Some time after Mrs. Wade died, he moved to Page, Nebraska to enter the grain business in what was then a new town. (George Brechler followed to start a bank there).

When Mr. Wade retired, he moved to Sioux City, Iowa.

Mr. Wade, as indicated in Mrs. Martin's article, was always a public spirited person. This writer remembers that his father always considered him a good neighbor and friend. When Mr. Wade died he was buried in the St. Patrick's Catholic Cemetery. Mrs. Preece did this writer the honor of asking him to serve as pallbearer at the funeral because of this friendship with his father.

The following is a letter received from Mrs. Charles Martin (nee Gertrude Wade) with her daughter in Michigan, tells us the story of the Tom Wade family.

I am the last of the Tom Wade family that came to Battle Creek in 1883. They had come from Waterloo, Iowa in the spring and lived on a farm southwest of Norfolk where the overflowing Elkhorn River drowned out most of their crops.

During the summer, my father filed on a homestead two and one-half miles south of the Battle Creek depot, made the required improvements, and then one bright sunny day in October, the family drove across country to the new home. They often spoke of that trip — the prairie with its tall grass and many fall flowers — how new and clean it all looked! The only house along the way was Andy Tillotson's where they stopped to get water. when settled in the new home, there was just enough money to buy one hundred pounds of flour, fifty cents worth of sugar, two pounds of coffee and one pound of tea. The next week my father went to work at the Tiedgen ranch where he received $1.00 per day for himself and team and carried his lunch. The next year they had a good crop of sod corn and a fine vegetable garden. there was an abundance of wild fruits much of which my mother canned or made into jelly. The town had come into being with the building of the Fremont, Elkhorn and Missouri Valley Railroad and was named Battle Creek because of an Indian uprising just west — which was hastily put down by U. S. Troops under General John M. Thayer, later Governor of Nebraska.

The town organizers were P. J. O'Neill, G. J. Hale, John Tiedgen, Herman Hogrefe, with John Hoover, surveyor. The latter was a government surveyor and built and operated the first flour and feed mill on the creek north of town.

Settlement was rapid. At the time of our arrival there were four general stores, two drug stores, a furniture store, a hardware store and two lumber and coal dealers, one who gave no credit and who took in payment, the cow giving the milk; the other who said, "I'll trust you until you get a crop." There were also two blacksmith shops, neither of which stood "under a spreading chestnut tree." And I must not forget the two saloons!

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