History of Stuart, Nebraska
Long before Stuart had a Main Street, it had a dugout. In March of 1878, or possibly early 1879 depending on which local account is followed, John Carberry, one of the first settlers to try his luck at nearby Atkinson, moved ten miles up the Elkhorn River to a timber claim just west of what would become Stuart. The river ran through the southwest corner of his land, and Carberry, a handy man with a broadaxe, carved a dugout into a convenient hillside and then spent weeks hauling logs down from Long Pine, forty miles to the north. He fashioned the timber into a snug two-story building, complete with an attic and an outside stairway, and by the following year he was already boarding the steady stream of settlers pouring into the country looking for homesteads of their own.
Carberry was not alone for long. Local histories name a handful of others among the settlement's earliest arrivals — Orange Hallock, Jack McGrew's father, Dick Johnson's mother, a Mr. O'Connor, and Orin Dorf — but the name that would stick to the town belonged to Peter Stuart, a Scottish sea captain who arrived with, by one contemporary account, title to fourteen quarter-sections of land, a large herd of high-grade cattle, some sheep, seventeen pedigreed stallions, and interests in an opera house, a store, and a flour mill. Carberry is usually credited as the town's founder, mostly because he opened its first store, but several sources agree that he chose to name the new settlement not for himself but for his father-in-law. Peter Stuart, in addition to his cattle and his stallions, had a daughter, Mary, and when John Carberry married her he brought her home to his big log house — by then already known as the first building in what the map would soon call Stuart. Peter Stuart became the settlement's first postmaster in 1880, and it is his name, not Carberry's, that the village and the surrounding township carry to this day.
The town filled in quickly after that. John O. D. Nightengale surveyed and platted the townsite in 1881, the same year the rails of what became the Chicago and North Western line reached the settlement — the first train is said to have run through early in 1882. Village incorporation followed in January of 1884, and the new board wasted no time setting its priorities: liquor licenses were fixed at $500 apiece, with the proceeds earmarked for the school fund, and ordinances were passed against litter in the business district and hogs running loose on Main Street. Wooden sidewalks went down in 1885, shade trees were planted, and two years after that the town raised a windmill at the square where Second Street crossed Main. According to local accounts the settlement's population swelled from perhaps sixty people in 1882 to several hundred within another year or two, as homesteaders, tradesmen, and merchants staked their claims along the new rail line.
Two hotels anchored those early years. The Stuart House, an eight-room hostelry with its own "sample room" for traveling salesmen, went up in 1881; it later became the Commercial Hotel and, after a Depression-era remodeling by Minnie Haskins, the "White Way," which operated into the 1960s. Grander still was the Northwestern Hotel, raised in 1886, three stories tall with twenty-seven bedrooms and a dining room large enough to feed the drummers who rode the trains in to sell dry goods and hardware to the merchants of Stuart, Atkinson, and the surrounding towns. An expressman named Lawrence Lofquest met the trains with a cart built on old cultivator wheels to haul the salesmen's trunks up from the depot. Bedbugs were common to every hotel of the period, by the local historian's account, but the Northwestern had a peculiarity of its own — a pen of hogs kept out behind the kitchen to dispose of table scraps, whose grunting and considerable odor were said to test the patience of the more delicate guests on a warm summer night. The old Northwestern was finally torn down in the 1930s.
Stuart's earliest institutions took root just as fast as its business blocks. The first school, a sod building, opened with a term of only three months; its teacher, Johannah Hayes, was paid fifteen dollars a month for the privilege. Miss Hayes later married Jack Meals, a young bullwhacker turned Holt County treasurer, after the two met at a country dance. The Catholic families of the area had been gathering for Mass in Carberry's own home as early as 1878, according to parish tradition, though it was not until 1896 that St. Boniface Parish built its first frame church, and not until 1899 that Bishop Scannell of Omaha sent Stuart its first resident pastor, Father Anthony Birnback. The present brick church went up in 1912, and by 1973 the parish counted roughly 650 members and ran a parochial school with four teachers. Presbyterian families, meanwhile, shared a circuit-riding minister with the Cleveland church for decades, the pastor preaching in Stuart one Sunday and Cleveland the next, a arrangement that persisted, in one form or another, into the 1950s. Two local newspapers served the young town in these years: the Stuart Ledger, published from 1883 to 1903, and the shorter-lived Stuart Press, which began in the nearby settlement of Star in 1884 before relocating to Stuart the following year.
