History of Page, Nebraska
Behind the tidy origin story of Page’s schoolhouse-turned-town lies a rougher, more human tale: the overland trip that brought the Page and Gray families to Holt County in the first place. In the spring of 1883, W. W. and Selinda Page set out from Polk County alongside Robert and Orilla Gray, each family driving a wagon loaded with household goods, farm tools, and a mixed herd of cattle and horses pulled by a green three-year-old and a notoriously balky old mare. Rain turned the roads to soup, and more than once both women, each carrying an infant, found it faster to walk than ride. At one boggy crossing Orilla Gray picked her way across cleanly, but Selinda, “being heavier” as she later admitted, sank to her knees in the mud with her baby in her arms; a family down the road took them in to get dry and warm before they pushed on. When they finally reached their claims, the exhausted travelers spent their first night not in a home of their own but under the roof of Orilla’s father, R. B. Hunter, who had arrived just ahead of them.
That first summer the Pages’ soddy had no doors, windows, or floor to speak of — Selinda later wrote there were simply “places for them.” Ground squirrels wandered in to play beneath her rocking chair while she nursed her baby, and one rainy morning she had to trudge out three separate times, once barefoot in what she called “very scanty attire,” to restake a stubborn cow named Old Rose who kept pulling free of her picket pin. She returned from the last trip to find a carriage of old friends from Polk County waiting in the yard, and made the best of it with hot biscuits and garden vegetables. Selinda kept teaching school on the side even as she raised her family, once “camping” overnight at the Stafford schoolhouse to keep the stove burning through a stretch of sixteen-below weather so bitter that children arrived with frostbitten fingers and toes. In leaner years she tried her hand at raising turkeys, nursing a single gobbler into a flock of forty that lived mostly off the open prairie — only to lose most of a shipment to rats while the birds sat crated overnight at the depot, waiting for the train to Omaha.
Page’s earliest business district owed a debt to a couple who didn’t stay long enough to see it grow. The Coons arrived from Illinois with real capital, and Mr. Coon put it to work fast, building a hardware store, a general store, and a lumber and coal yard on the north side of the tracks along with a new home. His wife, however, never took to frontier living, and she talked him into selling out and moving back east. John Walker bought their house, and when hotelier Jim Patterson built the town’s first hotel in 1892 and then abandoned it almost immediately to return to his own homestead, it was Walker who stepped in and took that over too. The town’s other frontier businesses churned through owners just as quickly — the livery stable passed through several hands, and the Page Reporter newspaper, successor to The Eye, changed ownership three times in a single year before things settled down.
The new two-story schoolhouse that replaced the old Pleasant Valley soddy needed a teacher equal to the job, and the district found one in Perry Chase, hired for the first term beginning in January 1891. More than ninety pupils of every age crowded into the big upstairs room, and Chase taught them all himself while also serving as the school’s janitor, hauling coal up the stairs each morning and ashes back down each night — all for sixty dollars a month. The load eventually broke him, and the board brought in a woman teacher to take the youngest four grades off his hands. A full roster of that first class of pupils survives today in the Holt County Historical Society’s records.
Some of Pleasant Valley’s original families put down roots that outlasted the frontier itself. Charles Leland Wood and Melissa Lines Wood had already lost two young daughters in the Elkhorn drowning that gave the new cemetery its first graves, yet the couple went on to raise ten more children on their homestead east of town. Melissa’s brother, Adlaska Lines, followed the family out and helped organize the rural Presbyterian congregation that Holt County residents came to know as the Lambert church, later moved into Page itself. A neighbor named McStay, arriving even earlier, carried a suitcase of cottonwood cuttings from Iowa and planted them across the road from the Woods place; the grove he started still stands as one of the area’s oldest windbreaks. As the Wood farm prospered, Charles installed a sixteen-battery electric light plant in his house — the first electric lighting anywhere in the Pleasant Valley neighborhood.
