Volume 2, No. 4               Buffalo County Historical Society              April  1978

PART II
EARLY DAYS AT ODESSA

from Ten Generations of Grants
                
  Compiled by Alice Howell and Marian Johnson

            This is the second article from Ten Generations of Grants by Myron Scott and is taken in part from a transcription of a conversation between Myron and his aunt, Adah Seaman Basten in August 1934, about the early days in Indiana and Nebraska of Susan Carr Grant, 1873 pioneer to Odessa, and her husband Michael Grant and their children.

Hadassqh Grant Seaman

            Adah Seaman Basten was an aunt of Myron Scott. She was born May 30, 1861 near Goshen, Indiana, and married Cornelius Van Dyck Basten, M.D., on November 24, 1885 at Kearney. Mr. Scott's account of her is as follows:

       "At Fort Kearny, in 1876, and at the age of 15, Adah started teaching school in a small school of five pupils. The school was in a civilian settlement near the post called 'Doby Town.' At that time the town of Kearney was linked to Fort Kearny by a mile long wooden bridge across the Platte River. The young teacher's ride to school on the stagecoach was a daily delight, and at the threshold of the school a snake under the doorstep would rattle its derisive welcome. A local newspaper, The Central Star, was then urging Washington to locate the seat of the national capitol at Kearney, as it was the center of the country, east to west. " Adah attended Nebraska  State University under Chancellor Canfield when it consisted of one building and  200 students. She then studied art in Munich, Germany, and returned to teach painting at the University. Later she became actively interested in the Fort Kearny Memorial Association. Much of the history of Buffalo County has found expression through the stimulus of her public addresses and papers. Her artistic talent was linked with a strong interest in politics, so that her tastefully furnished home was constantly abuzz with discussions of politics, art and medicine."
            Mrs. Basten picks up the story of her parents and grandparents on her mother's side, and continues:
       
          The Carrs sent their sons to school. Their daughters were left without any education to speak of. Grandmother's brother, George Carr, who was married twice, was a surgeon in the Union Army and was known all through Northern Indiana. He had a son who was sent to Notre Dame. He also had a son Oliver.

            John Grant and his brother Michael Grant inherited John Grant's farm in Ohio. Michael got only 100 acres and was disappointed at the size of it so he loaded up the family and left Ohio. They had a double carriage and grandmother rode in that with my mother. The others rode in wagons with all their possessions. They moved to Clinton township, Elkhart County, Indiana. Michael had been there before, but the family was dismayed at the sight of the neighborhood. Their neighbors did not believe in education.


Hadassah and John D. Seaman home on Avenue B in Kearney.

            The new farm in Indiana had a log house on it and they lived in this while they were building a new house. The new house had a circular stairway made of solid black walnut and we used to slide down the stairway in our linsey woolseys. Your mother, Stell, didn't wear shoes until the wintertime. After the day's work, Grandmother would say, "Come children, come get your feet washed." She didn't like us to go to bed with our feet unwashed. And she wouldn't let us go to bed quarrelling. She was peaceable but invincible. Uncle Walter Carr used to say that Susan Carr, your grandmother, was the best man of the lot of them.

            Michael and Susan's daughter Adah Alfretta, we called her Al, was born in the new house. She didn't have very good health, had very small wrists and ankles and could not do heavy work. Yet she married Richard Webb and worked harder than any of us. Stell was born there, too. There were no ornaments in the house, no pictures and very few books, until Marsh came along with his library of 300 volumes which he got in a fire sale. After that we had everything we wanted to read on the homestead and we would read to our heart's content. We had Pope, Byron, Dryden, Milton and Spencer.

            One day, during a game, when my mother was sixteen, she hid in the hay upstairs in the old log house which they were then using as a barn. The hay gave way where there was no floor and she fell plump into a barrel of soft soap. Dess was a school teacher. All of grandmother's daughters taught school. Dess went to church one Sunday. It was the day of the extravagantly sized crinolines over hoops, and if it went down in the front it would go up in the back. Some of the women were horror stricken. Stell was born in August 1859, and my mother, Dess, was married in June of that year. My father called when my mother was wearing a green and white spotted dress and she was making broth. He was wearing one of his celebrated waistcoats and he fell in love with her.

Adah Seaman Basten

            Life on the homestead at Odessa, Nebraska, was interesting in a way. There used to be terrible prairie fires and incursions of grasshoppers and there would be sudden floods with water rising in the gullies. Rattlesnakes would come into the cellars. Stell and I used to ride through the bottom lands along the Platte River on our ponies. Stell had a handsome side saddle. One day there was a funeral service for Al's first baby and word came of a prairie fire, and all of the mourners ran out to fight the fire.

            Grandmother had some money and sent Bunyan off to buy some sheep and he came back with consumption and died in 6 weeks. The Roll boys then came out and worked for grandmother. Michael and Susan's oldest son, Ben Ami ran away to join the army in the Civil War. He was not of age and his father went after him to bring him home. Ben Ami always had an obsession or fear of the measles. He was in barracks in Indianapolis when someone was brought in who had the measles. He promptly took the measles and died there in Indianapolis about 1865. He never got into actual combat. Bunyan, the youngest son of Michael and Susan would have made a great success if he had lived. He could make a crackerjack fourth of July speech. Silas, Bun's next older brother, went off down to the Ozarks and became a ranking citizen. Mother said that her grandmother, Elizabeth Casner, wife of John Grant, was a descendant of a native of Hesse Cassel, Germany.

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            Myron Scott lists the official information about Hadassah (Dess) Grant in his book, Ten Generations of Grants. She was born April 17, 1841 in Sugar Creek Township, Stark County, Ohio, and was the daughter of Michael Grant and Susan Carr. She married John Dillon Seaman at Goshen, Indiana on June 16, 1859.

         "From Elkhart Co., Ind., Dess and her husband moved to Kearney, Buffalo Co., Nebr., arriving 2-13-1873, where they homesteaded land at Odessa. The village of Odessa, ten miles west of Kearney, was named for Hadassah according to descendants of Adah Grant Webb, sister of Hadassah, who still live at Odessa. 

        "John Seaman, husband of Hadassah, was a Republican State Senator from Kearney in 1879. He was instrumental in securing the first water rights for the Kearney Canal, as well as having located at Kearney the State Industrial School. He was active in the construction in the area of the first concrete block houses (then called stone houses) and he built the Stone School House east of Kearney.

        "Dess had a talent as a teller of children's stories and in the early days of Kearney her children's stories would have large numbers of children enthralled in her library on Saturday mornings. She was the first librarian of the Kearney Public Library, opened 9-1-1890 in the Kearney City Hall, and she held that position for nine years (S.J. Clark Pub. Co., Buffalo County and Its People, Chicago, 1916, 2 vols. vol. 1, p. 221). Even before 1890 she had made available to the public at her home in Kearney her own private library of several hundred volumes. The bulk of this private library had been acquired by a younger brother of Dess, John Marshall Grant, who bought the books at a fire sale in Indiana."


Proofread 8-21-2005

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