Into the Sunset
Polli
Jost Turner, Editor
The following are bits and
pieces from the book, Into the Sunset, written by George
S. Ball, and published by the Greeley Tribune in Greeley, Colorado,
in 1966. Pierce, Nunn, and Ault are small towns clustered together
in Weld County, in northeastern Colorado, about 50 miles north
of Denver. It was in this area that Grandpa and Grandma Jones
met and were married, and thus, the birthplace of the Jones
clan.
The Weld County area was
arid. Originally it was mostly just cattle ranching country--wide-open
spaces where the cattle roamed until the cowhands came to round
them up and drive them to market. The ranchers were not pleased,
then, when homesteaders began to come in and settle on what
they considered to be their rangeland. There were resentments
on both sides. The homesteaders had to build fences to protect
their farms and gardens from the grazing cattle, and occasionally
a cowhand would break down a homesteader’s fence to allow
hungry cattle to have a convenient lunch. Eventually the homesteaders
won out, as their numbers increased, and water was brought
in for irrigation.
The author asked several
old-timers of the area to write him a letter telling of their
memories of the early days in Weld County. One of those included
in the book was from Hazel Lemonds McMullen, Grandma Jones’ aunt.
"Dear George,
"You asked me to write
you a letter telling you about my early days in Nunn.
"On March 12, 1852,
William Pinkey Lemonds was born in Monroe Co., Iowa. July 8,
1853, Martha Jane Turner was born in Virginia. Her family migrated
to Iowa. These young people grew to man and womanhood, met
at a 4th of July picnic and were married on April 16th the
following year. After living several different places, they
settled in Taylor Co., Iowa, on a farm. Six of their 8 children
were born there; 2 died in infancy. They lived there until
the spring of 1902, sold their farm and moved to Sharpsburg,
Iowa, and ran a grocery store and meat market for 4 years.
Western fever had gotten into their blood so Father came to
Colorado. The new land in Northern Colorado was just opening
to homesteaders so he filed on 160 acres of land east of the
townsite. Real estate men from Cheyenne had bought a section
of land from the railroad company, laid out a town and called
it Maynard as this part of the country had always been called
Maynard Flats. Father filed on a homestead in July and we had
to be on the land in 6 months, so father and mother sold their
store and home in Iowa, loaded an emigrant car with horses,
cows, dogs, and furniture from a 10-room house and moved to
Colorado. Our home on the plains was a 2-room shack. We stored
our furniture under tarps in the yard.
"Father and my two
brothers, Vote and Lemuel, came to Colorado in January, my
two sisters, Mona and Leo, came in February, and Mother and
myself came in March. When the train stopped to let us off
we stepped in snow to our knees and it was still snowing. Vote
and Lemuel met us and we started home but got lost. We were
plenty scared as we had heard so much about people in the wild
west getting lost and freezing to death. But the boys remembered
a dead cow and her head was pointed east so we went back to
her and got our directions straight and made it home all right.
Father had a light burning in the window for us.
"Spring came on and
the homesteaders began coming. We had to go to Ault for our
mail and as there were 7 of us we almost needed a bushel basket
to get our mail once a week. There were very few fences; we
just made roads across the prairie.
"Father had bought
Mother a lot in Maynard and a Mr. Elsie Moffit had put a very
small grocery store on it. (The building still stands.) The
homesteaders began wanting a Post Office. The Government allowed
it but insisted we call it Nunn, as that was what the railroad
wanted it called instead of Maynard. (That is another story.)
We got our Post Office and it was put in a corner of that tiny
grocery store. Mr. Barney Joyce was our first Postmaster.
"The owners of the
Nunn town site put up a good-sized livery barn and had their
Real Estate office in one corner. By then the town itself had
begun to grow. The Gilcrest Lumber Co. and The Boise Payette
Lumber Co. had each started lumber yards. We had our first
dance in the office of the Gilcrest Lumber Co.; our music was
a fiddle and guitar. We aleman left and swing on the corner,
and did we have fun! More businesses started coming, and we
always had a dance in every new building.
"Our first Sunday School
and Church was in the livery barn. People came in buggies,
wagons and on horseback. The barn was cleaned every Sunday
morning, and everyone brought their own chairs. Miss Pear Row
was Sunday School Supt., I was organist and secretary. Rev.
McMillen from Greeley and Rev. Sureman from Ft. Collins helped
us organize. Rev. Gauss of Greeley was our minister.
"Other businesses began
coming in; at one time we had 3 lumber yards, four grocery
and dry goods stores, a hotel, two restaurants, a millinery
store, hardware store, 2 drug stores, 2 livery barns, 2 meat
markets, bank, feed store, real estate office and newspaper.
