HISTORIC HOMES in Ashland NE
You will find the Pictures, History and Stories
about Ashland's Historic Homes on this page of our website:
W. A . Harnsberger home - NE Corner of 15th & Clay
A historical presentation was given to the AHS-SFHPS by Brenda May and her mother
and an article appeared in the Ashland Gazette about the W. A. Harnsberger home.
We will be compiling more photos and information for publication here soon
SQUIRE HILL - 602 Dale Street
SQUIRE HILL 602 Dale Street, Ashland, Nebraska
Legal Description: Lots 5-8 Block 4 Beetisons Addition to Ashland
By Marie Squire Groenjes, April, 2008
In 1915 my paternal Grandparents, Grover and Mary Ann Squire, bought four lots in the Beetison Addition situated in East Ashland, Nebraska.
The lots were part of the Israel Beetison farm. Israel came to Ashland in 1859 to settle land, then served in the Civil War, married and returned to farm in 1867. Some of his land would have been the Government Land Grant given to Civil War Veterans.
My Grandparents' lots sit on a hill that slopes on all sides, giving a wide view of the surrounding country. Grandfather contracted with a Mr. Peterson to build a two-story house in the style of the Sears Farmhouse. It cost $600 in 1915.
Grandfather worked for the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad and he also sold nursery stock by horse and buggy.
My Father, Clifford P. Squire, also worked for the same railroad. When he married my Mother, Mearl Marie Shirley, in 1924, he took over ownership of the property and he added the front porch, a basement and a back porch or summer kitchen.
We saw the sun rise over Beetison fields, pastures and The Seven Hollows. It was always a spring ritual to cross the pasture into the Hollows to look for violets and mushrooms. I recall a disgruntled old ram chasing us into the woods on one occasion. Now the sun comes up over the Iron Horse Development.
I don't know when this hill became known as Squire Hill, but in my childhood, after a good snowfall, the City would close Dale Street and 6th Street on a weekend to make a safe sledding run. People came from town and even brought four-man toboggans.
The latest addition to the house was a new kitchen in place of the back porch and decks both at the kitchen level and above on the second floor. This was done in 1989.
The family always considered landscaping an important part of the home. From Grandfather to my Father trees and gardens were planted and cared for even through drought. Grandfather, being a nurseryman, grew many kinds of fruits and berries. In 1939 I helped my father plant Siberian Elms given out by the Government, and a hedge of Mulberry. Most of them remain today. Gerhard and I have added hardwoods and evergreens to the mix. Hills on the prairie feel the wind the year around.
Shedd-Harnsberger-Proctor Home NW corner of 16th & Boyd
1602 Boyd Street, Ashland, Nebraska
Legal Description: Lots 11-12, Block 14, Flora City Addition to Ashland
By Elaine Proctor 2008
The abstract of title begins as the East Quarter of Sec. 2, Township 12, and Range 9 East in Saunders County. It was probably 80 acres in all and started selling in 10-acre segments in 1860.
The Flora City, Smith-Warbritten addition was deeded in 1868.
Although our house isn't as originally built, that part of the house does still exist.
It was originally a square house with three or four rooms upstairs and probably 3 down.
When we remodeled, we could see that the living room had been opened up making one room out of two; probably the parlor and dining room with the third room being the kitchen. Going upstairs there were possibly
3 or 4 bedrooms and later, when the back part of the house was added on, the back staircase was added and a bathroom. In the attic you can see the original roof and where the addition was added on.
Kate L. Shedd purchased these lots in March of 1880 for $175. She and her husband, H.H. Shedd, had a mortgage of $1400 in August of 1881. We feel the house was built at that time as that was a large sum of money for that day and age. The mortgage was released in December of 1885.
These dates I feel are close, making our house about 127 years old.
I think the Shedds owned this property until 1923 and then sold it to Carl W. Harnsberger.
H.H. Shedd was a prominent citizen of Ashland and an early member of the Congregational Church.
Mr. Shedd came from eastern Iowa in 1871 and had a general store in Ashland in the late 1870s.
As I said, Kate L. Shedd and her husband bult our home.
Mrs. Florence Williams referred to him as the Honorable H. H. Shedd;
former congressman and Lt. Governor of Nebraska (1885-1889)
He was a Republican and an active member of the Nebraska Historical Society in 1885.
He was a long-time organist, choir director and Sunday School Superintendent of the Congregational Church.
The three windows on the west side of the church were dedicated in his name to the church by the town in appreciation for the honor he had brought to Ashland and for his community involvement.
When we bought our home in 1973 we received a very nice letter from
Florence Williams, church clerk for the Congregational Church.
Mrs. Williams gave us a little history about our home and I found some on the internet.
