Marsland

Unless you're a part of my family circle, I'd bet you a quarter that you've never heard of Marsland, much less know where it is. So you might imagine my surprise when during an insomnia induced fit of late night random Googling, I found myself at this page on ghost towns. Even more surprising, I found myself looking at a photo of my own great grandparent's home.

  My great grandparents were James Mundy Tollman and Flora Caroline Maika. They built this home in 1912 of cement blocks made on site. This was their second home in Marsland, the first being on a homestead nearby.  This photo was taken just after its completion and the farm eventually expanded to include a large barn, cattle pets, a smoke house, an ice house, huge garden area, silo, and hog pen.  A family letter written by one of the children, James Perry Tollman, written in his retirement details life in Marsland and on the family farm in vivid memories. One of the amusing comments is that the neighbors were always stopping by to check on the building progress and they were quite perplexed by the modern bathroom that was being installed...apparently one of the first in the county...especially since there was a perfectly good two holer not far from the kitchen door!

Marsland is located in western Nebraska in Dawes County. It's pretty remote. In its heyday, the population was about 800, according the the Nebraska Historical Society virtual Nebraska. The nearest large town is Chadron. Today, Marsland is just a shadow of itself, perhaps deserving of the ghost town designation to the outside world. 

Not for me, a woman who hears the whispers of long gone ancestors. And apparently not for the Nebraska Historical Society; shortly after seeing the house on the ghost town site, I came across it again while doing genealogical research on a Tollman aunt. The Nebraska Historical Society has done an excellent job incorporating the internet with their holdings and I found the house listed in a survey of historic buildings in Nebraska. It was not identified, just shown as an unknown home.  So I contacted them offering details should they be interested. 

A very enthusiastic response followed the next day and I've sent them several photos and other bits of family information to help them document and preserve this part of Nebraska history.  The Tollman family has deep roots in Nebraska and although it is scattered across the USA today, family reunions are still held in western Nebraska and always include a stop at the old house.

 The old house may not last forever, but it sure feels great to have helped it become a part of Nebraska history.

Blueberry Skies

Because of this little event on my way home, I was able to drink in the biggest, bluest skies and clouds of the summer. Windows down, 78 degrees, moderate breeze; if you have to wait on construction, this is the way to do it.
You can't tell because I tool this from the car, but this is really,really tall corn that's closing in on harvest time.
Have you noticed how much I love my drive home? Isn't this a blueberry and cream sky if there ever was one? Today I wished for really wide lens. Note to self: remember this when it's icy, gray and below zero.

The Fourth of July in Farmland

Tradition exists in middle America, like this annual celebration in nearby, Fairbury,NE. Enjoy. Video by Keith Trimm, soundofffairbury.com.

Giants Roaming the Road

This is what kicked up the rock that broke my windshield. Considering that I drive a Saturn that seems to barely come to the top of the tires, it was hardly a fair fight. And some people think there are no giants!

Another view of my ride home, just cause I know no one believes I have such a horrible commute. Harbine, NE. Pop 66 - 5:30 pm on a weeknight.

Hear the Train A Comin

There was a little delay in getting home this evening. Seems like the Union Pacific had their own adgenda and it didn't include my plans at all. I cross this piece of track twice a day, rarely am I stopped by the train. A couple of the cars behind me seem to be impatient, edging closer, trying to get a glimpse of the caboose. They didn't have much luck. This was one of the hundred long coal trains that are an every day occurance here. I don't mind at all. Waiting on the train reminds me to remember, to slow down and savor the stories of the past.



All the small towns in this area grew to prosperity and dwindled into shadows of themselves at the dictate of the railroad. Populations grew to provide the workers and services needed by major railroad round houses in Wymore and Fairbury. Even little Odell (above, pop 300 give or take) owes its location to the train. Years ago, Odell use to be located nearby but because of a change in the tracks demanded by the railroad, the entire town just picked up, buildings, kids, dogs, the works and moved to their current location.

