Gage County, Nebraska - Chapter 5: Old Clay County, 1918

Prior to the passage of the act creating Gage county and defining its boundaries, the first territorial assembly, on the 6th day of March, 1855, passed an act "To define the boundaries and establish the seat of justice for Lancaster county," and on the following day an act was passed creating Clay county and defining its boundaries. Gideon Bennett and James H. Decker, members of the assembly from former Pierce (now Otoe) county, and D. M. Johnson, representative from Richardson county, were appointed by^ the last named act as legislative commissioners "to locate the seat of justice for Clay county" ; and a third section of the act provided "that the seat of justice in and for Clay county shall be called Clatonia." Both of these counties, like Gage, were twenty-four miles square. Clay lying north of Gage and south of Lancaster, but joining each, and consisting of a fine body of land, with an unusual proportion of rich upland prairie.

Clay was duly organized into a county pursuant to the act creating it and defining its boundaries, and entered upon its separate existence as such. No evidence is known to exist to show that any place was ever selected by the legislative commission as a county seat or seat of justice for Clay county. While several towns or villages appear to have been laid out on paper, there was never in fact any semblance of a town in Clay county. The nearest approach to it seems to have been a group of squatters on the public domain about what was known as Austin's mill, on Stevens (now Indian) creek. Here, in 1857, came Hiram W. Parker, Fordyce

Roper, Edward C, Charles, and Homer B, Austin, also Orrin Stevens, who gave his name to Indian creek at that point - a name which the Beatrice colonists always refused to recognize. Possibly a few other early settlers gathered near there on the public domain, and an effort was made to establish a town which could become in the course of time a county seat for the new county. Edward C. Austin had located a claim in the latter part of April or early in May, 1857, in the immediate vicinity of the present village of Pickrell. He had built a log cabin, staked out a forty-acre tract of his claim into town lots, and called the proposed town Austin. Shortly thereafter he purchased and brought to his claim a saw mill and buhrs for a grist mill, and erected the former on the east side of Indian or Stevens creek, on the north side of the present road leading east from Pickrell. A little below the mill, on the east side of Indian creek, was the surveyed town of Austin. No dwellings or other structures were ever erected on the townsite and the mill itself proved a financial failure, due in part to the fact that it was not on the line of western bound emigrant travel, and in part to the fact that there was scarcely any demand for lumber in that locality, but more to the fact that a saw mill was established about the same time in Beatrice, by the Beatrice Townsite Company. About the year 1862 the buhrs of Austin's mill were purchased by Mr. Fordyce Roper for use in a mill which he was then erecting in Beatrice. This move broke up the prospective town of Austin and nothing more was heard of it. The Austins left the country; Parker, Roper, and Stevens moved to Beatrice, and no one was left to take their places in furthering the interests of this forlorn hope.

In addition to the projected town of Austin, there was at least one serious effort to found a town in the north half of Clay county. In that section of the county, John D. Prey and family had established a residence near Roca, July 26, 1856. The following year other settlers joined them, among whom were J. L. Davidson, W. W. Dunham, and I. C. Bristol. A townsite company was formed, composed of John L. Davidson, Joseph B. Weeks, James S. Goodwin, John G. Haskins, and George L. Bristol ; a forty-acre tract of land was surveyed into town lots and the prospective town named Olathe. This ambitious project was located on Salt creek, about three-quarters of a mile west of the ford where the road from Nebraska City to Denver crossed that stream, a few yards north of the spot where the present bridge at Roca is located. The Olathe quarries were only a short distance away, there was some wood along the creek, and these appear to have been the determining factors in the location of the town. Nothing came of this venture, and at the time Clay county was divided there was not a single town, village, or hamlet within its bounds.

Clay county as thus constituted was largely a treeless scope of country, rather poorly watered, especially on the upland, and it was generally thought that there was no desirable central location for a county seat in the county. Its big, rolling, unbroken prairies did not look inviting to men who were wholly dependent for so imjxDrtant a matter as fuel upon timber along the streams. The settlements had been confined to those localities where timber could be had. In addition to the settlement in the neighborhood of Austin's mill, others were made in 1857, in Adams township, along the Big Nemaha river at several points in the north half of Clay county, along Salt creek and its tributaries, and a few squatters on the public domain might have been found in the

