Chapter II: Part 2

One day in 1928 John F. Harris, a New York financier who had grown up in Lincoln in the seventies and eighties, met a boyhood friend who still lived here. The rusty gate of memory swung back—it had been 40 years since Harris left Lincoln—and sharply accentuated before him stood the past. In a rush of deep affection for all that had gone into his boyhood he immediately resolved upon a memorial to his parents, to be located in the city in which he had grown to manhood. The result was Lincoln’s largest park. His boyhood friend—George Woods—picked out the 600 acre site and Mr. Harris came to Lincoln and approved. He was urged to use the family name for the park, but when he visited the site of his old home at 16th and K and stood at the graves of his parents in Wyuka, he decided on another—one which would name his parents in a broader sense and include all these with whom they had toiled in the wilderness—Pioneers.

George Harris, the father, came to Lincoln in the early seventies as land commissioner for the Burlington, and as part of his work brought thousands of people to the state. Later one of the sons, George B. Harris, became president of the Burlington. John F. Harris went to New York and became a successful financier. It was Mr. Harris’ wish not to drive nature from the rolling stretch of prairie presented to Lincoln, only to help her turn her most hospitable face to the city. One of the hills forms a natural amphitheater from which many programs and services have been heard. Lakes beautify the rolling surface of the park. Herds of buffalo and elk are a reminder of the early days. Near the east entrance stands a buffalo in bronze, also given by Mr. Harris, and made in Paris by the famous sculptor, George Gaudet.

No. 33—Smoke Signal, Pioneers Park

The east entrance of Pioneers is guarded by a bronze buffalo, symbol of the prairie when creatures of the plains drifted over her face scarcely aware of the existence of human beings. Their cries, their calls, were for themselves and the seasons. Yet they were not entirely alone. In and out of their orbit moved the Indian, as drifting as were the birds and the beasts. One day he might spread his camp in a valley, the smoke of his campfire lifting to the heavens. In a month, perhaps, he was beyond the horizon. The grasses rose slowly again and possession of the earth came back to the buffalo and the deer, the coyotes and the meadow larks.

Then came the white man. An early Lancaster county settler, John S. Gregory, wrote: “I reached the present site of Lincoln toward evening of a warm day in September (1862). No one lived there, or had ever lived there previous to that date. Herds of beautiful antelope gamboled over its surface during the day and coyotes and wolves held possession during the night.... About a mile west on Middle creek the smoke was rising from a camp of Otoe Indians, and down in the bend of Oak creek, where West Lincoln now stands, was a camp of about 100 Pawnee wigwams. I rode over, and that night slept upon my blanket by the side of one of them.”

The placing of “The Smoke Signal” (by Ellis Burman) in Pioneers was a suitable gesture. Its unveiling and dedication in 1935 was a picturesque, even dramatic, occasion. More than 100 Indians attended the ceremony. Chiefs of four Indian tribes which had roamed Nebraska sat their horses thruout the dedication, grouped at the top of the rugged hill which faces the west and the setting sun.

No. 34—Zoo in Antelope Park

Antelope park rambles loose-jointedly from the old federal treasury columns at 24th and O south to Sheridan boulevard. It can be and is many things to many people. Here families spread their fried chicken for a blue canopied feast, here the children point their toes to the sky as they pump up swings, here the band begins to play—evening and Sunday concerts. Here the young people dance the evening hours away, the summer Indians brandish their tennis rackets, the flower lovers stroll and gaze at elaborately laid out beds of flowers.

Or, calling all ages, there is the zoological building on south 27th, where the monkeys chatter and swing, the tigers shake their bars and little creatures of all kinds peer out from their cages. Central in the zoo is the scene above. Photographed thru the screen which surrounds it, it has the dreamlike quality of a Chinese painting. Some of the birds took to cover with the appearance of a camera. The scarlet ibis clings morosely to a branch and an African crane, with seedy headgear, is in picturesque tete-a-tete with another exotic bird in the foreground. The stork, to the left, legging its way as usual on the heights, is obliterated except for a beak and bit of curved wing.

The peace of this scene, with its pool, its rocks and flashes of bright color, is seldom disturbed. When the keeper circles the ledge symmetrically with dishes of bananas and grain the birds, big and small, float noiselessly down and begin pecking at their food in genteel manner.

No. 35—War Memorial, Antelope Park

Tucked here and there thruout Antelope park’s pleasant spaces—179 acres—are a number of statues and memorials, results of various impulses and circumstances. We have mentioned the pillars at the O street entrance. Roaming southward thru the park you will find others. One of these objects is the fountain given to the city by the late D. E. Thompson thirty or so years ago. It was placed in the center of 11th street a few blocks south of O. As Lincoln’s herd of automobiles grew to thundering proportions city officials realized that the fountain, very suitable in the days when ladies nodded to each other across it from phaetons and victorias moving on either side, must be transplanted. After a number of accidents, some of them truly tragic, the fountain was taken to the park. Neptune, on one side, had been permanently crippled and the water nymph on the other was doubtless aged in spirit.

