Andrew J. Maxwell, with his wife Lizzie and two children, Demmy and May, and, at this time, the estranged wife of Elisha Maxwell, lived on a homestead adjoining town-and, like the Isaacsons and Andersons and Alfred Hazeltine, were regarded as town folk. Elisha Maxwell, brother of Andy, lived part time with his mother in town, as did also his wife. Elisha’s wife was the daughter of Matt Randall, then living near Ontario, seven miles south-west of Wetmore. There was much in common between the town folk and those borderites. Let it be a picnic or a dog-fight they were all on hand. Altogether they made one big-shall I say—happy family. This, however, strictly speaking, would not be quite right. Gus Mayer built the first residence in Wetmore—the Neville dwelling on the corner where the First National Bank now stands. His daughter Lillie (Mrs. Peter Cassity) was the first child born in the town—though Irving Isaacson was born earlier in a temporary shack near the present depot before the town was established.
There was a one-room school house on the site of the present City hall, with one teacher, John Burr—in 1869. I was nearly eight years old then, and my brother Charley was a little over nine. This was to be our first—and last — school. Charley died at the age of eighteen; and I was out of school—not graduated, not expelled, but out—before the shift to the present location on the hilltop.
While our home was being built in Wetmore on the lot where Hart’s locker is now, the family found shelter in a one-room, up-and-down rough pine board shanty in hollow west of the graveyard, on the Andy Maxwell homestead—the farm now owned and occupied by Orville Bryant. This little “cubbyhole” was originally built to house Andy ’ s brother Elisha—known here as “The Little Man” — and his bride.
Charley and I followed a cow-path through all prairie grass all the way from the shack — about a half mile — to the school house. And during that first winter, after the path had been obliterated by a big snow which drifted and packed solidly over the board fence enclosing the school grounds, bearing up pupils — even horses and sleighs zoomed over the drifted in fence—we skimmed over the white in a direct air line to the school, with not a thing in the way.