John Warner Ladd

John Warner Ladd, son of Araminta Warner and John Ladd, Jr., was probably born 16 July 1873 in Galena, Jo Daviess County, IL. The use of “probably” is used in the interest of genealogical honesty, because no source from the year of that birth is available to consult. No birth certificate. No family Bible. So the details come from later sources that were vulnerable to informant error. All such sources agree that John was born on July 16th. Many support 1873 as the year and Galena (or at least the state of Illinois) as the place. Contraindications include his marriage certificate, which suggests the year of birth was 1872. This is unlikely. Among other things, it would mean his mother was a pregnant bride and this does not seem to have been the case. His obituary and death certificate say the year was 1876. This surely means his widow, in her bereavement, forgot how old he actually was. The 1880 and 1900 censuses have Wisconsin as his birthplace. While it is true his parents moved around during his early childhood and did spend some of those years in Wisconsin, they are also known to have spent time in Galena, and it would make perfect sense they were there in the middle of July in 1873.

John was called Jack by some of his friends and neighbors, but it was a nickname only. All public records show him under his formal name or under his business name of J.W. Ladd.

His mother had been raised in Winslow, Stephenson County, IL, a small village along the Pecatonica River just south of the Illinois-Wisconsin state line. His father had arrived in Stephenson County as a child in the 1840s, at first living on a farm a few miles southwest of Winslow, and then he had come of age within Winslow Township. The connections to Winslow were deep but John W. may literally never have personally lived there. His uncle John Warner had moved in 1870 a mile north of Winslow to Martintown, Green County, WI, where he became very well established as the son-in-law of that village’s wealthy founder, Nathaniel Martin. Those secure circumstances made Uncle John and his wife Nellie into anchor figures for relatives whose prospects were blighted by the Panic of 1873, the severe economic depression that hit the nation in the wake of the government’s decision to no longer heavily subsidize the railroad industry. Family matriarch Marancy Alexander Warner and her still-bachelor youngest son Charles A. Warner are known to have made use of this support. It is likely Minta and John Jr. did so as well, but this is not a documented fact. They could have been elsewhere in Wisconsin. They may also have spent a bit of time with John Jr.’s father and other family members in Story County, IA. It’s also not documented that they were struggling financially in the 1870s, though their choice not to hurry to add to the family following the late 1874 birth of second child Kate Ladd suggests they may have wanted to limit the number of mouths they had to feed.

The paper trail becomes solid again as of the year 1879. Charles A. Warner was by then turning twenty-six years old and had at last acquired a wife, former Winslow neighbor Mary Elizabeth Maurer. The two initiated their life together farming all the way across Iowa in Sheridan Township, Washington County, NE near Blair, the county seat. Minta and John Jr. decided they would farm nearby. The Ladds brought along Marancy, who was still vigorous at fifty-five years of age and willing to help with the raising of her grandchildren -- an increasing number of grandchildren given that Charles and Mary became parents not long after they became Nebraskans, and the births continued at a pace of approximately every other year. The outward-bound family members said their farewells to John Warner and the other loved ones they had known in the Winslow/Martintown area. Minta, John Jr., John W., and little Kate would never again reside east of the Great Plains.

(At right is John Warner Ladd and his little sister Kate as photographed in 1876 or 1877. This was scanned directly from a print was once owned by their uncle John Warner. This is how he knew them best. By the time they were a little older, they lived far away and he probably laid eyes on them only a handful of times over the remaining decades of his life.)

The two family households remained on their Sheridan Township farms for five years. While his little cousins would untimately have little or no memory of living there because they were so young (or even unborn) at the time, John undoubtedly came away with a trove of childhood memories. These years represented the main chunk of his schoolboy phase of life. The region was still in its pioneer phase and few high schools had been established. Six years of schooling in tiny one-room rural schoolhouses was often the most a farm boy of the region got before being relegated to helping out in the fields full-time.

Why did the Ladds and Warners stick around only five years? This is not explained in any surviving material. Clearly Minta and John Jr. and Charles and Mary felt they could do better elsewhere. Their decision to leave may simply have been an instance of “the grass is greener over there” syndrome at work because from a third-party perspective, the Washington County sojourn was successful. The nation had finally shrugged off the economic malaise of the 1870s. The development of eastern Nebraska was proceeding steadily. Charles and Mary felt secure enough to keep adding to their family and even Minta finally became pregnant again in the autumn of 1883. Even so, they apparently came to feel they could do better. In 1884, land a bit farther west in Nebraska (though still only a quarter of the way across the state) became open to settlement. The Ladds and Warners knew they could grab 160-acre homesteads if they got there in time, so they -- along with huge numbers of other families from Washington County and the counties around it -- made the move. They ended up in Knox County, their homesteads occupying parts of Section 18 of what would soon become Miller Township. The nearest village of any size was Creighton, eight miles to the east.

By the time of their arrival in Knox County, Minta was turning forty. She and John Jr. probably regarded themselves as beyond their “young and restless” phase and were ready to stay put either for good or at least until retirement. They were prepared to shape their new home into their generation’s version of what Winslow had been to John and Marancy Warner, i.e. they expected to be founders of the area -- pioneers who would shape the infrastructure and bureaucracy. On a personal level, they aimed to finish raising their family and hoped to live long enough to see the first of their grandchildren enter school and show what sort of adults they might become. They probably expected to be buried in Knox County. Charles and Mary Warner committed themselves in the same manner. Even young John, though only eleven years old, must have been caught up in the spirit.