When the glamour of railroads began to fade away, so too did the small towns. They didn't totally dissappear but they changed. The older folks have memories of busier days, prosperous downtowns and honky tonk nights. Somehow I doubt my own stories of past days will provide nearly the texture of these small towns. Suburbia, automobiles, fast food, television and life before the world wide web just doesn't seem to have the same texture.

Project 52 Week 10 Unexpected Surprizes

This weekend, cabin fever was setting in again, the wonderfully rich sausage from Frank's in Wilber was gone and both the Viking and I could hear the kolaches we passed over on our last visit calling to us.

Isn't Wilber just the cutest little town?

Remember those inviting little kolaches from a couple of weeks ago? We decided to forego breakfast and have kolaches once we got to Wilber.

First surprize, they weren't really very good. The filling was delicious, but the roll part was just straight, bland white bread. I was expecting a richer roll, like a cinnamon roll. I don't know if this is a typical kolache or just the result of an uninspired baker, but it was a little dissappointing. I decided right then that a nice layer of cream cheese frosting would help redeem the poor little kolaches.

When we got home, I made the frosting and alas, it didn't help tremendously. The roll just wasn't that good. However, a loaf of homemade rye bread we picked up is fantastic. We still like Franks.

Still feeling adventurous, instead of heading straight home, we decided to head north on a road we'd never been. It took us through more of the same farmland that surrounds us, and we were happy with our adventure. Then the second surprize of the day! Driving past a rustic sign for Bluestem State Park, we saw this as we drove by.


We backed up on the road (remember this is the middle of nowhere farmland) turned into a gravel road and within seconds saw this.

A very large lake with a very large, very loud snow geese party happening. The migration is still in progress but we had no idea this lake existed.

It was a wonderful event to see, this stop over on their long flight. We got out of the car and just watched a bit. They're a chatty bunch. It really made me wish I had a better camera and a wide angle lens.

Project 52 - Wk 7

We took a little field trip this week and ended up in a mini time machine. We'd heard there were still small meat markets nearby, in Wilber, Nebraska. Wilber is a charming little town that happily proclaims itself to be the Czech capital of the U.S.A. They host an annual festival that clogs the highways and swells the population of the area by thousands. Every one leaves with full tummies and lighter hearts full of music and ancestral pride.

Off "season" it's a modest little town with pretty facades and the most fabulously smoke scented air imaginable. Why? Well, Frank's Smokehouse is one reason. Close your eyes and imagine the best ever combination of wood smoke, cooking meat and spices and there you are. My apologies to vegetarians, this is carnivore country!

Although it's all about the meat here, there are some very cool pieces of kitchen equipment and that didn't come from some faux vintage kitchen kitch shop either. Check out that vintage coke machine. I'm guessing it's been in the shop for about 4o years. The old display cases remind me of the tiny general store in my grandma's little town when I was a kid. There's sausages of every description here, jerky, hocks... anything smoked you can imagine, I'll bet you'd find it.

We didn't get jerky this time, but we'll be back... this doesn't look anything like what's hanging near the check-out stand in WalMart. I don't think you'd see these guys in WalMart or Kroger either.

They also had some really good looking homemade bread and kolache. The smell of fresh bread and smoke in the air is almost criminal. I was wishing I hadn't just had breakfast when I spotted the kolaches. Kolaches? You never heard of kolaches? Fresh and still steaming up their bags. Almost made me wish I had a couple of kids at home to help eat up all the baked goods I wanted to buy. Not really, but almost! We did buy some smoked hocks (the Viking thinks it's time for some potato klub. We'll talk about that one later), some polish sausage, breakfast sausage, burgers and some Czech style potato dumpling that looks like a sausage thing to try. The butcher was cutting for fresh, gorgeous rib eye steaks for another customer, and we'll be back for some of those too!

One last thing that makes Frank's a totally unique little meat shop, is this little stash of hardware behind the register. At Franks, not only can you get meat and major sensory overload, you can also restock your ammo and buy a last minute anniversary gift for your man.