When we started "remodeling" our home, I never dreamed we'd wind up tearing out everything inside and starting over. Ron wanted to keep the house as true to the original as we could. The house had fallen into such disrepair we couldn't save any of the once-beautiful oak floors. The first twenty years we had the old windows throughout the house with the exception of those in the living room. Those were probably replaced when either P.D. Pyle and Willard Smith or Louis and Gretchen Johnson owned it. Our home was an apartment house when Pyle and Smith lived here but Johnsons returned it to a single-family home. Eventually we did have to change the windows but stayed with the same style, only smaller. We tried to salvage the woodwork also. We went through gallons of stripper but reached a layer of paint that could not be penetrated. We couldn't at that time buy wood trim of that period so we tore it all out and Ron routed all new trim for all the doors and windows. He used #2 grade pine 1x4s, still not quite as wide as the original approximately 5 inch wide woodwork, but it was close enough to look right.
When we gutted the upstairs, we found the outlines of how the rooms had been when the house was built with the bedroom doors on an angle rather than square with the hall making a sort of vestibule at the top of the stairs. We put the doors back the way they had been originally. Dick Harnsberger came to visit us once and he said there was a bedroom in this open area when he lived in the house so there must have been a hall before it was made into apartments. Dick was very pleased with what we'd done. He said we had returned it to a home again. We did do some re-arranging of some of the rooms upstairs but only to imrove closet arrangements.
The foundation is large 1 ft. x 3 ft. x 18 in. quarried blocks. To fill space large flat stones were cemented in to make the wall even. The structure of the house we found at the time we gutted the upstairs is called "balloon" framing, meaning the framing 2x4 area continued from the basement all the way up to the second floor with no sill plate between floors. We also found that carpenters and construction techniques have changed a lot through time.
Some little things we've found in our home that we've never thought of changing are initials on the back of the riser of the stairs going to the basement: C.H. + V.P. (probably Carl Harnsberger plus Virginia Packer) and on a post some names of carpenters that are not legible.
We've tried to do the house honor by restoring it to some of its former glory. Ron's mother, Mrs. Esther Anderson, said she could remember Mrs. Shedd sitting on our porch (in the area we have screened in) when she was a young girl about 13 or so (1913).
We have found the Shedd's lots in the cemetery. I think it is important to remember times and places of the past. So many times they tear down the old for building something new with less charm and character.
Dennis Dean's Limestone House
Dennis Dean's Limestone House
by Martha (Marti) Dean Fritzen
NOTE: we have many other photos that will be inserted with this article soon - stay tuned ! !
Dennis Dean was born in New York state in 1824. Forty years later in 1864 he moved to Saline Ford, Nebraska (now Ashland) and built a grist mill on Salt Creek (now between 11th and 12th Streets)
at the spot where the bridge goes over Salt Creek and connects Ashland to Highways 6 and 66.
Before coming to Nebraska he had lived in New York, Michigan, Indiana and Iowa.
When he married his first wife in 1843 he did some farming and in 1849 he started running mills and by 1852 he bought his first mill and continued running mills. He sold the Ashland mill in 1883. He farmed and also sold lumber, coal and farm machinery during and after the time that he ran the Ashland mill.
In 1885 he left Ashland and moved to Morrilton, Arkansas where he bought a saw mill, 1000 acres of timberland and a locomotive. He produced lumber for two years before he returned to Ashland.
Dennis was a prominent person in the Ashland community. He was the founder of the Baptist Church **.
He was the first County Clerk of Saunders County and held the office of Justice of the Peace.
In March 1870 he was elected Chairman of the Board of village trustees at their first meeting.
He helped organize a bank and served as its Vice President.
On January 16, 1865 Dennis bought a quarter section of land.
The legal description is SW1/4 Section 1 Township 12 Range 9. He bought it for taxes and paid $45.00.
This section includes most of East Ashland except for a half-block strip of land west of 6th Street.
Its northern border is probably Birch Street and the western border is 14th Street.
Approximately 1/3 of the section is outside the city limits south of East Ashland.
A small portion is on the west side of Salt Creek.
Dennis' house was built on Block 16 of the Dennis Dean Addition in that quarter section of land.
Block 16 was just north of the Dennis Dean Residential Lot which was a four-square-block area.
Its borders were 9th Street (now named Dennis Dean Road) on the east,
Fir Street on the south and 11th Street on the west.
Eleventh Street isn't on the map but it is approximately even with the east end of the Silver Street bridge.
The border on the north was Dale Street.
Although it was called the Residential Lot, he had farm buildings on it.
He built two barns, a corncrib, ice house, chicken house, and blacksmith shop on this lot.
He raised cattle and chickens there as well as having a large garden including grapes.