There was reason to believe their chosen spot would fulfill these hopes. The area seemed productive. Water was seemingly no issue. Summer thunderstorms typically kept the land green even in August and September. Merriman Creek ran through the family acreage. Moreover, the landscape of the homesteads was gently rolling in such a way as to provide relief from the prairie wind. Stream courses were sunk down in channels, and this was undoubtedly a welcome aspect to both Minta and her brother. They had grown up where the rivers and creeks ran sluggishly, flooding all too often in the rainy season, and giving rise to wetlands whose stagnant waters nurtured malarial mosquitoes. They would also have appreciated not having to clear their land to make it ready for cultivation -- at least not to the degree their father had been forced to deal with the timber on the Winslow homestead in the early 1840s. They understood there would be tradeoffs. In Knox County, the trees were riparian, hugging close to the streams or clustering wherever a spring bubbled up. The trees tended to be brushy in nature and the wood soft, i.e. it was often not suitable for lumber, which in turn meant that lumber for building homes sometimes had be shipped in from a distance. Even firewood could be hard to come by, forcing the families to economize and use dried cattle dung or bundles of corn stalks rather than deplete their precious stacks of cordwood. Their homes at first were either log cabins or were fashioned of sod bricks, perhaps halfway sunk down in the earth to provide partial insulation from the harshness of snow and wind, a type of home known as a “dugout.” Sod brick construction is known to have been used for the school John and Kate began attending. The first (known) wood-frame schoolhouse in Miller Township was not erected until 1888.

In Washington County, the two families had not quite been neighbors. For example, in the 1880 census, the Ladds appear five pages after the Warners in the fourteen-page Sheridan Township enumeration. In Knox County, their farms were adjacent. Chances are high the houses were arranged within the same greater yard straddling the property line, perhaps even sharing a barn and/or a root cellar at first. The advantages of the arrangement were obvious, not the least because Marancy could look after either group of grandchildren -- or all of them as one larger group -- without the logistics becoming a challenge. Given that John and Kate were older now, Marancy boarded less often in Minta and John Jr.’s home and more with Charles and Mary, whose girls needed her more because they were so small and numerous. John W. came to know his first cousins Laura, Alta, Edna, and Sibyl well during the remainder of the 1880s into the early 1890s, though he was inevitably set apart from them due to the age difference and the fact he was the only male. Sibyl Warner was not even born until 1886, two years after the families had arrived. Therefore it was John’s schoolmates who were his true peers and confidantes.

At first, things went relatively well. The surrounding farms grew. Fences began to demarcate fields “rescued” from their wild state and made productive -- a process we of today might view with at least a little ambivalence but one that in the pioneer era meant progress and an increase in safety and prosperity. Creighton expanded. Other villages were founded in that part of the county, though all were at least a few miles from the Warner/Ladd farms. One hardship was unusually cold weather in the middle of the 1880s -- and on the Great Plains, hard winters meant blizzards and arctic fronts so severe and sudden in arriving that cattle would become lost in the snows and die before they could be brought back to shelter. The locals thought they knew what to expect, but they were hit harder than that due to the effects of the eruption of the Krakatoa volcano in 1883, which cooled the entire Earth and made subsequent winters harsher than the norm. The families coped, however. The big sorrows of the 1880s had more to do with the health problems of the two youngest children of each of the two households. Charles and Mary Warner’s fifth daughter, born in the spring of 1888, was so afflicted it was apparent she would not survive her infancy, and does not appear to have been given a name even though she was nearly five months old when her suffering ended. The youngest of the Ladd children, Ira Earl Ladd, born just as the Knox County chapter of the family saga was beginning, was mentally retarded, either from birth or from a fever in early childhood.

The precise extent of Ira’s condition is not disclosed in surviving family writings, but public documents show it was severe enough that he was unable to attend school, never had a paying occupation, and lived with his parents as an adult until his mother had a stroke in late 1910 and was rendered unable to care for him. Both parents were dead by early 1912, and Ira remained institutionalized for the remainder of his brief life, dying at age thirty-one. John W. Ladd, who turned eleven years old the same month that Ira was born, had to grow up fast, because his parents had no choice but to devote a disproportionate amount of their love, supervision, and guidance toward Ira. No records remain to say how much John may have been disappointed to be cheated out of the healthy baby brother he had dreamed of, nor how much he may have suffered from the reduction in attention paid to him. However, his reaction over the long haul seems to have been to “man up.” He began working a farm of his own in the early 1890s at only nineteen years of age. The acreage he rented was very near his parents’ land and he continued to board with them. Even as he was committing to this lifestyle and level of support for his family, his sister Kate married next-door neighbor Charles Davey and turned her attention to her own household and offspring. Before long she and Charles moved away to Creighton, and this to all intents and purposes freed Kate from any real share of the burden represented by Ira. She was too far off to check in at her parents’ house every day. In that pre-automobile era, eight miles of distance took a couple of hours to deal with. The nearest (newly built) railroad line did not pass near enough to the farm to speed things up. A visit still meant journeying by wagon and team over bumpy dirt roads.

