The North Bend Eagle

 

The very first Old Settlers parade marches down Main Street North Bend in 1925.

Original old settlers started Old Settlers

by Nathan Arneal
Published 6/19/24

The first settlers of Dodge County in April 1856, depending on the source, were either Arthur and John Bloomer near the mouth of the Maple Creek close to today’s Nickerson, or George Emerson in the southwest corner of the county.

A few months later, on July 4, a group of Scottish immigrants led by Robert Millar and George Young halted their wagons on a rise off the southwest corner of what is now North Bend and decided this was the place.

That November, George and Ann (Millar) Young gave birth to a son, Seth, who the first white male born in Dodge County. That December, Ann passed away. The only bit of ground not buried in snow was that small knoll where they first stopped that summer. That is where they buried Ann Young on a bier made of cottonwood floorboards from their log cabin. The knoll became the Millar-Sloss Pioneer Cemetery.

At the time, there were three paper towns along the Platte River within about 3.5 miles of each other: Emerson (around the George Emerson settlement), Wallace and Franklin. Each town site contained one or two buildings and primarily existed in the sketches of land companies.

One of the two buildings on the easternmost settlement, Franklin, was the home of Matthew S. Cotterell, who arrived in 1857. When the owners of the Franklin townsite failed to make the improvements required by law, Cotterell filed a complaint and claimed the land for his own.

In 1866, the Union Pacific Railroad reached Franklin and built a railroad depot there. The decision to put the depot in Franklin basically gave that site victory over its competitors to the west, and Emerson and Wallace faded into history.

In 1867 Cotterell filed an affidavit changing the town’s name to one that had been used colloquially for years, North Bend. The railroad and the depot sparked a growth spurt that guaranteed North Bend’s survival.

As the decades wore on, that first generation of pioneers and settlers began to thin out, so it was decided something should be done to persevere their stories and the area’s history.

The Dodge County Old Settlers Association formed in March 1889, and the first Old Settlers Picnic was planned for that July 4 in North Bend.

The festivities were hosted on what served as North Bend’s city park at the time, the cottonwood grove around Matthew Cotterell’s house on the south side of the tracks, ground that is now part of the back nine of the North Bend Golf Course.

The association recognized anyone living in Dodge County between 1885 and 1867 as “old settlers” and special tables were set up for these honored guests. The president of the OSA, W.H. Ely, was home sick for the occasion, so George Young presided over the event. Young was the chairman of the committee who organized the event in North Bend, which included a who’s who of North Bend’s earliest setters: Young, James Sloss, James Graham, J. Mason Smith, Matthew Cotterell and Robert Millar.

A train full of people from Fremont arrived at 10:30, greeted by a pair of brass bands. The streets of North Bend were decorated with flags and banners fluttering in the breeze. It is estimated that just short of 4,000 people attended.

Races were run, songs were played and sung and a families gathered in groups around a picnic basket during the dinner hour.

James Graham, who settled west of North Bend in the fall of 1857, was one of the featured speakers. His address was printed in the July 11, 1889, Fremont Weekly Herald.

“Before the mail route was located we had to get our mail at Omaha,” Graham said. “After footing it in the snow, the expected letter was not always there, but we finally got the mail route. There were two reasons we stayed through all the hardships. First, we thought we had a good location. Second, we had nothing to get away with. There are two things that the old settlers may well be proud of: the early establishing of schools and preaching, the good effects of which have followed us these many years and may still be improved by the rising generation.”

The first teacher of the first school in the North Bend area, which opened in 1858, Mary Heaton, was in attendance at that 1889 Old Settlers Picnic.

The Dodge County Old Settlers Association hosted an annual picnic for the next six years, in Fremont each year with the exception on the 1891 picnic in Hooper’s Sanders Grove.

Coverage of the 1895 picnic mentioned the disappointing attendance and after that the Dodge County Old Settlers Association and its annual picnic went dormant.

It September 1922, the Hooper Sentinel mentioned the Old Settlers picnic it has hosted 31 years earlier in a “News from Days Past” column. The Fremont Herald noticed that item in the Sentinel and wrote a couple weeks later: “...which reminds The Herald that the idea has been raised in Fremont of late of reviving the Old Settlers’ association, which was once a popular society here, but in latter years has ceased to function.”

The idea is repeated in a February 1923 Fremont Herald article that commented on a reorganization of the DCOSA: “Years ago, old-timers say, there was such an organization in Dodge County, which held many a grand and glorious meeting, and it is foreseen that these pleasant gatherings of the men and women who came here at an early day and did the first work in the up-building of this section, might easily be repeated.”

In 1923, a “homecoming celebration” was held in Fremont. From that arose efforts to formally reorganize a Dodge County Old Settlers Association. B.W. Reynolds of Fremont, Seth Young of North Bend and Henry Spath of Scribner were appointed to a committee to draw up plans for the organization.

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