Growing up on the First Homestead

by Carol Quackenbush

Written in February 2003, first published in the Suiter Family Association Newsletter in 2003.

In January, 1920, I was born, the fourth child of Agnes May ("Sis") Freeman and Clifford Quackenbush. Agnes May was the youngest of eight children born to Daniel and Agnes Suiter Freeman, the first to take a homestead under Abraham Lincoln's homestead law. This homestead is the Homestead National Monument of America, located near Beatrice, Nebraska.

 Among my recollections, when I was four years old my uncle James Freeman came out to see his mother. He took me for a ride in his new car and bought me an ice cream cone, which was probably the first one I ever had. One can imagine how that thrilled a little country girl.  I was told many years later how that same Uncle Jim approached his mother saying, "You haven't done anything for Sis." He took her to Beatrice where they had a deed made, giving 80 acres of the 160 of the original homestead to my mother. The deed was duly recorded at the Gage County Court House.

We had 40 acres of cultivated land and 40 acres of forested land with Cub Creek meandering through it. That was our playground. In the heat of summer we took our dips in the stream. In winter when it was frozen, we skated on the ice. We had mulberry trees and gooseberry bushes. Although the mulberries were too sweet and the gooseberries too sour, we picked the berries and they weren't too bad when Mother made them into pies. We also caught catfish in Cub Creek, which supplied a change in menu.

The fall when I was four years old, sister Elinor, age 6, started to school at Freeman School, which Grandfather had built of brick. I was lonesome and begged Mother to let me go to school too. I said, "What am I supposed to do, stay home and play with the cats?" So she said, "After your birthday when you are five, you can go to school." And I did, for the remainder of that school year.

The next fall I started first grade. There were four other children age six, making an unusual number in one grade in a one-room rural school. I vividly recall that I already knew how to read and was very impatient waiting for the others to read, stumbling through their assignments aloud.

The school was about one-fourth mile from our home. The road to school first went through woodlands and over the bridge crossing Cub Creek. The last stretch was in the open with nothing to shield us from the wintry northwest winds. I walked behind my brother Charles, but the wind still took my breath away.

In April, 1931, when I was eleven years old, Grandmother Agnes Freeman passed away and I remember it well. She was 83.

Fast forward now to the year I was twelve, in the eighth grade at Freeman School. We were given examinations in all subjects at the Gage County Court House in Beatrice. These were given to determine if students were qualified to graduate. The graduation ceremony was held in the spring (I was thirteen) at the Chautauqua Park in Beatrice. I still have a copy of the program. The rural students on the honor roll (grade 90 and above) are listed and there at the top, of all Gage County students, is the name Carol Quackenbush, average grade in all subjects, 97 and 11/14. My family was very proud.

This was in the 1930's when our nation was in the woes of a deep depression. Times were very hard for most people. We didn't have electricity until the last couple of years. Equipment was hand powered, except for a gasoline engine on the washing machine. We had kerosene lamps for light. We had cows for milk, separated the cream from the milk, and churned the butter by hand. We used wood for both heating and cooking stoves, cutting up trees from our woods. I often split the kindling for starting the fires in them. These things may be of interest to younger people who never lived without electricity. President Franklin Roosevelt was responsible for starting the REA (rural electrification) – I think it was about 1936.

That next fall, the year 1938, President Franklin Roosevelt had signed into law the provision and money to purchase the 160 acres of the original homestead from the Freeman heirs, to establish a national monument commemorating the pioneers who had done so much to develop the West. I was eighteen years old. My family packed up and drove west via Highway 30 to where my brothers Richard and Charles were, in California and Oregon.

This ends my story about growing up on the land that became the Homestead National Monument of America.

Note: After moving to Oregon, Carol worked for the United States Post Office, starting as a window clerk and eventually becoming Personnel Manager for an area of 83 post offices. She married in 1940, and has one daughter, 3 granddaughters and 7 great-grandchildren. Update: my grandma passed away in December, 2005.

The Quackenbushes' visit to Le Claire, Iowa in 1938

LeClaire, Scott County, Iowa, was the hometown of Carol Quackenbush's grandmother, Agnes Suiter Freeman. Her family had been river pilots and farmers there -- the work of river pilot or captain continued through several generations of Suiters. Throughout her life, Agnes Suiter Freeman stayed in correspondence with her family back home in Iowa, and made several trips there to visit.

Agnes Suiter Freeman's youngest daughter, Agnes Freeman Quackenbush, took four of her children on a trip from Nebraska to Le Claire in 1938, shortly before the Quackenbush family moved to Oregon. Carol was 18 at the time, Elinor was 20, Verna 13, and Jim 12. In 2002, Carol wrote down some memories of the trip for her granddaughter, who asked her about the town of Le Claire and the people she met there --

[In another letter] "I'm fairly sure I met both James Philip and John F. [Suiter] but I can't say now which one was which. I was at the home of one in Le Claire and met two daughters near my age. One had a large bright birthmark near one eye. One gave me her high school graduation picture I may still have.        The other would have been the River Boat pilot that gave us a ride through the locks.