In 1936 the Lincoln park department sponsored the putting up of a war memorial—a marble 23-foot shaft topped by a figure in ancient armour—spirit of war and victory. On four lower pedestals Revolutionary, Civil war, Spanish-American and World war soldiers look out, each leaning on his instrument of death. When Mr. Burman and the park department planned this statue they probably had no thought that it would be so quickly outmoded. No niche has been provided for a warrior of the present conflict.

Another figure in the park is The Pioneer Woman, donated by the Woman’s club and the park board. The trees along Memory garden and Memorial drive—north of Sheridan boulevard—were planted in memory of the Lincoln soldiers who fell in the first World war.

No. 36—Nebraska Capitol

Nebraska’s capitol, designed by Bertram Goodhue, is one of the beautiful buildings of the world. Twenty years ago, disputatious words were circling round its budding tower—derogatory, complimentary, acrimonious, laudatory. But the capitol rose silently thru this swarm of words and today stands superbly in completed perfection. Controversy has died away, and there are probably few Nebraskans who are not proud of the capitol’s majesty and timeless beauty.

Opening a forgotten drawer recently we came upon the dusty drawings of Mr. Goodhue’s rivals in the capitol competition of more than twenty years ago and found them yawn-provoking. Only the one chosen seemed alive, rising into the sky, even on its yellowed paper background, as tho from some inner compulsion.

The capitol has many moods. Sometimes she wraps a dark cloak somberly about her. The next time one turns to look, she shimmers in a cloak of light. The capitol is beautiful in all her moments—silhouetted against the blue, against storm or twilight, or against the limitless background of night.

No. 37—Front Entrance, Capitol

The inspiration for the capitol as a whole was Bertram Goodhue’s. He first ran an architect’s pencil around its noble contours, in a moment of exaltation flinging its tower toward to stars. But death drew the pencil from his hand while many markings were yet to be made.

It is said that for no other building since the middle ages has such a definite, complete and comprehensive symbolic scheme been worked out—giving complete unity to the finished edifice. To Mr. Goodhue’s immediate associates, of course, goes a great deal of the credit for the capitol. William Younkin has been the supervising architect. Among others who had a large part in the perfecting of the building are Lee Lawrie, the sculptor, Hildreth Meiere, responsible for its mosaics, and Hartley Burr Alexander, who planned the sculpture, wrote the inscriptions and worked out the art symbolism.

The late Dr. Alexander, native of Lincoln and professor of philosophy at the University of Nebraska until he went to Scripps college in 1927, was familiar to two generations of students in Lincoln. A mild retiring person with a furiously intellectual brow, he possessed great ability in the field of poetry and philosophy, writing perhaps twenty books on these subjects. The inscriptions of the building read unhurriedly along its vast corridors, beginning with the hymn of the Navajo, imprinted on the buffalo at the north entrance: “In Beauty I walk. With Beauty before me I walk. With Beauty behind me I walk, with Beauty above and about me I walk.”

No. 38—Capitol Panel, Signing the Magna Carta

The capitol is the story, in marble, of mankind. Its physical outlines suggest this—sprawling inarticulate humanity drawn up finally into strength and beauty. To amplify the story in words would mean great book piled on great book. For every mosaic, every panel and every rising pillar holds the tale of some great struggle or advance in the life of man. At last the story is brought down to Nebraska—its pioneers, its buffalo, its Indians, its corn and wheat. But before Nebraska comes the whole great panorama of mankind. The upward struggle toward a high ethical code, toward religion, is pictured in great movements or incidents of history.

The western group of nine panels seen from the promenade describes the development of law in the ancient world: Moses bringing the law to Mount Sinai; Deborah judging Israel; judgment of Solomon; Solon giving a new constitution to the Athenians, publishing of the law of the twelve tables in Rome; establishment of the tribunate of the people; Plato writing his dialog on the ideal republic; Orestes before the Areopagites; codification of Roman law under Justinian. On the south wall of the promenade are panels showing the magna carta, signing of the declaration of independence and writing of the constitution. The eastern group describes development of law in the modern and western world, panels including codification of Anglo-Saxon law, Milton defending free speech, signing of the Pilgrim compact, Lincoln’s emancipation proclamation, the Kansas-Nebraska bill and admission of Nebraska as a state.

At the upper corners of the tower eight sculptured figures represent spiritual leaders of civilization, including the prophet Ezekiel, Socrates, Marcus Aurelius, St. John, St. Louis, Isaac Newton and Abraham Lincoln. Abstract virtues, Wisdom, Justice, Power, Mercy are represented as human figures at the north entrance.

No. 39—Foyer of State Capitol

Today we shall give you a few facts which include figures—the latter of which we have hitherto dealt out very stingily.

The lower part of the capitol is a square base, 437 feet each way, which conceals four inner courts formally landscaped. The tower reaches into the air 400 feet. The figure of the sower at the top is 20 feet tall and stands on a 12-foot pedestal—a shock of corn on a sheaf of wheat. The sower weighs about nine tons.