Spring Geese Migration

Spring is on the way! I saw two huge flocks of geese today, both heading north. I drive by a large rural pond on my way to work each day. This morning, the geese were in progress of just taking off as I went by. It was like being in a scene from The Birds. Amazing. Loud.

Then tonight, a second even larger flock was just passing over my home as I was approaching. There must have been thousands of them, hundreds of V formations in the sky. It's a wonderous thing to behold. This isn't my photo, but it could have been. I plan to have my camera out and ready to go on the seat beside me and maybe, if I'm lucky, I'll get my own shot to share. I love a sky full of flying Vs.

Project 52 #5 Yipes Stripes

Zebras in Nebraska? In Beatrice,Nebraska? Yes indeed! I'm not a local, so I don't know why they're here, but they are here. Along with several bison, llama, elk and donkeys. Which just goes to show, never say anything is impossible.

Project 52 - The road home

I have a gypsy spirit. I don't know how I came by it, but it's as much a part of me as breathing. I always wonder what's over the hill, even when there is no hill. It's led me to have more than 13 addresses as an adult and I'm reasonably sure there's a couple more to come.

This shot was just before sunset, on my way home from work. I didn't think the camera would even focus, since I was driving and holding it with one shaky hand. I do love the traffic here.

Memories of Another Time

My poor, frozen sister is home in Arizona again. She made good use of her time here.She came with the intention of visiting with our uncle and hopefully being able to scan the small number of family photos and documents he had collected through the years. Almost 1500 individual scans later, she breathed a huge sigh of relief and was done. With only one night's sleep and then off to the airport,she sure has earned her rest. I wish she could have stayed longer.

It will be a while before she manages to rename and organize her files, make an index and then bless everyone in the immediate family with this massively impressive archive of our Tollman/Anderson ancestors. For anyone who's interested, here's a tiny peek at the wonders to come.

Meet my maternal great grandfather, James Mundy Tollman,at age 17 in 1893. He's an ambitious young man, soon to become a western Nebraska homesteader in 1899. One day, he'll be father to four children. I wonder what he was thinking this day. He's certianly handsome, isn't he?

Project 52- Week 3

Winter in Nebraska takes many forms; snow has it's own personality. This morning we awoke to a light, gently falling peaceful snow, just the kind of snowy memory my Arizona sister needed to take home with her. No harsh wind and a balmy 14°.This isolated scene is outside the town I live in and captures rural midwestern winter in my mind's eye perfectly.

We had plans to have brunch with relatives in a nearby town. On the way home we did a little detour to the small town where our Dad grew up. My sister hasn't had too much excitement on her visit; for most of the week either the Viking or I have been seriously flattened by a virus. Fortunately she's escaped and I recovered enough by Saturday that we did a little antique shop memory hunting and wandering around ancestoral stomping grounds.

Doorknobs

It's funny how the littlest of things can elicit memories. Who would have guessed that both my sister and I would have such a fondness for old door knobs?

She's visiting this week and we were able to spend time in our grandparent's old home. It was built in the early 1900's as the Friendship Church of God, and became their home in 1951. Much of the house remains the same, all these years later, the things we remembered most as kids.

My sister and I were both elated that the elegant orignal glass door knobs we both remembered were still there. I honsetly expected to discovered that other relatives had taken them off. The home is still in the family and used as an office.

We grew up in a typical 60's era tract house. For me, at least, visiting the grandparent's on their farm became almost as much a trip to soak in more of the house as it did to see family.
This this most unusual house full of glass door knobs,
arched doorways and wooden trim was so different than my own, it was like venturing into another world. Today was a day for time travel.

Project 52

There's a lot of buzz these days about Project 365, Project 52 and others I can't even remember. They basically all boil down to the same thing, creating a photo record of your life. The photo a day Project 365 just sounds like too much to me so I'm going to go with the 52, one photo a week idea. Ideally, I'll get them digitally scrapped too.

