History of Star, Nebraska
The short version of Star’s history covers the Downeys, the Coles and the Thierolfs in broad strokes, but the fuller record — family letters, remembered anecdotes, and the community’s own written history — fills in a much richer picture of daily life in this far corner of Holt County.
The Downeys’ road to Star was a long one. Henry and Hannah Downey moved from New York to Illinois to Wisconsin before Henry, widowed, and his son Emory finally settled a timber claim in Holt County in 1880, passing through a Chicago whose streets were still paved with wooden sidewalks along the way. Emory, a trained cooper, later moved to Inman and became a partner in the Watson Hay and Implement Company before retiring to Missouri, where he lived to ninety-four. His brother Louie ran a general store in nearby Page into his nineties as well, evidence of just how long-lived the Downey line proved to be.
Charles Downey, who as a young man had the honor of naming the Star post office and carrying its first mail, kept a lively household of his own. He and his wife Minnie regularly cleared the furniture out of their living room so neighbors could dance while Minnie played the organ and Charles played fiddle, with the couple’s own children packed crossways into the bedroom to sleep through the noise. That musical streak carried into a different art form a generation later: their son Sumner Downey built a respected photography business, first in Niobrara and then in O’Neill, and his wife Stella was named Nebraska’s best photo retoucher three separate times. Their descendants carried the trade even further, running an award-winning studio in Scottsbluff that eventually earned an international photography award in England.
Star’s most vivid family saga, though, belongs to the Ridgeways and Coles. Daniel Ridgeway, a leatherworker rather than a farmer, homesteaded near Star anyway and set up a harness shop in the growing village, while his wife laid a rag carpet over the dirt floor of their hillside dugout and never much warmed to the place. Their daughter Etta caught the eye of young rancher Elvin Cole, and once the Ridgeways proved up their claim and returned to Iowa, Etta stayed behind as Elvin’s wife. He sold his own homestead to open a general store in Star, and for a few years business was good.
Then came the hard years of the 1890s. Elvin had extended credit to nearly every settler in the district, and when the district went broke, so did he; the family joined the general retreat “back east” to Iowa. Etta later wrote her own account of what followed — years as a renter’s wife, raising chickens and hauling eggs to town for five cents a dozen, cutting up her own wedding dress to sew winter shirts for her husband. When her father died in 1895 he left his unwanted Holt County homestead to whichever of his children would take it; every daughter but Etta turned it down.
Etta took her two young daughters and thirty-five dollars and rode the train back out to see the land for herself in the fall of 1902, and the family returned to Holt County a second time. Their first winter back was brutal: the house stood unplastered as the season’s worst cold set in, one horse and a milk cow both died, and the family lived through the winter on little but potatoes and salt. A relative’s cast-off horse, given away with the condition that they pay only if it survived the winter, lived to help break sod the following spring. From that hard start the Coles slowly rebuilt into what became the substantial Sunny Slope ranch, and the Star post office moved onto their property in 1910.
Their son Charles, fifteen at the time of the family’s return, remembered the trip out through bluestem grass standing four feet tall with hardly another house in sight, and dragging wild plum brush through the snow for fuel because the new house wasn’t finished before winter arrived. Decades later, little remained to mark where old Star’s two main streets had once crossed except a scattering of abandoned well casings poking up out of the prairie sod, all that was left after departing settlers stripped their neighbors’ empty houses for doors, windows and lumber.
The Thierolf family’s arrival in the district began with an unusual errand: in August 1898, nineteen-year-old George Thierolf bought a bicycle on credit for twenty-five dollars and spent a week pedaling it from Plattsmouth to Star in order to arrange the purchase of the old Downey homestead for his father, Henry. The family built the property into a working ranch of nearly a thousand acres, and George’s younger sister Rosa became the Star postmistress at just nineteen years old when the post office came with the place. Decades later, Henry’s widow Minnie, then seventy-seven, survived a car rollover that threw her nine feet into a pasture while driving out from Niobrara to check on the ranch — and was back riding along on errands again within the week. Three generations of Thierolf children were educated at the old Star school before it was folded into a consolidated district in 1961.
Star’s rural mail network touched other families as well. William Brown, who had traded a horse for an island in the Niobrara River and supported his family for a time by fishing and selling his catch for two cents a pound, eventually saw his daughter Goldie marry into the Wells family; from 1923 to 1928 Goldie and her husband John carried the mail by horse and buggy over a thirty-mile route linking Dorsey, Knoxville and Walnut, earning a hundred dollars a month for the trouble — one small thread in the web of family labor that kept this remote stretch of Holt County connected to the rest of the world.