This photograph taken by Gayle Neuhaus 16 September 2013 shows the modern-day view westward from Section 18 of Miller Township. Irrigation adds to the greenness, but the summer rains of Knox County are usually sufficient to stave off the “yellow ocean of grass” effect found farther west in the Great Plains, and John Warner Ladd would have known the area in much this way in the 1880s. This particular vantage is what he would have seen as a boy whenever he stood outside his home and faced to the west. That is to say, this is not the land the Ladds and Warners lived upon. This is the view seen from those homesteads. You are looking at Logan Township, not Miller Township. The rental property John began farming in the 1890s was in Logan Township. Perhaps the very land he labored upon is in this view.

Times grew indecently tough for the Ladd family as the 1890s progressed. It was tough all through the state due to severe drought, crop failures, the Panic of 1893, and more. The situation was so grim that a state that had surged in population from immigration in the 1880s saw an increase of only 7,000 from the years 1890 to 1900. At some point, John’s parents were forced to sell their homestead. (It perhaps was bought by Charles and Mary Warner, whose farm is shown on a 1903 parcel map as twice as large as their original 160-acre homestead.) The displaced couple either moved onto John’s rented parcel in Logan Township, or John gave up his parcel and moved in with them on some other Logan Township property they chose for themselves, combining forces to see if together they could outlast the hard times.

It is reasonable to declare they did not truly outlast the hard times, at least not to the extent that John Jr. and Minta were willing to stay in Knox County. The drought conditions eased somewhat in the mid-1890s, but the latter part of the decade brought a new flavor of heartache. Charles A. Warner developed stomach cancer and died in the spring of 1898. Then in the summer of 1901, Marancy Warner passed away. Son and mother were both buried in the little cemetery -- now known as Olcott Cemetery -- a mile southeast of the original homesteads. Losing her mother was the last straw for Minta. She and John Jr. left at once. They reestablished themselves 300 miles westward in Hot Springs, SD, in the southern portion of the Black Hills. Kate and Charles Davey accompanied them. None of these family members would ever again live in Nebraska, except that after Minta’s death, John Jr. appears to have spent at least some of the remaining four months of his own life back in Knox County in his son’s home.

John W. didn’t go. He had been the “good son.” His parents were probably the first to say he deserved the chance to finally have an independent life unburdened by the weight of others. He decided he would seize that opportunity, and he chose to do so in Knox County. He continued to farm into 1902, taking his time determining what he would do next, and in the meantime completing the harvest of whatever crops he had planted, and letting his livestock mature to the point where he could sell at full market value. Then he moved to Creighton. He would never again be a farmer/rancher.

Here is Creighton as it looked less than a decade after John became a resident of the village. This view was printed on a postcard sent 29 March 1909 by Sibyl Warner to Bert Warner, one of her and John’s mutual first cousins.

That final year (or perhaps year-and-a-half) on the Logan Township land may have left him on his own so much that he came to relish the prospect of dwelling within a village. The period was, however, not as lonely as it might have been. True, he no longer had the daily and/or nearby presence of his parents, siblings, brother-in-law, nephew, or even for that matter his uncle and his grandmother, but there is ample indication that he got by okay. The neighbors of the surrounding farms were almost all made up of people who had pioneered the area in the mid-1880s, just as he had, including many who shared his experience of having come there as a child. They had much in common. He was a sociable fellow and was on a friendly basis with quite a number of these locals. Moreover, for the time being his widowed aunt Mary Maurer Warner kept her farm going, and for at least a few more years, her four girls also remained based in Knox County. The latter, even though they were now adults or nearly so, still looked up to John as the older brother they never had. If he found himself in desperate need of a home-cooked meal and the comfort of family, he knew where to go.

In addition to his Warner-clan relatives, John was able to maintain a bond with one last representative of his kinfolk on the Ladd side. While his father had been off fighting in the Civil War, his very young nephews Norman H. Ladd and Frederick A. Ladd -- sons of his brother Henry Ladd -- had lost their mother. Norman and Fred had gone on to be raised by their grandfather John Ladd, Sr. and by their maiden aunt Laurentine, and for that matter, by uncles including John Ladd, Jr. Norman and Fred, though they had come of age in Iowa, felt a particular bond with John Ladd, Jr. and followed him out to Knox County by covered wagon in the late 1880s or early 1890s. Fred and his wife and kids had gone on to Idaho within a few years, but Norman had stayed in Knox County, becoming a saloonkeeper and later a blacksmith. With the departure of his uncle to South Dakota, Norman came to depend on his first cousin John Warner Ladd, particularly because Norman was a lifelong bachelor and had no wife or children to look after him. Eventually (in the early 1910s) when Norman’s health took a turn for the worse, a final decline that appears to have lasted many months and perhaps over a year, he took shelter with John. When the time came, Norman passed away in John’s home, and that was where the funeral was held.