The four light colored pillars in the foyer are the largest single piece marble columns in this country. They weigh approximately sixteen tons each. The chandelier which hangs in the center of the building, is the largest bronze chandelier of its type in the world. Its bell part is a single piece of pure bronze, cast in New York City. The whole chandelier weighs 3,500 pounds. It is 112 feet from the floor to the ceiling from which the chandelier depends.

Gov. Samuel McKelvie broke ground for the new building April 15, 1922, with Marshal Joffre of France as guest of honor. Dedicatory exercises were held ten years later. The building cost $10,000,000 and is paid for.

Guides who tell many interesting facts about the capitol make daily trips thru the building, at 10:30, 2:00 and 3:30, excepting that on Sunday the 10:30 tour is omitted.

No. 40—First Presbyterian church, 17th and F.

In 1863 Elder Young founded the town of Lancaster—to become Lincoln four years later—on his own 80 acre tract, which cornered Luke Lavender’s farm at what is now 14th and O. The village was to extend from 14th to 7th and from O to Vine. As the far-sighted elder bent musingly over the white paper which represented the future town he saw a city strong in church life—and even predicted that it would some day be the capital of Nebraska. Another dream was of a female seminary—either to induce families with young ladies to come to the new town or to make prairie damsels into suitable wives and mothers for his churchly city. Hovering over the platted town his pencil finally came to rest at 9th and P as a site for the seminary.

Many of the lots into which his farm was ribboned he gave to county and school districts. Money from the others went into the seminary. That institution burned in 1867, but Elder Young’s dream of a city of churches was more enduring. Between 1866 and 1870 Congregational, Methodist, Presbyterian, Christian, Baptist and Catholic churches were organized and built. These were forerunners of present downtown churches. Lincoln now has about 80 places of worship.

The First Presbyterian church was organized April 4, 1869. Its first two buildings were supplanted in 1927 by the present beautiful structure, one of whose distinctions is having been planned by the late Ralph Adams Crams. Thus may it lay claim to special brotherhood with the Cathedral of St. John the Divine and St. Thomas’ church of New York City.

No. 41—Burlington Shops at Havelock

On July 4, 1870, while Lincoln citizens were celebrating the nation’s birthday in shady groves, as was their wont, there came from the northeast a strange cavalcade. It was a string of flatcars, over which bowers of cottonwood branches had been arranged, pulled by a chortling little engine named The Wahoo, which name probably echoed the cries of the tugging engine rather exactly. Under the bowers sat travelers on improvised seats, chatting excitedly. It was the first passenger train to pull into, or almost into, Lincoln. The Burlington and Missouri rails had been laid to within a mile of the town and the company celebrated by offering a free round trip from Plattsmouth to Lincoln, which was made at the exhilarating speed of 15 or 20 miles an hour.

Within the year George B. Harris became Burlington land commissioner and began colonizing Nebraska on a grand scale. In 1870 Nebraska had 122,993 inhabitants, and most of them lived in the southeastern counties near the Burlington’s 2,500,000 acres. The success or failure of the Burlington’s land department depended largely on price and credit policies adopted by the company. Mr. Harris was given a free hand. Boundlessly enthusiastic over the possibilities of the state, he went at the job like one seating himself at a great organ. Towns sprang up wherever his creative fingers strayed. To the west appeared quickly a string of alphabetical stations—Crete, Dorchester, Exeter, Fairmont, Grafton, Harvard, Inland, Juniata, Kennesaw and Lowell. The “Mayflower” colony, “Plymouth” colony, colonies from England and the east were soon grouped over the landscape.

In the middle 80’s the Burlington shops were located at Havelock. Thru the Burlington lines flows the bloodstream of that part of Lincoln. It thrives or grows pale and listless according to the fortunes of its railroad. The shops at this moment are employing 750 men—550 in the mechanical department, 250 in the store. The shops build cars, repair cars, overhaul electrical equipment used on the lines west of Lincoln and overhaul working equipment such as steam shovels and pile drivers for the whole Burlington system.

No. 42—Governor’s Mansion, 15th and H

One leap from the south entrance of the capitol (if he doesn’t mind our accelerating his step in order to capture the attention of the audience) and Gov. Dwight Griswold, in gray suit and fedora, plus black overcoat the last few days, is home. Should he turn on the steps he might read over the capitol entrance one of Dr. Alexander’s carefully considered truths—Political society exists for the sake of noble living.

The house in which Governor Griswold lives, successor to one populist, five democratic and seven republican gubernatorial residents, suggests noble living. It is generously proportioned, deep bosomed, its wide galleries edged with delicately wrought spindles. Memories jostle each other pleasantly in the big house, which is acclimated to sudden changes.

One republican governor and his wife, Mr. and Mrs. Sam McKelvie, preferred to live in their home at 140 So. 26th, where indefatigable Mrs. McKelvie threw off lightly, the actual work of caring for 21 rooms, with oil painting and associate editorship of a magazine as pastimes. For the rest, since 1900—before that governors had to look for places to live, too—each governor’s retinue has moved in and fitted itself into its surroundings in its individual way. Mr. Griswold, for instance, hung his grandfather’s sword—its owner fell in ’61—in the front hall and his collection of autographed photographs in the back parlor. Mrs. Griswold marshaled treasured family antiques into the guest room against a background of George Washington-Mount Vernon wallpaper.