Our first restaurant was in a tent house. The first few issues
of the Nunn News were printed in Ault.
"Mr. Jack Kent built
the Hotel and Pool hall. Our first school was held in the pool
hall; Miss Ragland was the teacher. We built a tent house and
moved our Sunday School and Church to it. In the fall of 1907
we built our church that still stands. My father and mother
donated the bell that is still hanging there.
"My family always liked
it there. The first few years the rattlesnakes and cactus bothered
us most. Our entertainment in the early days was house parties,
ice cream socials, box socials, dances and baseball games.
We had one of the best baseball teams in northern Colorado.
We thought nothing of walking the mile and a half to town.
"Our first Harvest
Carnival was held in the barn in the fall of 1906. I didn’t
get to go in the morning; I had to stay at home and bake bread.
The entertainment was races of all kinds and a tug of war between
the men and women. You know who won, don’t you?
[There was a project
underway to divert water from the Laramie River and its tributaries
in Colorado into the Pierce-Nunn area. The state of Wyoming
went to the Supreme Court to try to stop them, and succeeded.
The farmers started dryland farming--kidney beans, sugar
beets, and potatoes--with great success.]
"Everyone had big dreams
of this being a big city. Greeley-Poudre Ditch Co. was organized.
They were going to bring water from the mountains. The Dover
reservoir was made. The Great Western Sugar Co. was going to
build a factory. The Railroad Co. had promised us a depot.
(We had a box car.) But when the Supreme Court ruled that the
water we were expecting belonged to Wyoming, the ditch company
went broke, and the dreams all faded. Then the farmers started
dryland farming.
"My two brothers were
very successful auctioneers. People came and went. My brothers
and sisters married and I married Jim McMullen [Grandma Jones’ uncle]
of Pierce on Aug. 6, 1909.
"My father (Uncle Pink
as he was called) passed away June 10, 1919. My Mother (Aunt
Mat) passed away Aug. 19, 1934, and my husband, Jim McMullen
passed away December, 1961.
"I live in the bank
building now. The only other person living at Nunn that was
here when we came here is Mr. Oscar Barnes.
"I have three daughters:
Gladys McMullen Daems, Ennis, Montana; Martha McMullen Kelly,
Walden, Colo.; and Eva McMullen Watts, Alamosa, Colo.
"This is my remembrance
of the first years in Nunn.
"Respectfully,
"Hazel Lemonds McMullen"
In the author’s reminiscences,
he discusses the time the automobile first came to the area,
commenting that Calvin McMullen had one of the first. I wonder what his father, who
owned the livery stable in Pierce, thought of that! The rest
of this section on autos has nothing to do with our family,
but it is so interesting that I couldn’t resist including
it.
"One of the things
that comes to my mind when I think back over the years is the
coming of the automobile. There were a few in this area before
about 1916, one in Pierce owned by Cal McMullen . . . . The
McMullen family was another that were pioneers in the area;
Mr. William McMullen, the father of Cal and Jim and Mrs. Lem
Lemonds [Alice McMullen, Grandma Jones’ aunt] at Nunn,
homesteaded right east of Pierce where the Batman family lives
today. Cal McMullen homesteaded north of Pierce at the place
now owned by Mrs. Troy (Marie) Jones. He had a family of several
boys and girls; Erma, the oldest girl; Alice, married first
to Harry English, a neighbor of ours, then to Mr. Charles Jones;
other children were Ruth, Claude and Lloyd.
"The automobile never
really came here until about 1916. I think that prosperity
brought on by the first World War made it possible for these
people to own automobiles. They were raising pinto beans at
that time and the price went high so it didn’t take very
many beans to buy an automobile. The going price on a Ford
Touring car--they didn’t have any closed cars at that
time--was $368 or $398, I don’t remember which. I.N. King
ran a Ford agency at Ault. . . . The makes of cars were Ford
and Chevrolet, a few Buicks, Reos and some Maxwells and Vellies;
also Apperson Jackrabbits. I could name a number of different
kinds of automobiles but as I’ve always been a Ford man
it seems like the world revolves around Ford.