Once John was in place in Creighton, he rapidly became accustomed to his new environment. He had never been a tradesman, but that sort of occupation seemed to be where opportunity lay. Many of the males of his mother’s family had done well for themselves as tradesmen, doing so as sawyers, carpenters, blacksmiths, and masons. John became a liveryman. A livery or two could be found in almost any American village at the turn of the Twentieth Century but is a type of business unfamiliar to the general public today, so perhaps a definition should be offered: A livery of those times was a large barn/stable where the owner stabled and cared for horses and rented out horses, wagons, and buggies. After a period as an employee, John took over an operation in Creighton previously owned by a Mr. Butterfield. John opened for business in early March, 1904. However, even though his grand-opening advertisements declared, “I am here to stay,” he gave up on the profession after just a couple of years. He found himself unsatisfied, perhaps because of the hardships -- during his tenure, a horse was stolen, a wagon and team was held in hock in another town because the man renting it owed money in that town, and a pair of horses were injured when dogs spooked them and ran them into a barbed wire fence. (John was thrown from the wagon in the process and came up bruised and shaken.) The deciding factor was probably that the business wasn’t sufficiently profitable. John saw a better opportunity, and took it. He became a butcher and opened a meat market.

This was the right move. Not only does John seem to have had the requisite skill set in terms of hand dexterity and an eye for evaluating the quality of meat, not only did he have an amiable way with customers, but he had the good judgment to involve himself in an industry on the brink of transformation. To be a butcher prior to the turn of the Twentieth Century was as much about knowing how to preserve meat as it was about cutting it up. A butcher of 1870 was a sausage maker. A butcher of 1906, on the other hand, was the owner of a storefront that could keep things cold in the summer because room-size refrigeration units were becoming practical. The equipment was expensive, but that was in a way an asset because it meant only retail establishments that dealt with a large amount of perishable merchandise could justify the cost -- an individual homeowner would not make such a purchase. In fact, in 1906, no one else in all of Creighton would have had reason to make that sort of investment. Once John purchased his unit, he could stock his cold room with essentials like eggs, butter, and milk, not just cuts of meat. Creighton housewives were able to stop keeping their own chickens and their own milk cows. They were able to cease chewing up large parts of their day engaged in the labor of caring for the critters. Instead they could drop by John’s meat market, exchange lively greetings and neighborhood gossip, and they were glad to pay the cash knowing how many hours of labor that quick visit had saved them. Even those households that acquired ice boxes still came to John -- because ice boxes needed ice, and guess who the only fellow was in town who had ice to sell? The net result? John’s meat market thrived. Early partner John T. Hookstra stepped aside in April, 1908, and within two more years John changed the name from Creighton Meat Market (sometimes called Ladd & Hookstra) to West Side Meat Market, “J.W. Ladd, Proprietor.” John had found his calling. He became so much a fixture as a businessman of Creighton, held in such regard as one of the community’s leading citizens, that in 1912, after only half a dozen years in business, he was profiled in the book Compendium of History, Reminiscence, and Biography of Nebraska, published by the Alden Publishing Company of Chicago.

(Shown at left is an advertisement for John’s butcher shop. It was published in The Winnetoon Pioneer newspaper in 1926 and refers not to his operation in Creighton, but to the successor meat market he owned and operated later in his career. Note the phone number. In 1906, phone service was a rarity across America and chances are high he did not have a phone at his place of business when the doors first opened to the public.)

One of the individuals John came to know during his first few years in Creighton was Betty Johnson, a widow in her late twenties. Born Elizabeth Josephine Ragnar (or Elisabet Josefina Ragnar) 10 October 1875 in Sweden, she had arrived in the United States as a teenager in the early 1890s. Chances are she came with a brother or other relative, but may have come on her own, and certainly not with her parents, Carl P. Ragnar and Sofia Josefina Andersdotter. She had made her way to Knox County, where she had become the wife of Alexander Nathaniel Johnson in December, 1896.

The Johnsons were well established in the local vicinity, having homesteaded in Creighton Township in 1884 -- their arrival coinciding with that of the Ladds and Warners to neighboring Miller Township. Increasingly, more and more of the members of that extended family had left their rural circumstances behind in favor of life within the village itself. John Ladd would over time become acquainted with most or all of them. The patriarch was Peter Johnson. His wife was Anna (formerly Hanson). Already in their mid-sixties when John’s butcher shop opened for business, the pair were Swedes, but had been in the United States much longer than Betty. Paul and Anna had arrived in the country in 1865, each of them settling in Shelby County, IL, where they wed in 1866. Their first two sons had been born in Illinois, then five more had come along after the couple founded a homestead near Hooper, Dodge County, NE. Alex, the fourth of the seven children, had been ten years old when the family founded their new homestead in Creighton Township. This mirrored John’s own experience of arriving at age eleven, and the two probably would have felt quite a kinship had they been able to get to know each other well. They may have in fact met, but they would not have had much chance to cement a friendship. During the bleak years of the bank panic and drought, Alex had gone west and started to develop a piece of property in Sedgwick County, CO. He did not live there full time. He was often back in Creighton -- he married Betty in Creighton, the pair appear in Creighton in the 1900 census, and it was in Creighton that all four of their children were born. But the Sedgwick County home was regarded as the primary residence, or at least was intended to be, and Alex did die there, his death taking place 14 October 1903. He was buried in Creighton, though. His body was brought back by rail for burial in Greenwood Cemetery, his wife, kids, parents, and brother William Theodore Johnson escorting it on the journey. The cause of death was tuberculosis, the same affliction that had claimed the life of his youngest brother, Nels, just four months earlier in the very same house. (The body of Nels had also been transported back to Creighton for burial.)