Every governor’s wife handles with pleased fingers the beautiful silver service with the aid of which light refreshments were once dispensed on the battleship Nebraska. During legislative sessions especially, the governor’s home is opened for many social gatherings.

No. 43—Nebraska Wesleyan

If you drive in a long slow arc from southernmost to northernmost Lincoln, veering to the right as you drive, you will pass thru the parts of the city which were not the result of growth of the original town but sprang up a distance away from some special urge or circumstance. There were five of them, like the isolated fingertip prints of a cupped hand. As Lincoln spread the tiny towns spread also, until they finally all met, embraced and became one.

Driving from one to the other thru these originally diverse sections we feel subtle changes. It may be that thoughts and processes, personalities of those once dominating each, are in some way imprinted on each section. Or it may be only that we happen to know local history. To the south is College View, its nucleus Union college (Seventh Day Adventist). Next in the arc is Bethany, originally the background of Cotner college (Christian) and next its sister, University Place, home of Nebraska Wesleyan (Methodist.); Havelock, a little to the north, was born of the Burlington shops. Last in the arc is Belmont, planned as a beautiful city 50 years ago but now fallen from that high estate. Its woolen mills burned down, the railroad came in the wrong way.

Above is the ivy covered main building of Wesleyan, an institution which has stood sturdily for over 50 years, battling drouths and depressions with one hand and serving the Lord and Methodism with the other. Attesting the educational soundness of its program was a recent national survey showing Wesleyan with a rank of 22 among 339 liberal arts college in the proportion (36 percent) of its students going into graduate study thruout the country. A greater proportion of graduates has gone from its classrooms into theological seminaries than from any liberal arts college in America.

No. 44—Scene of big bank robbery

When we downtown Lincoln lunchers gathered in groups at the board on Sept. 17, 1930, we did not begin talking about the stock market or fall fashions or unemployment or our neighbors or any of those things which usually occupied our attention.

Even before reaching for the menu or the sugar bowl everyone burst out with one identical topic—what had happened that morning at 1144 O. We had heard remotely about gangsters and underworld affairs, but on this fair September morning hands from that other world actually reached out and touched quiet respectable Lincoln.

There were submachine guns but no killing. Three men quietly entered the lobby of the Lincoln National bank, with a word turned employes and customers face downward on the floor, scooped up currency, looted a vault and were out again—into a waiting sedan and away. One of the largest bank robberies ever to occur in America—$2,000,000 in currency and bonds—it forced liquidation and closing of the bank.

Gus Winkler, big time gangster and member of Al Capone’s gang, confessed to knowledge of the stolen bonds but established an alibi so far as active participation was concerned. Tommy O’Connor and Howard (Pop) Lee were tried and given long term prison sentences. Jack Britt was released after two trials. Winkler offered to return $600,000 of the securities in return for his freedom. After much discussion and comment on the advisability of such action Winkler won the point. Bonds valued at $575,000 were eventually returned. (Their return, Mr. Towle reminds us, saved five small banks in Lancaster county.) In 1933 underworld enemies caught up with Winkler and he went down fatally wounded by machine gun fire.

No. 45—First Plymouth church, 20th and D

From the First-Plymouth tower, music floats out and soars upward like birds shaken free by the great organ inside, grazing Mark, Matthew, Luke and John at the top of the tower with their golden wings. As one enters the church thru the large forecourt, his pleasant sense of gracious earthly living and worship is heightened by the presence of this heaven-looking tower.

First-Plymouth Congregational church, built in brick, cost half a million dollars, was designed by H. Van Buren Magonigle and has become widely known for its architectural freshness and beauty. A picture of it illustrates “Religious Architecture” in Encyclopedia Britannica.

Among individual items of interest are three stones incorporated into the building: The Bethlehem stone from the birthplace of Christ; Pilgrim stone, gift of Plymouth, England, sailing port of the Mayflower; Martin Luther stone in the base of the tower, taken from the home of the reformer. In the singing tower—traditional name of the carillon harking back to mediaeval times when watchers aloft blew warnings of invaders or flooding of dikes, are the bells, made by the famous carillon builders, John Taylor and Co., of Loughborough, England. The church celebrated its 75th anniversary in 1941. Rev. Raymond A. McConnell is its pastor.

No. 46—Cotner college

This is Cotner college—Cotner boulevard between Aylsworth and Colby—back, back in the early days of existence. The grass around it appears to be unbroken prairie growth. There are no walks around the building, not even paths. And yet this is very much a picture of Cotner now. After 1889, when the college opened, a tide of green washed up over the campus—a whole grove at the north and big sheltering trees elsewhere. And so also did a tide of youth sweep into the building to give it life. Now both tides have receded. And still, Cotner does not represent a totally lost cause. Young people who wish to attend a denominational college have merely been deflected to other Christian church institutions—Drake, in Iowa, for instance, nearest Nebraska.