I think it's interesting that all around me EVERYONE, whether I know them in person or just cruise their blog is getting turned on to doing more with their cameras this year. On almost the same day, my sister posted about her "my year of the camera", I enrolled in a photography class, a coworker started talking about buying a new camera, daughter and son-in-law started Flicker pools for their photo experiments. It's like a massive wave of photo-lust has swept the planet.

I pretty much take a photo every week (at least) anyway, so maybe it's cheating just a bit to do my normal thing and call it a project. Either way, its good. So, here are my catching up photos. Week one at the top of the page was on New Years Day. This is straight out of the camera, at the west end of the small city of Beatrice,NE.

Week 2, is this little organza blue angel. She's just the palest shade of blue imaginable. My sister has one almost exactly like her, only in pink. They came from my Grandma Opal. As we were told, they were package decorations on Christmas presents. Since my third sister doesn't have an angel, we had to have gotten them from 1957-1959. Mine is missing a little golden instrument of some sort, maybe a harp?

She doesn't like having her photo taken. I have taken 30 some shots of this ornament this season, ALL except this one have been awful, blurry despite even resorting to a tripod. Almost makes me wonder if someone wasn't sending me holiday wishes each and every time I focused on her, until this very last shot.

Snowy Day

It started in the wee hours this morning and has been snowing all day. The first snow of the season is pretty and it's easy to have wistful romantic thoughts of winter wonderlands. As I was making my way to work this morning in the balmy -2° along the highway that had not been plowed, in the dark with only my headlights illuminating the icy crystals, I actually liked the sparkle of snow falling.


Fast forward 7 hours to when I had to brush off 4 inches of snow from my car before I could head home, and the romance is over. I changed gloves midway to keep my hands dry. I changed one more time when I was done to keep my hands warm on the way home. It doesn't seem silly any more to have about 6 pair of gloves in my car.

I confirmed something today too, about living in Nebraska. It's too wicked cold when even the cows have snow building up on their backs!

Another Real Estate Agent Fiasco

I think this real estate agent is intentionally trying to prove her incompetence. Until now, I'd avoided mentioning her by name, but this latest screw up has her name boldly associated with it in print, so I don't see any harm in sharing it now. What's wrong? Well nothing except the house is shown with a completely incorrect description. The correct description is printed under the first house in the ad and the house we're selling is the second house.

The MLS listing link is still incorrect. As of today it still shows the right house at the wrong address. This is the listing that local agents use as their primary reference of available housing inventory. It has the house listed in a totally different town! She's very unprofessionally told us on 07/21 when the problem came to light, to "Chill Out" it's only a minor problem that "no one but us ever even saw " and yet still submitted the completely wrong ad to the newspapers. She has repeatedly assured us that she has fixed the problem and we're over reacting. I don't see how anything has been fixed since the link has been wrong with 3 different versions since 07/21 and remains so on 07/27.

Plus, she has now printed the incorrect ad in one of the local newspapers. The description of the house is not accurate and never has been. We've alerted her since the beginning to the inaccuracies in the description, but they have never been corrected. Apparently in Nebraska real estate agents aren't concern about truth in advertising.

There are other issues that are just basic "he said - she said" things, that really are subjective, mostly concerning communications. This, however, is pretty clearly inept. There was suppose to have been an open house today, I wonder what people thought who went to the addresss and saw a totally different house. I wonder if a potential sale will never happen because of this huge error.

So to anyone who stumbles across this blog and is looking for a real estate agent in the Beatrice, NE 68310 zip code, don't go with this agency. You'll be making an even bigger mistake than we did, because you've been forewarned.

St. Joseph, Sell This House

Here's St. Joseph standing at the precipice, looking into the pit he's about to get buried in. With so many opinions on how to do the ritual, I just decided to wing it. I dug 6-8" down, buried him upside down, facing away from the house. We said the prayer and covered him up.


I sure hope he gets busy. This week has been another tumultous one with the agent. It appears that the house has been updated in the MLS book with an incorrect address and she refuses to acknowledge. Now, many people who've checked the online listing for MLS are seeing it incorrect as well, so I'm not sure how that squares with her denial. All I know is that for the 3rd day in a row, with a cleared history and cache, I get the right house with an address 15 miles away.