Betty apparently had no interest in remaining in Sedgwick County, leaving it to her brother-in-law William Johnson and family to take over there. Instead Betty retreated to Creighton and her familiar acquaintances. This kept the kids near their grandparents. Given that Betty’s own parents were back in Sweden (or were perhaps already deceased), Paul and Anna Johnson were the only grandparents the kids knew. The kids were Herbert, Irene, and John. The latter was frequently known as Johnny (and will for convenience be called Johnny for the rest of this essay). One other child had died in infancy. This child was probably Harry Johnson, born and died 21 June 1898, whose grave can be found at Greenwood Cemetery. Herbert, Irene, and Johnny had been six, four, and two years old respectively at the time of their father’s death, so Betty had her hands full as a single parent. Nevertheless she took her time selecting a new husband. Almost any other Nebraska widow of her era would have had a great deal of trouble making financial ends meet by staying single, but Alex had taken out a couple of life insurance policies that between them paid Betty a total of four thousand dollars. Betty had the freedom to be choosy. She held out nearly four years. It speaks well of John W. Ladd that he met her standards. The pair became husband and wife 4 July 1907 in Creighton. The ceremony was officiated by George Stockwell, pastor of St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Creighton.

Betty and John did not have biological children together. On the surface, this seems strange. John and Betty’s domestic situation was stable. Further children would have thrived in their household. John probably wanted biological progeny and Betty, a thirty-one-year-old bride, was still well within the traditional span of childbearing years. One explanation is that some sort of medical issue may have interfered -- sterility perhaps being an unintended side effect of abdominal surgery Betty underwent in Sioux City in the spring of 1908 for appendicitis. Another is that Betty may have desired to spend as much attention as she could to her daughter Irene, who apparently suffered a head injury or was ravaged by a high fever when she was eight or nine years old, rendering her mentally handicapped. Irene would by adolescence be sent off to the Institute for the Feeble Minded near Beatrice, Gage County, NE, thereafter spending time at home with the family only on a sporadic basis. She would live out a long adult life at the institution, ultimately coming back home only in the sense that her grave is at Greenwood Cemetery.

John would well have understood the time-consuming nature of caring for a mentally-impaired member of the immediate household. Fate having dealt the cards, John’s experience as a parent was entirely a function of his being a stepfather. Over the long run, he fulfilled that paternal role for Betty’s kids longer than poor Alex Johnson had been able to. Herbert, the eldest, had been barely ten at the time of the wedding. Johnny would grow up unable to recall any other father but John Ladd. Johnny was even sometimes known as Johnny Ladd, even though he and his siblings retained Johnson as their legal last name.

The 1912 biographical sketch in Compendium of History, Reminiscence, and Biography of Nebraska portrays John as a man so much in his place he seemed destined to stay in Creighton all the way to retirement and probably all the way to the grave. At the time of the book’s publication, it may well have been the sort of future John himself imagined he would have, but as the decade progressed, Creighton lost its luster for him, and for Betty as well. The personal reasons for this change of perspective are clear enough. The people they had cleaved to in Creighton were disappearing. Some of this was due to mortality: Betty’s former mother-in-law Anna Hanson Johnson died 8 January 1912. Norman Ladd died 30 December 1913. Betty’s former father-in-law Paul Johnson died 3 April 1917. Other developments were not as morbid but still were profound in their effect, such as Betty’s kids becoming adults. Herbert went off to college in Valparaiso, IN. Irene was nearly always at the asylum in Beatrice. Eventually enough was enough. In the autumn of 1917, John sold the Creighton butcher shop to Clark Parkhurst, the man who had been his junior partner since 1911 or 1912, and bought the City Meat Market of Winnetoon, NE. It wasn’t practical to live in Creighton and operate a business several miles away, so he and Betty moved, bringing along not-yet-quite-an-adult Johnny Johnson. The relocation put John back in Miller Township. He was once again “among his people.”

The couple did not return to the same part of Miller Township that John had lived in before. Winnetoon was a village situated in the township’s northeast corner about five miles from the spot where the Ladd homestead had been. The settlement had sprung into being in 1892 when a railroad line was established through the area. In subsequent years it had grown to a few hundred residents -- not quite as many as dwelled in Creighton, but enough to support a meat market. John apparently felt it would support an even better meat market than it had earlier enjoyed, and decided not to limit himself to the space the City Meat Market had occupied. The Richling Harness Shop was vacating its quarters along the town’s main thoroughfare. John shifted his business there some time in 1918.

The building shown in the right half of this image housed the Ladd butcher shop from 1918 to 1926. This photograph was taken before John and Betty’s tenure, however. If you look carefully, you will see the words “Harness Shop” on the main sign. (Image courtesy of Gayle Neuhaus of the Winnetoon Historical Society.) The building still stands today, more than a hundred years after its construction, as shown below in a photograph taken by Connie Smeds 23 August 2016.