A small church college is one of those anomalous places where students in the morning gaze worshipfully upon a preacher professor and in the evening plot to put his cow up in the belfry tower. Scattered over the world as teachers, preachers and missionaries, Cotner students recall happy days here, not only inspirational but full of pranks and fun. The college was named for Samuel Cotner, who donated a large tract of land in Bethany to the school. Closely connected with the school is the name of W. P. Aylsworth, first chancellor and later president emeritus, greatly loved and revered by the procession of students who passed thru the college during his lifetime. He was killed a number of years ago, as twilight was approaching—on Cotner boulevard, named for the college, and near the street named for him—by a speeding driver who did not stop and was never located.

No. 47—Union College

You may have heard that, in case you are absentminded on Saturday, on Sunday morning you can get a loaf of bread or a roast in College View. That is quite true, but such considerations reduce College View to its lowest terms. The fact that most of College View observes its Sabbath on Saturday is the result of a deep religious conviction which set up a college and spread around it a sympathetic community.

Union college (Seventh Day Adventist) has 12 buildings and many interesting features. One of the most interesting is its work program. More than 90 percent of its students, which usually number around 450, pay their way, at least in part, by working on the college farm or in its shops and buildings on the campus.

For the first two-thirds of its lifetime—the college, like Cotner and Wesleyan, was started in the late 80’s—the town was made up exclusively of those of the faith. For longer than that—we are not prepared to say definitely whether or not this is still true—much strictness was observed in the life of the students.

The college now has a medical cadet corps (shown in the picture), part of a nationwide program sponsored by the Seventh Day Adventist denomination and operating under the approval of the surgeon general of the U. S. army.

No. 48—Pershing home, 1748 B

Early in the nineties, two companions might almost daily be seen on Lincoln’s downtown streets. Written and unwritten history traces their footsteps more minutely—into Don Cameron’s. Curious as to the sort of fame which perpetuated the name of Don Cameron we investigated and found that he was a restaurant keeper. The secret of his popularity and enduring memory seems to have been that he furnished a good meal for 25 cents.

Among the rising young men of Lincoln who found a good 25 cent meal important were these two companions. The shorter, darker of the two, who resembled a bundle of scantily padded charged wires, was Charles G. Dawes. The taller, fairer more reserved young man was John J. Pershing, then commandant at the university. In the restaurant, where they sat at a table with other young men who in the future would be Lincoln’s prominent citizens, they discussed many things, Dawes with animated forearms, Pershing more sedate but square-jawed and purposeful.

It was not until 1905, after he was gone from Lincoln, that Pershing married. A dozen years later his wife and three oldest children died in a California hotel fire. It was then that he established a home in Lincoln for his sister, Miss May Pershing, and his youngest child, Warren. This is still known as the Pershing home, and to it General Pershing has often returned for periods of visiting and rest. For the most part, this last great leader of the American Expeditionary forces of 1918 lives at Walter Reed hospital in Washington.

No. 49—Former Dawes home, 1301 H

From this house at 1301 H, little changed since the nineties, was Charles G. Dawes, later to be vice president of the United States and ambassador to Great Britain, catapulted daily by the boundless energy which eventually shot him up to the top in national affairs. Dawes lived in Lincoln only eight years (1887-1894), but he made a quite indelible impression, as will a red-hot little iron which a housewife goes off and leaves for a few minutes.

His mobile hands reached out, in many directions. Everything he touched seemed to thrive, his fingers being to many things what the green thumb is said to be to gardens. His first law suit in Lincoln won a case for some Nebraska farmers who believed they had been discriminated against in the matter of freight rates. Thus he gained the reputation of being an anti-monopolist—which he was not. Even in his twenties he was organizing utilities and starting banks and building a fortune, which eventually got up into the millions. He was a born financier and gained a wider reputation as such on becoming President McKinley’s comptroller of the currency.

For relaxation he loved to sit at the piano and improvise. He put on paper a number of piano and violin duets. The best known, “Melody in A Major” or something of the sort, became popular and often rolled out to meet him in great volume when he came back to Lincoln. Once—not in Lincoln—he had the whole Thomas orchestra come to his home so he could play along with it on the fife.

In a letter to The Journal Mr. Dawes once said that the eight years he lived in Lincoln he had always regarded as the most important in his life, and some of the friendships then contracted were most valued.

No. 50—Wyuka, 36th and O

Wyuka is, we think, a beautiful word, and especially so for Nebraska. Listening to the sound of it one hears not only the lonely prairie wind but the more cheerful call of prairie birds.... And the name should never be followed by “cemetery,” which is redundant, and, much worse, robs it of beauty. It is an Indian word often interpreted as “place of rest.” We like still better the more literal “place to lie down and sleep.” At any rate, Wyuka is a beautiful, peaceful spot, especially on a still summer day, when sun and shade lie side by side over it and large white birds drift timelessly on its quiet lagoon.