"The first Ford that
my folks bought was along in 1916, in the fall. I remember
Forrest Ruffner bringing the Ford out, coming down the road
with the dust a-flying. . . . He was a young man then and he
brought the Ford and gave us all a ride in it; we drove around
the section and it ran pretty good; he left the Ford and went
back to Ault. After it had had time to cool off, we went out
and tried to start it. The Ford didn’t have any self-starter
on it, just a crank. Dad would crank it and then my brother
would crank it and then I would crank it and it wouldn’t
say a word; it was dead as far as we were concerned. Dad went
to the telephone and called up down at Ault to Forrest and
told him, "there’s something the matter with that
car; we can’t get it started." He said, "Well,
what you have to do when you get ready to start it, after it’s
cooled off, you’ll have to choke it; there’s a wire
that runs out front through the radiator, and you pull that
out and make 2 or 3 turns with the crank and then your car
will start." So Dad did that and the Ford started and
we had no more trouble starting it from then on. But that was
just about how "green" everyone was about an automobile
when they first came out.
"They had little old
tires on them, 30" x 3" in front and 30"x 3
1/2" in back and if you had a flat tire it was a case
of fix them some way; I don’t remember how we fixed them
in the early days but all of the air you put into them was
with a hand pump. It was a common occurrence when these automobiles
first came out, the driver not being familiar with an automobile
but had been used to driving a team of horses, that when he
got ready to stop he’d holler "Whoa!" and of
course the car didn’t understand horse talk and it didn’t
stop. Several of them drove their cars through the end of the
garage when they got ready to stop; the car didn’t stop
when they hollered, "Whoa!" That was a common way
for some people to stop a car for a long time. . . .
"With the Model T Ford,
after it had been used for awhile the back main bearing would
wear and the magneto--it had a revolving mag on the fly wheel--would
move away from the field coil so you couldn’t start it
by cranking it. The common method to get it started then was
to jack up the hind wheel about 6 inches off the ground and
that had a tendency, if you put the car in high gear and lowered
the hand brake, to move the coil nearer the magneto. You also
tickled the coils; it had a separate coil for each cylinder
and sometimes those coils would work and sometimes they wouldn’t;
sometimes the points would stick and you’d have to work
with them awhile before you’d get them to work and then
you’d give it about 2 turns with the crank and it would
take off and if you had a little too much gas on, maybe it
would jump off the jack and that would kill the motor again.
But that was the favorite way of starting the Model T Ford
for years, before they put the self-starter on them.
"Sometimes the owner
carried a block of wood the right height and someone would
pick up one corner of the car and the other party along would
place the block of wood under the axle and then it could be
started; they would put it in neutral and shove it off the
block and they were ready to go.
"The lights on those
early-day cars were something out of this world. They were
powered by the magneto and it depended on the speed at which
the car was being driven whether you had any lights or whether
you needed a flashlight or a lantern to see the road. As you
slowed down, so did your lights, till you had no light at all;
I think you could probably see better by moonlight than you
could by your car lights. Some of the cars had oil lights,
coal-oil lights that were on the front, or some kind of carbide
or gas lights. But they were a far cry from the automobiles
that we have now. They have gradually improved as time went
by."
The family is recalled as
being active in the local churches. Alice McMullen, (Grandma
Jones’ aunt) for instance, was secretary for the Pierce
Sunday School. In Oct. of 1906, the Nunn Presbyterian Church
was organized with 25 members, including Mrs. Mattie Lemonds
and her daughter Mona, who joined by letter from the Presbyterian
Church in Sharpsburg, Iowa.
Mr. Ball included a section
of clippings from some of the local newspapers in the early
years. Our family was mentioned several times. This gives an
idea of how hungry small-town newspapers are for stories! By
the way, the Alice McMullen mentioned is Grandma Jones’ aunt.
In the Ault Advertiser,
Nov. 15, 1907--
"B. McMullen, of
Pierce, was through this district Sunday with a party of
land seekers."
In the Pierce Page, March
27, 1908--
"Mr. McMullen is
clipping his livery horses this week."
"Miss Alice McMullen
took dinner with friends at Nunn, Sunday."
June 5, 1908 was a busy
day for the family--
"William McMullen
purchased two fine new rubber tired buggies in Denver, Monday."
"Mrs. McMullen,
Mrs. Shafer and Grandma Davis were calling in the west part
of town Thursday."
"James McMullen’s
trip to Nunn Sunday evening proved very disastrous. While
taking his usual nap on his way home, the horse stepped off
into the Pierce Lateral [a water canal], breaking the dashboard
and shaking Jim up considerably. We think he will be alright
by next Saturday."
Jim and his sister Alice
seem to have had a special interest in the town of Nunn! Perhaps
because the Lemonds family lived there! It was not long after
this that Jim married Hazel Lemonds, and Alice married Hazel’s
brother, Lem Lemonds!
Sources:
Into the Sunset, written by George S. Ball, and published
by the Greeley Tribune in Greeley, Colorado, in 1966.
March 1, 2013
Polli Turner