The Residential Lot and Block 16 were not platted into the usual smaller lots
so this is the only legal description we have for Dennis Dean's property.
When Dennis was about 65 he made a list of what he had done during his life.
In that list he states that he built his house in 1865.
That date is probably correct since he bought the 160 acres of land in that year.
The house measured approximately 60 feet by 30 feet. The walls were 18 inches thick and the windows were 6 panes over 6 panes except for the small ones upstairs under the eaves.
There was a front porch that faced west and stretched the entire length of the house.
There were two chimneys, one at the north end of the building that went down to the basement
and a center one that went down to the living room floor.
The woodwork and floors were made from hand-planed walnut.
The basement extended under the whole house with
one outside entrance and one inside at the center of the house.
There is not very much information on the rooms in the house.
The photos of the family taken inside the house show Dennis in front of his desk talking to family members. Another photo of the same room shows Dennis and his wife, Drucilla,
seated by a small table in front of the desk.
Their daughter, May, and son, Roy, are standing behind them.
In this picture we see that the desk is in a small room and that Dennis
may have considered this room to be his office.
There is a photo of his sons sitting around a large dining table.
Another picture shows a variety of family members sitting at the same table.
More of the room can be seen and a window is visible so we know
that the table is in a separate room and not part of the kitchen.
A family picture taken on Dennis' 80th birthday was probably taken in the living room.
The furnace room was in the northeast corner of the basement. There was a sofa there where Dennis could take his after dinner naps. He was away from the noise of the family and it would have been warm.
The stones used to build the house were rectangular limestone.
When the house was taken down some of the stones were used
to construct a commercial building just north of 120 N. 14th Street.
That building burned and several of the stones were saved and
stored by the Saline Ford Historical Preservation Society.
There was a cistern on the east side of the house with a sandstone wash house built above.
Dennis used spring water to fill his cistern and piped it in from springs that were 4 or 5 blocks away
on or near the property which now has the address of 709 Dennis Dean Road.
The old maps of Ashland had a street going through
about where that house is and it was called Spring Street.
This street was platted but was never actually there.
East Ashland is quite hilly and the water would have had to travel uphill to get to Dennis' house and to his cattle on the Residential Lot. Lillian (Dean) Bailey, who was his great granddaughter, believed that he must have used a hydraulic ram to move the water up the hills. "This small device is a cyclic water pump powered by hydropower. It functions as a hydraulic transformer that takes in water at one 'hydraulic head' (pressure) and flow-rate, and outputs water at a higher hydraulic-head and lower flow-rate. The device utilizes the water hammer effect to develop pressure that allows a portion of the input water that powers the pump to be listed to a point higher than where the water originally started." (definition found in Wikipedia)
The first addition or change the family made to their house was to convert part of the front porch to a
room for Drusilla's plants. They called it the conservatory and it was on the southwest corner of the house.
In 1874 he built a brick addition to the house on the northeast corner.
It included a new kitchen and a bathroom. The water tank for the toilet was six feet high on the wall.
Ralph Dean, Dennis' grandson, said that that was the first indoor toilet he saw when he was a child.
The bathtub was made of zinc and had a wooden cover for when it wasn't being used.
The steam heat and hard coal furnace may have been installed at this time.
When the house was first built it had several tiny windows under the eaves on the west side of the house
just above the porch roof. Later dormer windows were installed in place of them.
Perhaps that was done when the brick addition was built.
Later the railroad gave Dennis the galvanized iron roof that had been on the nearby Schuyler railroad bridge. He put it on his house roof to protect it from catching fire from the sparks from the trains.
In 1870 the railroad built a line through Ashland and nearly went through Dennis' house.
The tracks were very close to the house. In the photographs there is a road next to the picket fence and
the tracks are next to the road. They wanted the land his house was on, but he made a bargain with them.
He furnished their trains with water and they let him stay in the house as long as he lived.
Dennis Dean died in 1908. The house was dismantled by the family in 1917.
It appears that many parts of the house were recycled.
My mother, Lillian (Dean) Bailey, had just a little memory of the house. (see Lillian's recollections, below)
"In 1917 I was 5 years old. That makes it possible for me to remember something about Dennis Dean's house. I can recall walking in the front door and being amazed that there were holes in the floor and I could see down into the basement. The reason for the holes in the floor were that the finishing floor had already been torn up as the house was gradually being removed from the railroad's property.
"I walked on through to the back door and on to the back porch. There was the wash house built of sandstone and beneath it was the famous cistern from which Dennis furnished water for the railroad."