Few residents left a deeper mark on the community’s hardest days than Duran and Clara Hunt. Duran, grandson of a Methodist preacher, had left home at seventeen to drive an ox team all the way to Oregon before eventually settling in Pleasant Valley, where he served as Justice of the Peace for eighteen years and helped moderate the very first school board. He and Clara had already survived tragedy of their own: while pausing to visit relatives near Bloomfield on their way to Holt County, they lost three young daughters, apparently to an epidemic, and buried two of them in a single grave at Creighton before continuing on with their one surviving girl. Clara became the neighborhood’s unofficial nurse and midwife, delivering babies and treating the sick for miles around. It was her hands that laid out the drowned Woods sisters for burial in 1892, and hers that nursed baby Nellie Harper through her first summer after both of Nellie’s parents died within months of each other.
The Harper family’s story remains one of the valley’s saddest. Jacob and Martha Harper, Iowa transplants, had already lost one infant son when their third daughter, Nellie, was born in April 1893 — and Martha died within the month. Neighbors Duran and Clara Hunt, who had a baby of similar age, nursed the newborn alongside their own child to keep her alive. Jacob followed his wife in death only five months later, leaving all four Harper children full orphans, and no two of them were raised in the same household. The eldest, Harry, was taken in by an Iowa uncle but returned to the Page homestead at twenty-one to build a home of his own there; his daughter Alice and her husband later settled the same ground, and by the 1970s a third generation, the Beelaert family, still called the old Harper claim home.
The 1893 tornado that tore apart the Griest mill also flattened the newly built home of Rufus Wagers, whose family had only recently moved into town to open a general store. His wife, Clara, and young daughter Agurtha were found unconscious in the wreckage, Clara not waking for a full day afterward. Rufus, who had battled a childhood bone disease that eventually forced doctors to amputate his leg above the knee decades later, spent his working life bouncing between farming and shoe repair in town. His brother James “Bill” Wagers took a different path entirely, drilling wells across the county and then opening a real estate office next to the Hunter and Gray store, where he lodged and fed prospective land buyers straight off the train in his own eight-room house — a sideline so profitable it kept his household constantly full. Their sister Maria, meanwhile, ran a Page millinery shop and lent her voice to the town’s successful fight to keep a saloon out of the community.
That saloon fight was no small matter. When Page residents first tried to formally incorporate the village in August 1905, the effort collapsed almost immediately in a dispute over whether to license a saloon, and several board members resigned rather than see the question settled either way. It took seven years and a fresh slate of board members before the town finally completed the job of incorporating.
Banking in Page began with Edward Adams, who arrived in 1889 and built the town’s first place of business, the Farmer’s State Bank, followed a year later by a house that still stands largely unchanged. Adams eventually sold the Page bank and moved on to found another in Chambers, where his sons carried on the family trade for decades afterward. He was well past seventy, in February 1933, when a lone gunman tried to rob the Chambers bank; Adams grabbed the man’s gun hand with one fist and the weapon itself with the other, tearing his finger open on the hammer but keeping the gun from firing, while his sons wrestled the robber through a glass cage door and tied him with rope from the hardware store next door until the sheriff arrived.
Even the county courthouse carried a Page connection. Clarence Joseph Malone, who grew up in the valley’s Malone family, taught school for thirteen years while working his way through college, then read law and was admitted to the Nebraska bar. He went on to serve as Holt County Judge for more than twenty-eight years across two long stretches in office, and during the frantic paperwork rush of the Rosebud land opening, he and his wife worked deep into the night by kerosene lamp, with Mrs. Malone hand-copying every case into the court’s record books since the office had no typewriter. That same thread of families who arrived as homesteaders and stayed to build the town’s institutions — schools, churches, banks, courts — runs on into later generations of Page natives who left their own mark elsewhere, from architect Gary Bowen’s civic buildings in Omaha to decorated military and federal careers built on a Pleasant Valley upbringing.