The Historical Committee has a letter from Mrs. Loretta Colgrove Jacobson now of San Diego, California, which adds to the history of the people of Battle Creek. to quote:
"The family of her father, Charles W. Carr, was neighbor to the Warner Hale family in Grayson County, Virginia. The children of the Carr family and the Hale family attended the same school.
Parents of Charles W. Carr were Fielden and Nancy Carr. In review, one finds the name "Fielden" or Fields quite common among the Virginians, even to the name "Keziah Fields Memorial Methodist Episcopal Church" which was the first name adopted by the present First Methodist Church in Battle Creek. We tried unsuccessfully to learn the origin of this name for the church.
Charles W. Carr was born in 1861 and while still a young man he crossed the Appalachian Mountains from Grayson County, Virginia into North Carolina to work as an apprentice blacksmith.
When he was twenty three years old he married Elisabeth Buseick of Wythe County, Virginia, and immediately came to Madison County, Nebraska. For a time they lived with and worked for one of the Osborns in Schoolcraft Precinct and then in 1884, he came into Battle Creek to ply his trade as a blacksmith working in the shop of Conrad Hanson and Frank Reavis which as she remembers, stood near the site of the Red Bud Store. She wrote that "in the back of the shop stood a little Baptist Church with a Rev. McPharean as pastor." (The historical committee can find no other record of this church). She adds later that this church was torn down and the Baptist Church under Rev. Jos. Cossairt was built at the site one block south where the Mrs. Gronau and Elmer Kohl homes now stand.
The Carr home was "on Depot Street across from where the Methodist Church was built about 1893-1894." It would seem that this would be the present Pete Smith home.
The frame blacksmith shop burned. Hanson and Reavis built a one story brick shop on the site of the present Red Bud Store and Carr bought a farm northwest of Battle Creek.
Farming was not to his liking so that in 1901 he came back into town and in company with Andy Hengstler of Creighton, they built a shop on the site across the alley from the Ponton Service Station.
Mr. Carr loved horses and did the horseshoeing for the race horse men common in the area at the time. Other reference has been made to the horse racing circuit in which Battle Creek sportsmen had a part.
In 1905, Mr. Carr thought there was a better opening for a blacksmith shop in Meadow Grove and he and Mr. Hengstler therefore sold out and started a shop there. The shop in Battle Creek was sold to John Kivalek, a Bohemian bachelor. (John had a room for his residence in the back part of the shop. How many 'boys' remember how the boys of that era would torment poor old John 'I-fix em' by throwing clods at his building at
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