One could argue the late 1910s and early 1920s was when Winnetoon reached its peak. (The population has dwindled since then, bringing the tally down to less than a hundred residents in the 21st Century.) Even so, when John and Betty arrived, it was a small and isolated community -- so isolated, in fact, that coyotes still roamed the prairie around it, preying upon livestock. Being so tight-knit a place, everybody banded together in a way they would not in a larger settlement, as for example when they organized big hunts in the winter to try to deal with the aforementioned problem with the coyotes (or prairie wolves, as the locals often called them back in that era). Just by opening up for business in Winnetoon, John immediately became a person well known to the whole village. There was more to the familiarity than that, though. John had known many of the residents for over thirty years. Like him, a great many homeowners had formerly been farmers in the rural portion of the township. Over the early years of the Twentieth Century, these individuals had drifted into the village.

Among those former friends and neighbors were the Bonges and the Crandalls, clans headed by two elderly couples, Claus Bonge (1843-1924) and his wife, the former Matilda Voss (1845-1927), and Albert W. Crandall (1849-1939) and his wife, the former Mary Ann Stokes (1854-1933). Claus and Matilda were German immigrants who had spent the early years of their marriage in McLean County, IL. They had come on to Miller Township in 1882 (or about then). The last two of their eight (known) children were natives of Knox County. A.W. and Mary Ann had spent the first part of their marriage in rural Cook County, IL about 25 miles southwest of Chicago. In 1883, A.W.’s father had purchased land in Miller Township. The following year, A.W. and Mary Ann had taken possession of it, meaning they arrived in Knox County at the same time as the Ladds and Warners. In 1914, by which point the youngest of their nine children was eighteen years old, A.W. and Mary Ann had come to Winnetoon.

The Bonges and the Crandalls were folk John W. Ladd knew mainly as neighbors and butchershop clientele, but the genealogical connections should be mentioned. Claus and Matilda’s son Clark Ferdinand Bonge (1881-1947) was the husband of Edna Warner, the pair having wed back on New Year’s Eve, 1902. They had gone on to produce two children, Willard and Gladys Bonge. Clark’s slightly older sister Clara Matilda Bonge (1877-1975) was the wife of Howard Wallace Crandall (1875-1972), eldest child of A.W. and Mary Ann.

It is the writings of A.W. Crandall that today are the prime source of information about John and Betty during their years in Winnetoon. From his arrival in Winnetoon in 1914 until the sunset of his life in 1939, A.W. maintained a daily diary -- meaning he filled twenty-six annual volumes during that span. After he died, the books ended up stored at the village bank, which was owned by a couple of his sons. Later in the Twentieth Century, material from the bank was moved to the former schoolhouse. In 1994, when the schoolhouse was being cleared of its contents, the diaries were discovered and recognized for their historical value. The originals were given to descendants, but microfilm copies and transcripts were made and are available to persons researching the early days of Knox County. The entries reveal the daily life of Winnetoon 1914-1939 from an insider’s viewpoint. Of particular relevance is that A.W. refers to John W. Ladd and/or to Betty in multiple volumes.

The first such entry is that of 6 December 1918. For weeks A.W. had been noting the cases of flu among friends, neighbors, and family members, including his granddaughter Lorena Crandall, and is concerned about his own light symptoms becoming worse, whereupon on the 6th he adds, “Mrs. Ladd is about half sick abed in two chairs.” This was no trivial observation. The nation was in the midst of the initial assault of the great influenza pandemic and the newspapers were full of the accounts of fatal cases from coast to coast and across the planet. Happily Betty pulled through fine.

Thanks to A.W., we know John and Betty did not depend entirely on the income from the meat market, but also hired out his services as a plumber. It could well be that the maintenance of his refrigeration equipment led to him developing expertise in the repair of pipes, faucets, and valves ruined by freezing -- something which happened often during Nebraska winters -- and he became one of the “go to” guys around town to call for help. Sometimes getting pipes protected meant digging ditches to bury them sufficiently underground. John did that work, too, aided by his stepson. (A.W. mentions hiring Johnny -- called Johnny Johnson Ladd in one entry and John Johnson in another -- to fix his fences. Johnny was a close friend of A.W.’s grandson Leonard Milford Crandall.) As with any small-village economy, some work was surely done on a barter basis. A.W. mentions building a flower box for Betty in August, 1922, apparently charging the Ladds only for the lumber and bolts (an outlay of $1.25).

Betty and Mary Ann Crandall were friends, causing Betty to be repeatedly mentioned in the social doings that Mary Ann was involved in, such as birthday parties, costume dances, and meetings of the Ladies Aid Society. (A.W. refers to a gathering of women friends at the Van Camp home 1 February 1919 as a “hen party.”) Mary Ann was one of those who checked in upon Betty during a bad case of illness in late February, 1923.

On the fifteenth of July, 1922, John was sworn in as Winnetoon village marshall. (As it happens, this is not one of the facts noted in A.W.’s diary, but A.W. would have had an appreciation for John’s role inasmuch as A.W. had served as sheriff of Knox County at the turn of the century, temporarily relocating to Niobrara, the county seat, in order to fulfill that job.)

