On May 23, 1919, Dr. Frank A. Brewster of Beaver City and pilot Wade Stevens took off on a flight to Herndon, Kansas. There, Brewster performed emergency surgery to save the life of an injured man. This flight attracted worldwide attention and Dr. Brewster was regarded as perhaps the first physician to use an airplane for professional purposes. The plane was a Curtiss JN-4D "Jenny," which the doctor had purchased a few weeks earlier. Brewster's airstrip and hangar, located near here, was among the first private airports in Nebraska.
One of the few surgeons serving a large area of Nebraska and Kansas, Brewster was quick to adopt timesaving innovations. In 1906, he purchased the first automobile in Furnas County. However, bad roads were a constant problem, which led to Brewster's use of an airplane in his medical work.
After moving to Holdrege, Nebraska, Brewster regularly flew to visit the several hospitals he had built in the two-state region. At age 71, he received his own pilot's license and was an active flier until his death at 89 in 1961.
]]>This building, measuring 14 by 16 feet, was one of the smallest schoolhouses in Nebraska. It was used by Furnas County District 102, formed on October 7, 1896. The last class was held in 1935. The district was dissolved and the area attached to District 59 on September 30, 1949. Originally located 3 1/2 miles SE of Edison, the building was moved here in 1968.
]]>Among the first settlers in Southwest Nebraska were a small group of Norwegians, who settled along Deer Creek in Furnas and Gosper counties in 1873. At that time the region was still a part of the buffalo range and a major Indian hunting ground. In October 1877, those pioneers met at the home of Erickson Fosse for religious services, and they organized what was to become the Deer Creek Norwegian Evangelical Lutheran Congregation. The charter members were the families of Eric Erickson, Ole Olson, A. E. Phillipson, Ellen Simon, Nels Simon and Old Simon. Church services were held in the homes of the members until 1888, when Mr. Phillipson donated an acre of land on the west bank of Deer Creek for a church site and cemetery. A small church was erected in 1889. By that time, the church membership also included the Benjamin, Christianson, Hanson, Lee, Madison, Olson, Oswald, Petterson, and Thompson families. By 1902 the membership had outgrown the small church and the present building was started the following year. The new church was dedicated in May 1904.
]]>Faced with the great influx of white settlers after the Civil War, hostile Sioux and Cheyenne Indians retreated into the Republican River Valley. Here they found a nearly ideal location since the valley remained one of the great buffalo ranges of the American West until the 1870's.
Regular military patrols came to the Republican on the Fort McPherson Trail, which followed the divide between Deer and Medicine creeks and entered the valley one mile west. The largest military force to use this route was General Carr's Republican Valley Expedition of 1869. After his successful campaign, the region was clear of hostile Indians.
In 1870 Isaac "Ben" Burton settled one mile southeast on a bend of the Republican at the One Hundredth Meridian. Burton, the first permanent settler of Furnas County, and his partner, H. Dice, established the Burton's Bend Trading Post. This post supplied necessities to the buffalo-hide hunters, who soon killed off the great herd.
For many years the community continued to be known as Burton's Bend, but after the railroad came, its name was changed to Holbrook.
]]>On May 30, 1935, torrential rains fell in eastern Colorado and southwestern Nebraska; by early morning of the 31st, the usually peaceful Republican River was running bluff-to-bluff along its upper reaches. When the waters subsided two days later, over 100 lives had been lost and many millions of dollars of damage had been done. A number of persons from this community were drowned. After the prolonged drouth of the early 30's, the wet spring of 1935 had brought welcome relief to the region. By the end of May, however, the soil was nearing the saturation point. The rains of May 30th, concentrated in the basin of the South Fork and extending into the valleys of the Arikaree, Frenchman, Red Willow, and Medicine, poured into the main stream--normally 300 to 400 feet wide, turning it into a raging torrent one to four miles wide. The flood water came as a wall, variously estimated at from three to eight feet in height. The advance of the crest was more rapid in the upper valley, reported at ten miles an hour above Trenton, at five between there and Oxford, and slowing to 2 1/2 miles an hour upon crossing over into Kansas. To prevent the repetition of such a tragedy the federal government has built a series of six dams, five in Nebraska, across the Republican or its tributaries, serving not only as flood protection, but providing recreation and irrigation facilities as well.
]]>