This is Lincoln’s oldest burial place—tho not the oldest in Lancaster county. Pale folded hands and open Bibles on pure white stones and flat slabs from which lettering is almost obliterated indicate certain age. The records show that it was founded in 1869, not as a city but a state cemetery. Many names of interest may be found on its stones, among them early governors Nance, Poynter, Thayer, Mickey and Aldrich. The founder of the village of Lancaster, Elder Young, was carried here when his days were done.

Little more than half of Wyuka’s 200 acres are laid out in lots. The southwest corner is devoted to an artificial lake bordered with grass and shrubs. Space to the north is for future use. Sections on the north also have been set aside for Civil war and World war veterans. The high iron fence surrounding the cemetery once encircled the university campus. It proved to be a considerable hindrance to firemen when fire broke out in the museum years ago, and in 1924 it was transferred to Wyuka.

No. 51—State Penitentiary, 14th and Pioneers

Five hundred and fifty-four convicts now sit scowling in their penitentiary cells. This statement, however, is merely to fix them in your minds. The personnel of the old gray bastille is in reality much more mobile and active. The men make things and do things, go to school and have music and movies. They live as pleasantly as is possible with whatever guilt hangs over their heads, and within their narrowed boundaries. For some who have lived there, the view narrowed finally to the sight of one black loop against the gray dawn—or the leaping of one fatal spark. Seven were hanged from 1867 to 1920; eight have walked to the electric chair—1920 to 1929, date of the last case of capital punishment.

In seventy-five years there have been several outbreaks, mostly minor ones. But on March 14, 1912, there was a more spectacular performance. During a deep snowstorm three prisoners, John Dowd, Shorty Gray and Charles Morley, shot their way out, killing Warden Delahunty, Deputy Warden Wagner and Usher Heilman. Thereafter for a number of days Lincoln people were reluctant to plunge out into the neck-high snow lest conspicuousness result in their being picked off by a convict or a member of a posse. In the final windup of the chase an innocent farmer, as well as two of the convicts, were killed—a total of six deaths for the incident. The third convict, Charles Morley, surrendered. He was released from the penitentiary about a year ago.

A somewhat sensational escape, 1922, was that of bad man Fred Brown, who was not only bad but quite antic in his movements. He was variously referred to as Kangaroo or Chain-man Brown. One day he would pop up in Omaha, then in some peaceful Lincoln spot, keeping citizens in a state of uneasy dismay until he was finally captured in the wilds of Wyoming. On his second attempt to break out, in 1925, he was shot down and killed.

No. 52—Holy Trinity Episcopal, 1200 J

While other Lincoln churches have been stepping along with the years, changing costumes as they went and, incidentally, taking on new building debts, Holy Trinity has remained content with what it has—and it has something, says the historical American building survey, which designates it as typical of the best architecture of its period. Indeed, it is not hard for any of us to see enduring beauty in this structure, erected in 1888. Speaking as a temporary columnist with six and a half inches of two-column space at our disposal, towers and turrets cause us some difficulty. In this case, however, we are delighted to relinquish writing space to a noble and eloquent church spire.

No. 53—Lincoln High, 21st and J

During its 75 years, Lincoln has worked up to an excellent school system, with three high school buildings, three exclusively for junior and 20 exclusively for elementary grades. It includes attractive and ample buildings and high standards of education. There is little now to indicate ordeals of past schoolboard heroes who kept an adequate school roof over juvenile heads as Lincoln in its hasty growth trampled down surrounding cornfields.

Lincoln’s first public school was held in Elder Young’s stone seminary where The Journal now stands—Mrs. H. W. Merrill at the blackboard with a babe on one hip. The seminary burned in 1867 and another stone schoolhouse started at 11th and Q, partly the product of town-held festivals and dinners. But the board announced when school began that funds were exhausted and it would have to levy a “rate bill of 50 cents per month, per scholar, payable monthly.”

Seventy years ago Lincoln schools showed not a trace of today’s pattern. However, that year school authorities looked over their motley throng and for the first time waved it into groups. Out went these orders in the fall of 1872: “At the first ringing of the university bell all scholars of the primary grade and those who will read in the first and second readers and begin the study of mental arithmetic will meet at the stone schoolhouse at the corner of 11th and Q. Those who will read in the third reader ... will meet at the building on 12th street known as the White schoolhouse. All prepared to enter schools of a higher grade will meet at the building on O between 11th and 12th.” The stone schoolhouse at 11th and J continued more or less as a free and easy country institution, without all that citified grading.

But even in 1872 the high school which was to serve students at 15th and N for 42 years had been started, and next year it was occupied. From that date Lincoln schools looked up and on. The present building was placed on its 15 acre grounds, J to Randolph and 21st to 23rd, in 1915.

No. 54—Veterans Hospital, 600 So. 74th

This rim-of-the-prairie picture is of Veterans hospital. Here men lie and think of war. Planes thunder over their upturned faces and they remember the airplanes of 1918, tho a few may be occupied with planeless thoughts of San Juan Hill, and a very few with moldy memories of the blue and the gray. Here, perhaps, war news is taken—largely by radio—in larger and more frequent doses than anywhere else in Lincoln. All the patients—capacity is 251—have been thru war somewhere. Before long the doors will swing open for a fourth generation.