It's been a huge tragic comedy dealing with selling this house. Things don't look good for Mom and time is running out.

Staw into Gold

Do you remember the fairy tale of Rumpelstiltskin? A poor miller, to win favor with the King, lied and said his daughter could spin straw into gold. Of course the greedy king liked this idea and so the daughter was locked up in a room filled with straw and couldn't be free until it was all gold. A magical drawf appeared who actually could spin straw into gold, with a catch of course. The girls first born son would have to be given to the coniving dwarf. How was she suppose to know that the king would be so thrilled with the talented girl, he would marry her to the Prince. Time passes and a son is born. The dwarf comes to collect the baby, there's a riddle to be solved in order to avoid the child's fate, the girl isn't too bright and can't solve the riddle within the alotted time. On the very last evening, when all hope is about to be lost, a palace servant supplies the answer, the child and the kingdom are saved and everyone except the evil dwarf lives happily ever after. The answer was the dwarf's name, Rumpelstiltskin. According to the Brothers Grimm at least.

Last summer was the first time I'd thought of that fairy tale in 40 years. It sprung to mind when I saw the outrageously luminous, decadant color of freshly cut wheat in the brillant sun. When the wheat is freshly cut, it's the color of glowing, molten gold. Its the most vibrant, perfect color I've ever seen. Last year, I didn't know that I'd better stop and shoot it on my way to work. I thought I could go back and catch it on the weekend. Wrong. This spectacle lasts only a day; by the next day the sun has bleached it out to the pale staw color most of us are familiar with. I wish I was a professional photographer and could really capture what I see to share with you. This one moment alone will have made my stay here in Nebraska worthwhile.

St. Joe, The Ultimate Real Estate Agent

We've not been too happy with the agent we hired to sell Mom's house. She talked a great game, but that seems to have been all she's got going for her. I think we need intercession of a divine kind. So, meet our new agent - St. Joe!

As you can see, his commission is much more reasonable and all we have to do is bury him in the yard, beg for help and get out of the way. The part about this that surprises me is that my ultra conservative Methodist mother wants it done. She's worried that maybe God will be p.o.ed , but she wants to try it. Why not? Maybe it only works for Catholics? Do you have to have saint credits or something before it works?

Did you ever hear of St. Joseph selling your house? One place says bury him upside down in the front yard, another says bury him right side up facing the house in the back yard, another to do a salt cleansing ritual( christian, right? ) and then bury him exactly 3 inches or 12 in the front right corner.... heck, even the instructions that came with him gives you about 3 different ways to get him working for you.

Then, when your house is sold, if the buyers are nice to work with you leave him in the ground and if they're nasty you dig him up and bean them on the head with him. Not really,I made that part up. Hey, if you want to buy your own St. Joseph, SuperAgent, check out this site, where his commission is even less than what we had to pay locally. We're in a hurry at this point, so we opted out of mailing.

Personally, I think maybe St. Jude might have been a better choice.

The Hills of My Ancestors

Lying here, in the shadows of the hills of Steele City, Nebraska (pop.81) are my ancestors. Strong, resilient people who for better or worse, were committed to the unforgiving land of the plains. Original homestead pioneers, their sons and daughters, grand parents, aunts, uncles, cousins and more in generations too far removed for me to remember are here. Veterans, farmers, teachers, mothers, even a circus performer inhabit my family tree.

Why the first ones chose this land to make a home has been lost to faded memories and time. Now, I am one of the last of this family living here and remembering them, and even I will not be staying.

In this valley, there's a place in this peaceful spot for my return if I choose, in a section with this view. As a child, on yearly visits, my grandfather would stand in this spot, holding my hand, and he and I would just be silent. Then he'd squeeze my hand and we'd leave. I come here sometimes and just drink in this view. It nourishes me and connects me with hearts I never knew but somehow feel.