Hebron, Nebraska
February 8, 1921

Editor Hebron Journal:

   Reminiscences carry a long way back. I came to Omaha in 1870, and to Hebron on September 10, 1872. On arriving at Hebron, I found it only a small village of half a dozen buildings, with two stores, J. B. Smith had a small wooden building, where Mr. Hill's meat market is now located and Grandfather Glenn where Nacke's hardware store now stands. There were no churches, no banks, no saloons, no railroad.

   I constructed many of the buildings of that era. I first built a school house about a mile and half east of Chester (although there was no Chester then). I worked on the brick school house (now the Journal office). I built the Odd Fellows hall where Boyces' store now stands. Also, the old Catholic church near the B. & M. depot, the old frame court house, and dozens of other houses that do no now exist.

   Immediately on arriving at Hebron we got a few Master Masons together in an old boarded up and down frame school house, 16x20, located a few feet south of the honey locust tree now growing south of the Journal office where we studied and posted up. On June 30, 1873, we got a charter for our Hebron lodge No. 3, with J. W. Hughes as master, and W. J. Green, senior warden.

   The Masons did much work of genuine charity. A few years after the formation of the lodge brother Thomas died, and the Masons carefully laid him away as he was a poor homesteader, and had nothing except his wife and four children, who looked to the Masons as their best friends, which they well proved to be.

   The Masons built her a small three bedroom house, donated it to the widow, and furnished the family with shoes and the mother was able, by washing, to support and school the children.

   From the little school shack that we first occupied, we moved upstairs over the Journal office, then upstairs in the Hughes building, then upstairs in the old Odd Fellow building, and finally built the present large hotel structure.

   We built the Masonic hall in 1887, which occasioned us to go to St. Louis to see about material necessary for its construction. A few years later, Bethlehem Commandery No. 18 was organized, with J. W. Hughes as its first Commander. After having been King and Scribe and having held nearly every office in the Grand Commandery, I was elected, in 1906, as Grand Commander of the Grand Commandery of the Knights Templar of Nebraska.

   About all of Belville and Republic county, Kansas, came to Belvidere to sell their grain and stock, and would return to Hebron to do their shopping.

   The first church in Hebron, built by the Christian church people, was nearly a match for the first school house built south of the Journal office. Compare it to the splendid brick structure they now occupy; also the small shack of a school house of planks nailed up and down like a barn, to the five splendid school buildings Hebron can boast of.

   We will not dwell at length on the man who perished in the three days snow storm less than one mile southwest of Hebron; nor the city well in the center of the street intersection of Lincoln Ave. and Fourth St., not the old Catholic church, which ws moved to the lots where Mrs. Cissana now lives and converted into a laundry, nor the residence where E. M. Correll used to live, where Gray's Cafe stands, and on the rear of the lost was his lumber yard, the millinery store where the Rumbaugh store is, the butcher shop W. M. Hill presided over, where the Boston now stands, the old cottonwood frame which A. C. Ring built and where he sold drugs for a third of a century, the Dr. Evens office overhead so as to be near at hand to counteract the officials, the great skating rink of Winslow Barger on the northeast corner of Roosevelt park, E. S. Past's basement residence, now covered by the Wolcott meat market; James Dinamore's residence, where the Lincoln school kiddies play, the first Methodist church where Casper Klaes now raises potatoes, the first undertakers, Hughes Bros. in the basement of their own building, where they made caskets, and where E. J. Huse succeded them by shipping a lot of second-hand coffins (so some said, though we never believed it), south of the Rock Island depot; the general mercantile store of F. B. Udall and W. J. Thompson conducted on the present Thayer County Bank corner, the old livery barn managed by W. J. Green, who carried the mail and passengers for twenty years to Belvidere, and never missed but one train; the fine pressed brick residence, built by C. H. Willard and now used by Hebron Academy; J. Reed Ferguson's residence, where C. M. Smith now lives; the basement of the old court house, where Sheriff W. D. Galbraith confined prisoners; the great grocery store conducted by W. H. Frame, where the billiard and pool balls are now punched; the livery barn in which Dan Ruby traded horses, south of the Farmers' Union Store, and dozens of others that could be described if space permitted and time allowed. We first found the Journal a little weekly, much smaller than the Register-Champion of last week.

   A great man once said if all the things were written that happened, the world could hardly contain the books. We are beginning to think that is about the case with Hebron, and will probably have to continue it at the next Hebron Journal anniversary.

   We became acquainted with the Journal in 1872, when Ralph K. Hill was working on it in a very small frame building where Hays and Hogrefer's lumber yard now stands. It was our habit to be a good deal with Mr. Hill and the Journal force at that starting point, and for nearly fifty years that friendship and attachment for it has never wavered or ceased.

   We wish you many - yes many - happy returns for these anniversaries and we will never, never forget it until it publishes our obituary.

Respectfully,
JOHN W. HUGHES

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