Wiggenhorn Home NE corner of 15th & Boyd
(NOTE: the top two + stories have been removed - Carriage House still stands)
Wiggenhorn Home NE corner of 15th & Boyd
(NOTE:The present house is built on the original foundation - Carriage House still stands)
We will be placing information and more pictures of the Wiggenhorn home soon
The FOLSOM House - 208 North 15th - Ashland
Legal Description: Lots 1 & 2 of Block 18 of Flora City Addition to Ashland by Shirley (Raikes) Hemke October 2, 2008
My Grandparents, Philip and Clara Folsom, lived in the house at 208 North 15th Street
from 1914 until 1956 when it was sold to Grandmother's brother, John Hoffman.
The house has been owned by LaVerne "Lefty" and Carol Anderson for several years.
The Folsom family originally came from Norfolk, England on the ship Dilegent in 1638 and settled in Worcester, Vermont. They traveled west in 1869, crossing the Missouri River on the ice on March 1. They homesteaded on land about three miles south of Ithaca, moving later to Wahoo, then south Bend and finally to Ashland in 1892.
Philip W. Folsom was the oldest of eight children.
He graduated from Ashland High School in the class of 1895.
In 1897 he started a tobacco and cigar shop and also repaired watches in his home.
The 1900 census lists him as a cigar maker.
In 1898 he married Clara Hoffman and they had two daughters, Mildred and Glendora.
Hoffman family gathering - Clara (Hoffman) Folson is second from the left
When she was 9 years old, Mildred contracted infantile paralysis, now known as polio, and she spent the rest of her life in a wheelchair. Glendora married Forrest Raikes.
The cigar shop was sold in the fall of 1904 and in the spring of 1905
Philip started a jewelry store and continued to operate it until his death in 1941.
In addition to watch repair they sold pianos, sewing machines and glass-headed dolls. Clara Folsom continued to live in their home with her invalid daughter,
Mildred, and ran the Folsom Jewelry Store and Watch Repair business
at 1419 Silver Street, the building east of Breadeaux Pizza.
The house remains much the same as it was when my
Grandparents lived there except for some interior renovating.
I remember the stucco exterior and the spacious veranda
and wide steps which accommodated Mildred's wheelchair.
China cupboards were built into the dining room and
I have a free-standing breakfront with a round glass front from the dining room.
The yard was beautifully landscaped.
Bushes lined the alleyway and lots of flowers were planted in front of the bushes.
In the center of the side yard was a pergola with a birdbath in front of it.
The birdbath and octagon-shaped stepping stones leading from
the front sidewalk around the side to the back door and around
the fish pond in the back yard were made of small stones set in cement.
The fish pond was also made of the small stones
set in cement and was stocked with goldfish.
In the winter the goldfish were kept in large
ten-gallon crocks in the basement of the house.
I liked spending a Saturday night with Grandma and Grandpa Folsom
and helping Grandma feed the fish and change the water.
At the back of the side yard was a grape arbor running from the fish pond to the garage.
The Folsoms rented out rooms in the upstairs of the house,
mostly to school teachers since the house was only three blocks from the school.
My first-grade teacher, Miss Petersen, roomed there.
I remember going to dinner at my Grandparents' house every Sunday.
I have lots of fond memories of that home.
the FOLSOM House, featured above, was that of Shirley's grandparents
A presentation of the history of the FOLSOM house was given by Shirley (Raikes) Hemke
at a meeting of the AHS-SFHPS - a summary of that presentation was published in the FEB 2009 newsletter
A picture from the past - the 1948 Stir-Up Days Royalty - the very first Stir-Up celebration !
R
BURLINGTON DEPOT . . . not exactly a home . . . however
the railroad was and is certainly an integral part of our history
According to the article about the DENNIS DEAN House,
above, the railroad came to Ashland in 1870
Below are some pictures of the 'modern day' Burlinton depot, built in 1907
that was demolished in SEP of 2009 .
The pictures above came from the postcard collection, recently donated by Dick Harnsberger
The notation of 'NEW' on one of the photos is not dated - believed to be circa 1920s
Historical documents show that the depot was destroyed by fire & rebuilt twice
The pictures above are of the depot, circa 1920s, & the “gardens” on the south side of the tracks.
Notice the ‘billboards’ for traveling passengers to see - advertising the Hotel Fontenelle
in Omaha and the Hotel Lincoln in Lincoln, as they traveled East or West The “gardens” photo shows Mearl (Shirley) Squire and May Wills,
taken in the 1920s and is from Marie (Squire) Groenjes) collection
For more information > > see MARCH 2010 newlsetter
Do you have color photos of the Burlington Depot ? ?
We would appreciate your sharing them with the AHS- SFHPS
We will arrange to scan your treasured photo (not damaging it in any way)
We thank you for your support in preserving and 'telling' the History of Ashland NE
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