Veterans Hospital is probably the first place in Lincoln to practice the art of blackouting—a wide precaution, for the hospital, with its 28 subsidiary buildings, off by itself on a hill, sparkles at night like a row of Christmas trees.

A few veterans at the hospital are veteran patients—five or six years—but only a few. The turnover in most cases is more of the pancakes-on-a-hot-griddle sort. It is a general medical hospital which does not handle long, slow cases. There are 92 veterans hospitals sprinkled over the country. Except in special cases, each takes veterans living nearest, so that those treated here are mostly from Nebraska or a narrow strip around it.

The patients are not left alone with their gloomy thoughts. Tuesday and Saturday nights they have movies. On Mondays, Wednesday and Fridays there is some other form of entertainment. The hospital library contains 4,000 books, and if the patient can’t come to the library, the library comes to the patient. From now until Christmas occupants will be busy making next spring’s American Legion poppies.

If you, too, are puzzling over the 28 buildings, check them off as living quarters for attendants, power plant, warehouses, electric shop, plumbing shop, utilities buildings, garages, etc. etc.

No. 55—Yankee Hill Brick Mfg. Co.

To the child, grandmother and grandfather were never young—that was too far away and long ago for him to picture in the faintest degree. So with cities and towns as we contemplate them today. Our imaginations are scarcely more elastic than the child’s. We see Lincoln as it is now; Yankee Hill as it is, or almost is not, today. Seventy-five years ago they were two little sisters, side by side, quarreling over a pile of blocks—the first state capitol.

The story is that when the commissioners were on a tour in search of a capital site they were given a chicken dinner by the ladies of Yankee Hill, followed by ice cream, “a treat which astonished them greatly, as it was undoubtedly the first ice cream to be served in the wilds of the salt basin.” The commissioners, nevertheless, gave the prize to Lincoln.

And now, as in some parable of two sisters, Yankee Hill, in her barren old age, toils daily in the making of bricks which pile up to the magnification of the fortunate sister, Lincoln.

The bricks works are almost sixty years old. It is an interesting fact that as late as 20 years ago there were nearly 50 brick plants in Nebraska. Gradually they disappeared, for one reason or another, one of which was that the right kind of clay can’t be found just anywhere one might throw up a factory. There are now four in the state—at Yankee Hill, Nebraska City, Hastings and Endicott. Yankee Hill, adjoining Pioneers park on the southeast, makes all kinds of brick, many of which are used in Lincoln and many shipped to other places. Plant capacity is 80,000 bricks a day.

No. 56—Whitehall, 5903 Walker

Whitehall has romantic appeal, for a number of reasons. It was once the home of Mrs. C. C. White, pioneer Lincoln resident and Methodist, and, in its calico and cornbread days, one of Lincoln’s first young ladies. When in later years one of the White daughters became the wife of an Italian count there was a general pleased feeling of something or other—as that east and west do sometimes meet, or that it’s just one step from pioneer to peeress.

Mrs. White, who had presented Wesleyan university with a college building named for Mr. White, long deceased, later gave Whitehall to the state as a home for children. There is sometimes romance in Whitehall even yet. We once wrote a story about the children, picturing the one red headed child, a good and wistful little boy. The parents of red haired twin girls, seeing the picture, arranged to adopt him.

It is of course dangerous to expose yourself to childish charm at Whitehall—you might come away a parent. Forty years ago a train of New York waifs was sent out thru Nebraska. A woman, feeling idle curiosity, went down to see the train come into her small town. As she stood on the platform she noticed a small boy—he is now a Lincoln man—walking forward and looking up most earnestly at all the people around him. When he saw this woman he took her hand and said, modestly but confidently, that he would like her to be his mother. Altho already supplied with a child of her own, the woman found it impossible to refuse. And, happily, he turned out to be the best of sons and the finest of men.

No. 57—St. Mary’s Cathedral

Encountered by another heaven-kissing spire, so delightful to look at, so difficult to encompass in small space, we decided to invite you inside St. Mary’s, to contemplate the high altar and reflect on the enduring work of that fiery first bishop of Lincoln—Bishop Bonacum.

This advantageous position, 14th and K, was first snatched by members of the Christian church, who built an edifice very like the one now standing opposite the capitol. They lost it during the 90’s depression and Bishop Bonacum took over, rebuilding once after a fire had well nigh demolished the church.

A cathedral is a bishop’s church and in it the first bishop’s successors, Bishops Tihen, O’Reilly, Beckman and Kucera have presided. Since Msgr. C. J. Riordan has become pastor the entire basement has been finished, so that it contains two large halls. In one of them each Sunday a second mass is celebrated at 11 o’clock, while the solemn mass is celebrated upstairs. From the kitchen each school day noon are served hot meals to the entire student body of the Cathedral school.

University art classes each year visit the church to sketch its architectural beauty.