In early 1926, John and Betty made an ambitious occupational move. As A.W. notes in the 16 February 1926 entry of his diary, “Jno. Ladd moved his ice box and [Ice] Company across the street in the Campbell building and will run a butcher shop and restaurant combined.”

Adding a restaurant sounds like John and Betty were confident of their prosperity and were investing in themselves and in the village in a new and creative way. Maybe so, but it is more likely the restaurant was a “last gasp” sort of effort to keep themselves afloat financially. Unfortunately, this “doubling down” strategy did not pay off. In August, 1927, they gave up -- not just on the restaurant, but on the butcher shop, the ice house, and upon Winnetoon itself. A.W.’s diary entry of 26 November 1927 mentions that the “Ladd auction” was held that day -- the liquidation of John and Betty’s remaining assets. The Creighton News of 1 December 1927 mentions John having arrived from Harrold, Hughes County, SD that week to take care of business matters.

The problem does not appear to be any mistake or lack of initiative on John and/or Betty’s part. They were undoubtedly victims of a phenomenon gripping the whole nation in the 1920s. Small villages were losing their economic hearts -- the clusters of small retail businesses that every such village had routinely supported a generation earlier. All over the heartland, the owners of general stores, blacksmith shops, and dressmakers’ parlors found themselves unable to compete in an increasingly global marketplace. People had cars. Even A.W. Crandall, who was too much a creature of the Nineteenth Century to personally own or drive a car, could call upon his sons or grandsons to drive him where he needed to go. It was now simply too easy for Winnetoon-area residents to hold back on local purchases and spend their money instead in the bigger towns and cities, where their dollars would go further. John had insulated himself from the similar declines of the previous two decades by choosing the sorts of ventures that did not particularly suffer from distant competition. People didn’t journey far for meat and butter, and certainly not for ice. When they felt the impulse to have a steak sandwich for lunch, they dropped in at John and Betty’s restaurant rather than zoom off eighty miles to Sioux City. Alas, the village as a whole was in decline, and this inevitably affected every village business, no matter what product or service they offered. There simply wasn’t enough money in circulation within Winnetoon to keep John and Betty’s cash register ka-chinging.

Betty Ladd is the woman on the left in this image. She is standing outdoors in Winnetoon beside her neighbor and friend Molly Secrist. Betty was in her forties when this photograph was taken. Molly was fourteen years her senior. Molly and had been a close neighbor of the Ladd family in the 1890s, so she and John had been acquainted with one another well before they became neighbors in Winnetoon. (Image courtesy of Gayle Neuhaus of the Winnetoon Historical Society.)

Though John accepted that he and Betty had to leave, the actual departure could only have been bitter for him. He had been a denizen of Knox County since before he needed to shave. He probably sensed he might never again “settle in” anywhere the way he had on his parents’ homestead, and then in Creighton, and finally in Winnetoon. This was an accurate premonition, coming true in part because he died only seven years later. However, some factors made the leavetaking easier than it might otherwise have been. For one thing, John had no relatives left in the area. His siblings were not only gone away; they were deceased -- Ira by a dozen years, Kate by five. His aunt Mary Maurer Warner had given up on the old farm and had moved back to Illinois eight or nine years earlier. Even Edna Warner Bonge was gone. Divorced from Clark Bonge, Edna was by 1927 residing in Rockford, IL, and her kids Gladys and Willard had joined her there. The problem with John and Betty’s initial retreat -- the aforementioned Harrold, SD -- is that it had no familiar faces at all. John had probably selected the site because over twenty years earlier, before marrying Betty, John had investigated homesteading opportunities in South Dakota. His first cousin Laura Belle Warner had taken advantage of those opportunities at that point. John had by contrast been content to stay in Knox County. Laura was still living in Hartley, SD in 1927, but this wasn’t particularly close to Harrold -- Hartley is over a hundred miles west of Harrold. If John and Betty wanted kinfolk around them, they had to find some other situation. And so by Christmas, 1927 or the very early part of 1928, the couple ended up in Twin Falls, ID. This was where Betty’s sister Victoria and brother-in-law Carl Nathaniel Anderson had been based for about ten years.

Victoria appears to have been the only other member of Betty’s birth family to leave Sweden and move to America. She had not come with Betty. In fact, she had only been seven years old when Betty left home at age sixteen. The two sisters had not lived near one another since childhood, so they had extra reason to appreciate each other’s proximity in Twin Falls. Among the fringe benefits was that Betty could enjoy getting to know her three nephews and her niece, all of whom were young enough in 1927 to still be living with their parents.

