History of Opportunity, Nebraska
Behind the short version of Opportunity’s story — Mineola’s boom and bust, Cox’s cheese factory, the long, slow drain of the drought years — lies a deeper cast of homesteading families whose day-to-day lives filled out the neighborhood for decades. Germans, Swedes and transplanted Midwesterners built their houses, raised their children, and buried their dead within a few miles of the little creamery town, and their stories say as much about Opportunity as the businesses ever did.
Among the earliest were August and Augusta Oberle, German-born immigrants who came by way of Iowa and, in 1882, filed adjoining claims near the Disney post office with Augusta’s brother, Rudolph Schimmelpfennig. August built a two-story board house and banked sod up its sides clear to the eaves for insulation, then attached a small barn to the outside wall of his own bedroom, with a door cut through so he could check on his two best horses without stepping outside — a defense against horse thieves that he only tore down once law and order had firmly settled the county. His wife kept canary birds indoors, and the Oberle children delighted in watching the eggs hatch, each claiming and naming a chick as its own.
Their daughter Josephine remembered a small hotel at Mineola run by a couple named Slotherwer, where her older sister Mary boarded for a winter in exchange for chores while attending school, and where Josephine herself and other neighborhood girls earned pennies picking corncobs out of the hogpen for the cookstove — money spent immediately at the store’s candy counter. Those years also brought hardship: with the nearest doctor twenty miles off in O’Neill, typhoid and diphtheria moved through the settlement and carried off several of the Oberles’ young neighbors. Families who stayed on afterward found some compensation in open range for their herds, since fences were still rare, and Josephine and her brother spent long days keeping the family’s cattle and horses from wandering too far.
By 1893 the Oberles had outgrown their soddy and built a new frame house on their adjoining tree claim, largely from salvage: August bought the shingled roof off a big sod house from a settler who was leaving the country and hoisted it onto his new walls, then bought a departing neighbor’s frame barn, floored it, and turned it into a kitchen. One son, John, had a natural gift for building — he copied a traveling salesman’s washing-machine demonstration well enough to build his mother one of her own, rigged a small machine for threshing cane seed, made violins and dulcimers, and crafted an elegant cutter sleigh good enough to rival any fine buggy. The family hosted dances at home until one night a fight broke out between two young men; August refused to let them settle it under his roof, sent them out to the road to finish it, and never hosted another dance again.
Josephine also recalled the tiny Leonie post office three miles off, its letter slots nailed straight to the wall and mail arriving by horse cart from O’Neill three times a week, tended by postmaster Hi Hodgkin and his ninety-five-year-old mother. At the Wrede school the Oberle children sat on long planks arranged around the walls, facing the wall itself with their backs to the teacher. Josephine married John Shaw in the Oberle home in 1897 and the couple ranched briefly on Louse Creek before moving to Iowa, while her brother Frank married Georgia Moser in a double ceremony alongside his sister. Frank later told his own children about the driest years, when the homestead barely produced enough seed corn to plant the following spring; he gave up raising sheep after losing too many to coyotes, turned to custom threshing behind a John Deere tractor, and watched grasshoppers strip his alfalfa to bare ground during the 1930s. The Oberles were the first family in the Opportunity neighborhood to own an enclosed automobile, a 1927 Chevrolet sedan that remained the household’s pride for years.
Christopher and Catherine Berger arrived from Iowa in 1890 and homesteaded on the ground where Opportunity would later rise; a decade on, their sons John and Charles bought the place from their parents, built up a Hereford herd, and owned the first car in the area. When their own boys came of school age, the brothers built the original Opportunity schoolhouse just south of the post office. The family later suffered a hard blow when Charles’s son Kenneth drowned while swimming in July 1936.
Lee Berglund’s path to Opportunity began in tragedy — orphaned in Sweden as a small child after his father died in a logging accident and his mother followed three years later, he came to Nebraska at twenty-one to join an older brother. After first homesteading in western Nebraska, he traded that claim for a calf, bought 320 acres near Opportunity in 1902, and in 1912 married Frieda Hohndorf. Their oldest children rode double on one horse to the Opportunity school, where Rose Coufal of Atkinson was their first teacher. The Berglunds’ 1924 Ford, notable for its self-starter, was one of the community’s earliest cars, while their neighbor Frank Oberle owned the first radio in the area, complete with earphones. Lee died in 1936, ten days after being thrown from a horse while trying to stop his wife’s runaway team, and was buried at Mineola only three miles from home.
Insiders had their own explanations for why the cheese factory that gave the town its name eventually failed. Ella Eisert, whose German family arrived from Berlin by ship in 1923 and settled a few miles north of old Opportunity, remembered that too many farmers lived too far from the creamery and their milk soured before they could haul it in. Mrs. Ray Siders, who wrote much of the neighborhood’s history herself, blamed a simpler cause: the younger generation had simply lost its taste for milking by hand. The Eiserts contributed their own small piece of local lore, too — when young Werner was sent to fetch the mail, he came home empty-handed because in German “Mehl” means flour, not mail, and the mix-up sent him looking for the wrong thing entirely.
Sylvester Zakrzewski, born in Loup City, bought a bare quarter section three miles northeast of Opportunity in 1919 and built from nothing, arriving with a sack of seed potatoes so small the family ended up eating them before planting season came around. During the driest years of the 1930s the Zakrzewskis packed cornstalks, tumbleweeds and sunflowers into a pit silo and trampled the mixture with horses to keep their cattle fed until rain returned. When disease wiped out nearly an entire year’s hog herd just before market weight, five turkey eggs taken in payment for a day’s work turned into a flock of two hundred birds sold to a Sioux City market — turkeys that, by the family’s own account, saved the farm. Zakrzewski held his retirement sale in 1968 and, fittingly for a man who had spent a lifetime working the land, died suddenly while chasing an escaped cow across the sale grounds.