The maintenance of county government in a county whose population was so sparse and so widely separated, would, it was thought, be an expensive and difficult problem under any circumstances, and the early settlers of the county, realizing the situation, were for the most part readily persuaded to embrace a scheme for the division of their county. This movement was started in 1863. John P. Cadman, residing near the village of Lancaster, in the neighborhood known as Yankee Hill, where the present Asylum for the Insane, at Lincoln, is located, was that year elected the representative of Gage, Clay, and Lancaster counties in the territorial legislature. He is said to have carried with him a petition signed by a majority of the legal voters of Clay county praying the legislature to divide that county and attach the north half to Lancaster and the south half to Gage county. Whether this is true or not, a bill was brought forward early in the session of the assembly, which convened at Omaha. January 7, 1864, to effect .such division and distribution of old Clay county. Some opposition developed at first to this measure in the legislative body, headed by Mr. John S. Gregory, a colleague of Cadman's. But the obvious advantages of this important measure to all three counties were such that Gregory was finally induced to lend his influence to the act.

The bill, which passed the assembly on the 15th day of February, 1864, was carefully and skilfully drawn by the late P. M. Marquette. It was entitled "An act to attach the north half of Clay county to the county of Lancaster and the south half of Clay county to the county of Gage." It covered every possible contingency that might arise from the proposed division. It declared the orrganization of the county of Clay to be forever at an end, and constituted the board of county commissioners of Lancaster and Gage counties "A board to meet at such time and place as they might agree upon for the purpose of effecting the division of Clay county pursuant to the provisions of this act." In compliance with the terms of the act, the commissioners of Gage county on July 26, 1864, held a joint session with the commissioners of Lancaster county, represented by John W. Prey, at the home of Hiram W. Parker, the county clerk of Clay county, in Beatrice, for the purpose of effecting a settlement of the afifairs of that county. The preliminary entry on the journal of the records of the county commissioners of Gage county as respects this meeting reads as follows:

"At a meeting of the county commissioners of the counties of Gage and Lancaster, held at the house of H. W. Parker, for the purpose of receiving the accounts, books, monies, and all and any other property belonging to Clay county, and for the purpose of a settlement of the accounts to and with the officers of the aforesaid county of Clay.

"There were present county commissioners from Gage county, Fordyce Roper, F. H. Dobbs and William Tyler. From the county of Lancaster, John W. Prey."

As illustrative of the meager volume of business transacted by a county in that early day, as well perhaps as the poverty and simplicity of the times, the remainder of the record of the meeting mentioned in the preceding paragraph may not be without interest to the reader or regarded as inappropriate to this history. It reads as follows :

Ordered 1st. - That the account of H. W. Parker be allowed for services as county clerk (Clay County) from April 4, 1864 to July 28, 1864, 3j4 months at $4.25 per month, $15.00. And that the Clerk of Clay County draw a warrant on the county treasurer for the same.

Ordered 2nd. - That John W. Prey be allowed $11.00, his per cent, for collecting Co. revenue and that the Co. clerk of Clay County draw warrant on the Co. treasurer for the same.

The reader has now looked upon the closing scene of old Clay county. Seldom have the obsequies of so important an organization as a splendid county been attended with greater simplicity or with less bitterness and dissension. It is easy to read between the lines of the act of dissolution the paramount influence of the rising city on the south and the ambitious village of Lancaster on the north, so soon to lose its identity in the noblest monument that has yet been reared to the martyrpresident, the heroic Abraham Lincoln. Lapse of time has proved that the few heroic spirits of Stevens creek. Pierce, Bear, the Nemaha and Salt, would have been more than justified in persisting to the last in maintaining the separate existence of their county. The traveler who now motors over northern Gage and southern Lancaster counties is charmed with the beauty of the landscape and the fertility of the soil. Where once only a few souls gathered in isolation and loneliness along the widely separated streams within these boundaries, he finds a contented, prosperous, and happy population numbering many thousands. Where once stretched the silent and, to many, desolate prairies, he beholds widespreading fields, meadows and pasture lands, groves and orchards ; he finds also commodious and not infrequently elegant country homes. No finer upland site for an ambitious county-seat town can be anywhere found in the west than that occupied by the present village of Cortland, near the geographical center of ancient Clay county. Within the former boundaries of this old county are several other pretty, attractive, and thriving villages, and what was Clay county in the primitive days has evolved into a district supplied with railroads, telegraph and telephone lines, schools, churches; banks, magnificent highways, and other institutions and conveniences by which modern living is both embellished and exalted.