No. 58—Northeast High, Sixty-third and Baldwin

Those three sister territories, University Place, Havelock and Bethany, spread out side by side in northeast Lincoln and once quite separate divisions of the city, were tied together as neatly by the new Northeast high school as three handkerchiefs are secured by one knot in the corners. Thus caught up, they are a flag of friendly challenge, not to say defiance, to wave across to Lincoln high at 21st and J. Overnight a feeling of solidarity sprang up at the new high school.

There had been murmurs when the school neared completion over a year ago that the name Northeast was undesirable—that it had a cold, damp sound and that no one could love an institution with such an appellation, and so why not name it for some Nebraska or national notable. Others contended that the name was not the thing—that dear old Northeast could entwine itself as firmly around the heart as dear old VanWyck or Montmorency.

The latter seem to have been right. The three lines of youngsters we see converging on Northeast these mornings approach their new institution smiling. Probably one could learn to love Hogwallow school if associations and surroundings were pleasant. Speaking of appearances and surroundings, the picture above is a very inadequate representation of the building itself. The surroundings, naturally still a little barren, have been improved by a cement walk, and with gravel on 63rd.

Lincoln’s third high school is in College View.

No. 59—State Historical Society

Conquerors sweep thru a nation or state bent only on conquest; traders camp on its borders intent only on immediate gains; missionaries kneel on its soil with the welfare of souls in mind; pioneers break the sod for the purpose of putting four walls around their families, bread in their mouths. It falls to the historian to follow after these men of one purpose, to gather up the fragments; to keep alive, in words at least, the spark struck off by fleeing hoof or flintlock or ringing ax.

Musing with half-closed eyes one can see a throng of people entering Nebraska, spreading out over it in patterns interesting and intricate. One can see a giant, colorful picture painted on the plains, even hear the throng moving to simple slow strains of music—and realize how literature, painting, music, are born of movements of people, individual or en masse.

There is no lack of romance in the building of Nebraska, beginning with its Indians—ships with adventurers and settlers sailing far up the rivers; the Mormon migration; the underground railroad (slaves were sold on the block in southeast Nebraska in the early sixties); the fight for the capital, the building of the railroads (which reminds us of Building of the Union Pacific, given by the Ballet Russe in Lincoln several years ago); Wild Bill Hickok, Doc Middleton and their brother bandits; the struggle between homesteaders and cow men in the north and west of the state.

The State Historical Society, state capitol (Dr. A. E. Sheldon, superintendent) has all this locked in drawer and file and safe—except for interesting exhibits spread on its walls. The picture above, drawn at Omaha for Leslie’s Sept. 26, 1860, depicts the arrival in that pioneer village of the Jennie Brown, bound for Fort Benton, Mont. It is one of over thirty thousand pictures filed by the librarian, Martha Turner, pertaining to the history of the state.

No. 60—Orthopedic Hospital, 11th and South

The time has come, we believe, gently to remove the guide who has been walking ahead in these Lincoln explorations, and to let those following—if there are those following—go on, each with his own sightseeing. Possibilities have not been exhausted. There are, for example, the state orthopedic hospital, with its bright-eyed little birds, seemingly survivals of some great battering storm; the state reformatory, once a normal college (a thousand tapped on its door for admission 50 years ago this fall), later a military academy and now, last chance for wayward boys and young men; the state hospital, with its population of 1,440, widely known its treatments.

There are old houses, patient, wise and worn; churches, each with its own flavor, history and problems; parks we have not mentioned; hospitals and theaters. The agricultural college, apple cheeked sister of the university we have inadvertently neglected.

If you are interested particularly in the historical aspects of a community you will visit the historical society museum in the capitol. Here time will cease for an afternoon as in spirit you move rapidly from 1842 to 1942 and back again to 1842, your fingers touching visible evidence of periods between those dates. For Nebraska had its white people even before 1842—its fur traders, trappers, missionaries. In Bellevue, first Nebraska town, first territorial governor Francis Burt took his oath of office Oct. 16, 1854—only to die two days later in the log cabin home of Rev. William Hamilton.

... In short, we commend all ramblers into the past to the state historical society. It will serve as an excellent guide to early Lincoln and Nebraska.

And so, goodbye.

(THE END)

Street Directory

Streets running north and south are numbered from 1st to 78th eastward and to 2nd westward commencing at 1st street, the western boundary of the original city and continuing to the city limits.

Streets running east and west are either alphabetical or named. Alphabetical streets begin at the southern boundary of the original city at A, omit I and continue northward to Y. Named streets continue south of A and north of Y to and beyond the city limits.

Block and house numbers begin at O street north and south end at 1st street east and west. Streets north or south of O are designated by the prefixes N and S respectively. Addresses West of 1st street are designated by the prefix West, abbreviated W. For example, 534 W. Washington. Odd numbers appear on the west and south sides of the streets and even numbers appear on the east and north sides.

The location of each street is indicated by showing the number of blocks north or south of O, or east or west of 1st. The length of the street is indicated by showing the streets at which it begins and terminates. For example, Apple street is shown as follows: Apple—10th N of O...27th to 40th. This indicates Apple street is 10 blocks north of O and runs from 27th street east to 40th street.