(SBA) - It’s been a while since I wrote anything about the history of our town, so I thought this might be a good time to pick up where I left off the last time that I wrote about it. I’m using Alliene Baker Lindgren’s HISTORY OF PIONEER VALLEY as the basis of this column, although I do have some other references that I may include if space allows. By the 1860s, the area around Sergeant Bluff was prospering. Every farm had a cellar filled with vegetables, fruit, dried salt meat and sorghum syrups. Everyone raised their own meat, milked their own cow, churned their own butter, ground their own flour for bread and collected eggs from their own hens. L.M. Brown operated the first dairy business, making cheese and butter from the milk of his own sixty cows as well as from the milk from the cows of his neighbors.
Prairie grasses often reached the height of six to eight feet and after the first frost, the dry grass could easily be ignited, necessitating the use of fire breaks on every farm. Mr. Frank Baker reported that as the oldest child in his family, he carried a big stick to protect his younger brothers and sisters from animals lurking in the grass as the children walked to and from school.
A rich and productive section of Liberty township acquired the name, “Weedland” as the land was predominantly timber, but when an area was cleared or after a brush fire, tall weeds would soon appear. Weedland was situated west of Brown’s Lake in the northwest corner of the township. Weedland soon had a grocery store, a pool hall, a schoolhouse and a park for picnics and recreation. James A. Davison ran the one-room grocery store that stocked minimal staple items including sugar, flour, tobacco, crackers, and hard candy. Most people took their grain to Sioux City to be ground into flour, but there was a burr mill in Weedland where corn could be ground into cornmeal.
At first the Weedland school was a single room, but as more families moved to the area, a second classroom was added and then the roof was lifted to allow for a second story. Prior to the day of the roof lifting, all the studdings were measured and cut by hand. The roof was jacked up and each man from a large crew of volunteers placed a single stud, moving in unison. Then the roof was lowered into place, fastened down and rough siding was applied immediately to avoid wind damage. The entire process was completed in a single day! The job was so well done that the building was still standing in 1954. Religious services were held every Sunday afternoon in the school house building until a church was built.
On January 7, 1861, the first board of supervisors met in Woodbury county. Each township sent a member to represent it on the board and Samuel Cameron was the first chairman. The business at that first meeting included laying out of roads, auditing accounts and levying taxes. In 1864, Luther Woodford became the second chairman. The board purchased the county poor farm in 1870 on land located a mile and a quarter east of Sergeant Bluff. After the death of his first wife, Mr. Holman laid out a cemetery on the bluff above his brickyard in 1863. Soon, the cemetery was purchased by the township that still owns the property today.
A serious grasshopper plague struck the area in 1864. One housewife wrote “On the 23rd of July, 1864…myriads of winged miscreants…as thick and pestiferous in numbers as the creeping lice and slimy frogs were in Egypt in the days of God’s judgment. So thick were the clouds of these invaders that the sun was at times darkened, houses, fences, trees, etc. were literally covered with the little pests and, in fact, the entire face of the earth was covered in piles to two feet in depth.” A lady in one of the towns returned to her home,where she found the door so covered that her husband had to remove the pests with a shovel. Fields and gardens that had looked so promising were reduced to a half inch of stubble in less than three hours. Squash vines, for some unexplained reason, were untouched. Hundreds of acres of corn were swept away in less than a single day.
At about the same time, new families including Hurlburt Brower, Lafayette Foster, Irvine Dewey, Milton Swartz, William Carter, Aaron Olsen, Peter Iverson, Oliver Bryan, and Squire Haviland moved to the area. C. J. Holman & Brothers began the manufacture of brick as fine deposits of clay, sand and gravel were found in the area. The brickyard was soon the most important business in the area. The firm also did considerable pork packing and Holman lard became a famous staple item in the county.
Not much was written about the flood of 1867, except that after the water subsided, the Missouri had cut a new channel. The old riverbed that came along the Marcus Coombs farm was left as a bayou, soon known as “New Lake” and the old channel that ran past Bigelow’s farm was also left as a bayou, known first as “Horseshoe Lake,” but subsequently named “Brown’s Lake.”