John and Betty had exhausted their capital, so there was no prospect of opening another butcher shop. Even staying gainfully employed as wage-earners became a challenge once the Great Depression hit. John and Betty’s solution involved taking jobs that kept them apart. Whether this means they were on the rocks in terms of their romantic relationship is an open question. They did not divorce, and they are shown on John’s death certficate with the same address -- 1304 Seventh Avenue East in Twin Falls. It could be they were just as much in love in their final few years as they had been for the preceding ten or twenty, but it is a fact they were not always together. The 1930 census tells part of the story. John is enumerated in rural Twin Falls working and lodging on a truck farm owned by an elderly widower, E.M. Herriott. (A “truck farm” refers to a farm devoted to the growing of fresh produce to be taken to market almost daily. The Herriott farm probably supplied grocery stores, hotels, and restaurants within the town of Twin Falls.) Betty is enumerated as a resident cook at at the Idaho State School for the Deaf and Blind in Gooding County, ID. The couple may have still been maintaining this sort of separation even four years later. John’s obituary mentions that Betty “was in Rupert” -- a village about thirty-five miles east of Twin Falls -- “caring for a sick man” when John died. The obituary further reveals that she had been fetched back to Twin Falls by her sister and brother-in-law, with whom she had taken shelter while waiting for word from her sons before she made the decision about the funeral arrangements.

John’s death came mere days after he had obtained employment potentially steady enough to take him into retirement and perhaps even provide a shred of a pension -- government meat inspector. He was certainly well qualified for the position. He may have had to start low on the totem pole, though, because his position required him to work on Sunday. Even so, he was probably counting himself lucky as he went about his tasks on Sunday, 15 July 1934. At 3:45, shortly after arriving at one of the businesses on his list, he suddenly fell down dead of a heart attack. If he had survived just one more day, he would have made it to his sixty-first birthday (assuming the 1873 birth year is correct), and he and Betty would have celebrated their twenty-seventh wedding anniversary.

Until late 2013, this website described John’s death as the result of violence. That version was a tall tale that appears to have originated with Willard Bonge. Why Willard would have invented his description of John’s demise is a mystery, except that it should be noted that Willard was known to have been eccentric. In any event, in the 1970s, Willard told his cousin Leah Merle Hastings Schumacher of Green County, WI that John Ladd had been found gutted in a butcher shop in Twin Falls -- implying that he was either murdered, or had chosen to commit a bizarre form of suicide utilizing the skills of his trade. Leah wrote down this detail on the same page with other facts about John Ladd she had recently obtained in an interview with her elderly uncle, Bert Warner. Her notes were for a while the only source of detail available about John’s death, but now the real story has been made clear by 1) the lack of any newspaper coverage about a gruesome incident in Twin Falls in mid-July, 1934, 2) the cause-of-death section of John’s death certificate, and 3) John’s obituary.

Another comment about John made by Willard was that John could drink impressive amounts of liquor and remain sober. Given the source this may be not be trustworthy information. However, it is possible to imagine a fairly innocent reason why Willard might have been left with this impression, and be moved to share it. Willard was still living in Knox County when he was a teenager. Like many youths of the late 1910s, he probably tested himself to see how much alcohol he could consume and still remain standing. When comparing his capacity to adult men around him, he may have noticed how much less he could handle than John Ladd could. It would therefore have been something about his surrogate uncle that became forever imprinted upon Willard’s memory.

Betty Ragnar Ladd survived John by over two decades. Her sister Victoria and family continued to be based in Twin Falls. (This was true even in 2013 when the first draft of this biography was being written. Victoria’s son Armour Anderson was one of the prominent citizens of Twin Falls as co-founder and guiding force of the Gem State Paper Company. He survived until early 2016.) Betty therefore always had a haven waiting for her in a pinch, and in fact it was in rural Twin Falls that she passed away 11 May 1957 at the age of eighty-one. (Victoria made it to ninety-six.) In the meantime, Betty did not waste away as a lonely widow. She resumed working in Gooding County, where she wed Fred Vader 20 December 1937 in Hagerman. A divorced man, Fred had three grown sons, so Betty finally got her own chance to be a step-parent. Naturally she did not know these sons as children or participate in their raising as John had done for her offspring, but she did know at least one of them on an everyday basis. Fred’s middle son Earl and his wife and son resided upon and helped maintain Fred’s dairy farm (which in turn was adjacent to the dairy and sheep farm of Fred’s brother Frank Vader). After Fred retired, he and Betty spent a period of time in Spokane, WA, but eventually returned to Idaho. Fred survived Betty by nearly four years, perishing in 1961.

(Above left is John’s small gravemarker at Twin Falls Cemetery. Betty was also laid to rest in that cemetery, but not with John. Instead, she was placed with Fred Vader and is memorialized with him on a larger stone under the name Betty Johnson Vader.)

How Betty’s son Herbert spent his later life has yet to be discovered. Irene, as mentioned, remained institutionalized in Gage County for the whole of her adult life. She passed away 15 March 1973 at age seventy-three. After a long bachelorhood, Johnny Johnson married in his mid-thirties and settled near Ovid, Sedgwick County, CO, where he and his wife Dorothy raised multiple children. The place possibly ended up in his hands as a kind of delayed inheritance -- it may have literally been his biological father’s property, which his uncle William Johnson had lived upon and looked after until his death in 1936. Johnny and Dorothy continued to live there in retirement. Bert Warner and his wife paid a visit during a 1960s cross-country road trip and later described Johnny’s residence as a “beautiful home.” Johnny died in December, 1971. At the time Bert Warner was last in contact in the 1970s, Dorothy was still in place. She died in 1981.

To go back one generation, click here. To return to the Warner/Alexander Family main page, click here.