No pioneer town escaped fire or hardship, and Stuart was no exception. In 1910 a blaze leveled the John Skirving store, the Jamison Cafe and pool hall, and the Taft Brothers grocery in a single night, a loss reckoned at some $25,000 — a fortune in that day. Andy Moss's livery barn burned in 1917; Charley Biglow's barn and two of George Wallinger's horses were lost to fire in 1949; the Biglow and Corn States hay barn went up in under twenty minutes in 1951; and in 1966 the bulk tanks of the William Krotter Company caught fire. The community's darkest single day, though, came not from flame but from water. On a Sunday morning in May of 1922, while most of the countryside was at church, a group of men from Stuart went out on nearby Dora Lake to fish for bass. Their boat overturned, and by the time help arrived it was too late: Johnny Kaup, Forrest Shearer, and a young man from the Miller family all drowned. Only Dr. Dale Stuart survived, having managed to cling to the capsized boat until rescuers reached him.
If any single figure came to embody Stuart's growth from rail-line outpost to established trading town, it was William Krotter. Born in Illinois in 1865 to German immigrant parents, Krotter came west to O'Neill in 1887 to work for a lumber company, and was said to be unloading a boxcar of coal there when the great blizzard of January 1888 struck. Three years later he bought the lumberyard at Stuart outright, and over the following half-century he built it into a genuine business empire — dealing lumber, farm implements, hardware, and grain, and eventually taking on dealerships for Maxwell, Hupmobile, Ford, Studebaker, Pontiac, Buick, and Cadillac automobiles. He organized the Interstate Telephone Company serving Nebraska and South Dakota towns in 1894, helped found the Citizens' Telephone Company of Atkinson, and in 1917 organized the Stuart National Farm Loan Association, later serving as president of both the Midwest Farm Implement Dealers' Association and the Nebraska Lumber Merchants Association. When Krotter died in August of 1941, his lumber company had just marked its fiftieth anniversary in Stuart; by 1973, the family firm was still the oldest continuously operating business in town.
Other institutions rounded out the growing village through the early twentieth century. Gas streetlights arrived in 1906, and in 1919 Max Seger installed the town's own electric light plant — a municipally owned utility that, remarkably, was still generating its own power decades later, one of only a handful of such plants left in the state. Seger converted the front of his own building into a movie theater that same year; talking pictures reached Stuart in 1927, and the Stuart Theater was still showing films on weekends into the 1970s. Rodeo came to town in 1930, when local rancher and Turtle Association member Gus Obermire, fresh off competing at Pendleton and Rapid City, came home to produce Stuart's first rodeo and went on to become the county's first professional rodeo stock contractor. Grain, cream, and livestock trade sustained the town's economy for generations: a cream station opened in 1891 and, by the 1940s, Stuart supported as many as ten grocery stores, along with lumberyards, hay barns, and harness and implement shops that served the ranch country stretching north toward the Niobrara and south into the hay meadows of the Elkhorn valley.
Stuart today is a much smaller place than it was at its early-twentieth-century peak, its population settling at roughly 480 residents in recent census counts, down from the 600 or more who lived there through much of the last century. But the village persists as a working center for the ranching and farming country of northwestern Holt County, still strung along U.S. Highway 20 where the Chicago and North Western tracks once ran, still home to its school, its churches, its municipal light plant, and a scattering of businesses that trace their lineage back to the lumberyards and hotels of the 1880s. It remains, as it was from its first sod schoolhouse and log trading post, a town built by people who came out from Illinois and Ireland and Scotland and Germany with little more than a wagonload of belongings, and who stayed to raise families, bury their dead, and name a village for the sea captain whose daughter a homesteader happened to marry.