later leasing it to Wes Evans; when T. V. Golden built his own namesake hotel nearby, Evans moved his operation there instead.
The town's newspapers had their own turbulent early history. The Frontier was founded in July 1880 by W. D. Mathews, and quickly ran afoul of a rival paper, the Holt County Record, whose owners reportedly wrecked Mathews's office one May night in 1881, threatening him with a hammer and a gun when he arrived. Rather than fold, Mathews hauled in lumber for a building of his own, scattered his salvaged equipment among sympathetic neighbors' offices around town, and got that week's issue out almost on schedule; the town, outraged at the attack, rallied to his side, and the Frontier went on to publish without a missed issue for nearly a century. Dennis H. Cronin edited the paper for fifty-four years beginning in 1892 and owned it for fifty of those years, installing Romaine Saunders as editor in 1896 — Saunders became so identified with the paper that he was known simply as "Mr. Frontier," and wrote a long-running local history column called "Prairieland Talk" until his death at ninety-two. The Miles family, who had bought the rival Independent in 1904, eventually purchased the Frontier itself in 1965, merging the two into the Frontier and Holt County Independent, at the time reportedly Nebraska's largest weekly newspaper.
The town's Catholic community, largely built by the original Irish colonists, grew alongside it. St. Patrick's parish and its accompanying St. Mary's Academy became fixtures of O'Neill life under the long pastorate of Father M. F. Cassidy, whose personal notes recorded the community's joys and hardships — a severe regional drought in 1894 that brought "much suffering" and "severe destitution among several of the poorer families of the parish," a parish census in 1897 showing 125 Irish families alongside a handful of German and Bohemian households, and a new cornerstone laid on August 4, 1909, for a larger St. Patrick's Church, dedicated the following October after a single Sunday's collection helped cover much of the remaining cost, with a $5,000 gift from Utah Senator Thomas Kearns, a Holt County boy who had made good out west. Later chronicles kept in the parish record noted July 20, 1934, as "the hottest day in the recorded history of O'Neill," when the temperature reportedly reached 117 degrees, and the winter of 1948–49 as one long remembered for its "vast and utter whiteness."
O'Neill also endured its share of disaster. A fire destroyed the Academy building in February 1891, and though a roundhouse blaze that August was contained before it could spread, the near miss finally shamed the city council into buying its first fire engine that September — seven months too late to have saved the Academy, as the Frontier pointedly noted. The drought of the 1890s hit hard as well: the Holt County Bank closed its doors in July 1893 with a sign reading "Closed temporarily. Cannot collect as fast as deposits are withdrawn," and the town's electric light plant shut down in 1897 as hard times dragged on. Tragedy struck the community directly on February 15, 1893, when William E. Moore and Newton McCleary, riding together toward town to buy a marriage license for Moore's upcoming wedding, were struck and killed by a freight train at a Burlington crossing just east of town. Decades later, on March 16, 1931, a fire that started in the Bazelman family's lumberyard spread to consume Fred Bazelman's Golden Rule Clothing Store and a neighboring garage, with townspeople climbing onto rooftops to wet them down against flying sparks; the blaze burned for the better part of a day and cost the Bazelmans an estimated $40,000, only a fraction of it insured.
Two of O'Neill's native sons left marks far beyond Holt County. Moses P. Kinkaid, a bachelor lawyer who came to town in 1882, served a term in the state senate, spent thirteen years as the region's only district judge, and was elected to Congress in 1902, holding the seat until his death in office on July 6, 1922. His name survives nationally through the Kinkaid Act of 1904, which he authored to allow homesteaders in the dry Sandhills country to claim up to 640 acres rather than the standard 160 — a change that reshaped settlement across a huge swath of northern Nebraska and gave rise to the term "Kinkaiders" for the ranch families who took advantage of it. And Frank Leahy, born in a small frame house at Fifth and Clay streets around 1908, grew up partly in O'Neill, where his father, also named Frank, had settled after failed farming ventures near Wisner and Long Pine to run a tavern in town; the younger Leahy went on to play football at Notre Dame under Knute Rockne, coached at Fordham (where he mentored a young lineman named Vince Lombardi), and returned to Notre Dame as head coach in 1941, compiling a career winning percentage that stands among the best in college football history and earning him a place in the National Football Hall of Fame.
The 1886 courthouse that had once seemed such an achievement was itself eventually replaced. The Art Deco courthouse that still anchors O'Neill's courthouse square today was built in 1936 as one of several Depression-era public buildings raised under federal works programs, designed by the Omaha firm of John Latenser & Sons, and it was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1990. It was inside that newer building, according to local memory, that a plaque was later dedicated declaring O'Neill, on the governor's own proclamation in 1969, the "Irish Capital of Nebraska" — a title the town has worn proudly ever since. Each March the designation is celebrated in earnest: the intersection of Fourth and Douglas streets, once the site of the "World's Biggest Shamrock" painted directly on the pavement, hosts an annual St. Patrick's Day parade and performances by local Irish dancers, a tradition that by the 1970s had grown so popular the shamrock itself had to be relocated a block north to keep up with traffic.
Today O'Neill counts a population of a little over 3,500, still the seat of Holt County government and still, in ways General John O'Neill would likely recognize, a working town built by people who came from somewhere else looking for a fresh start. The general never lived to see his hundred imagined colonies, and the single Nebraska town that does bear his name grew up rougher, slower and more mixed than he had first pictured it — fought over by rival county seats, scorched by fire and drought, and settled as much by German butchers and Bohemian farmers as by his original Irish colonists. But the quarter sections that Grady and Mayberry walked into on a July afternoon in 1874, hoping only for a place to build a cabin, became instead the courthouse town at the center of Nebraska's fourth-largest county — a fitting legacy for a soldier who spent most of his short life trying, by one method or another, to give his countrymen a place to call their own.