The previous post in this series ended with two questions: When did Peter D first began to lease the property? Why did he lease a parcel of land so far from his Farmers Valley home? This post begins with an admission: I have no answers to those questions. I did have a hypothesis when I posed the questions, but it turns out to be untenable when we look at the evidence before us.
The hypothesis was that Peter D and Sarah leased the land to give one of their children the opportunity and the means to establish an independent life of their own. The hypothesis made sense in terms of what parents of that day often did (Peter P, for example, provided his children with land of their own) and in recognition of the fact that the Brown township property was 8 miles away from the Farmers Valley home. That might not be an unworkable distance today, but it would, I think, have presented significant challenges in the late nineteenth century.
So why do I now think the hypothesis unlikely? A lack of positive evidence from various censuses and substantial negative evidence from the Buller Family Record (BF). We will start with the latter, since it is the clearest.
The BFR records the marriage dates of each of Peter D and Sarah’s children. Given the fact that Peter D apparently leased the Brown property prior to 1894 (when he as lease holder requested an appraisal so he could purchase the land), we can focus our attention on the children who married before that time. There were three: Johann, Peter P, and Katharina.
(1) In 1889, Johann/John married a young woman from Mountain Lake, Minnesota, Anna Thieszen, and they lived with Anna’s parents for the first few years of their marriage (this last information from GRANDMA). Clearly, the Brown township parcel was not procured for Johann. (2) Peter P, of course, married Margaretha Epp in 1890, and they immediately (we think) moved to the Epp family farm 4 miles east of Henderson. Presumably the Brown property was not meant for Peter P either. (3) This leaves Katharina, who married Heinrich Epp in 1892. Considering that both Johann and Peter P took up residence with their new wives (matrilocality; see here), we might imagine that the Brown 80 acres was meant for Katharina and her new husband. However, there is no evidence supporting this notion, and by the 1900 census Heinrich and Katharian were living in Henderson township. In light of this, it is difficult to imagine that the Brown property was secured for them.
All the other children were married in 1898 or later, so Peter D probably did not lease the land with the thought of transferring it to one of his children that far in advance. Considering the 1894 or earlier leasing of the land and the evidence from the BFR that none of the children who married prior to 1894 gave any hint of establishing a home on that property, we have no alternative but to conclude that we do not know when Peter D leased the property (only that it was apparently before 1894) and why he first leased it and then decided to buy it (a decision that fell to his family to carry out after his death). In short, we cannot offer a reasonable, evidence-based answer to the questions with which this post is concerned.
We can, however, fill in a few more blanks of our family history in the years following Peter D’s death. We learned in the previous post that, after Peter D passed away in September 1897, the family followed through with the requested purchase of the Brown property, buying 40 acres in 1898 and the remaining 40 acres in 1899. Why, one might wonder, did they continue with the sale even after Peter D was dead?
Here the hypothesis of the 80 acres serving as a starter homestead for one of the children finds support. Before we examine the evidence, a few words about censuses of that period. As is well known, the U.S. conducts a decennial census, that is, a census every ten years. The U.S. censuses relevant to the early decades of our family’s life in this country were thus 1880 (a year after Peter D, Sarah, and the children arrived), 1890, 1900, 1910, and 1920. Unfortunately, nearly all the records of the 1890 census were destroyed in a fire in the Commerce Department Building in Washington, DC (see here); all of the Nebraska records were lost in the blaze. Fortunately, the gap between the 1880 and 1900 censuses was closed somewhat by a state-level census conducted in 1885.* This fifteen-year gap in our records limits somewhat our ability to trace our family history between 1885 and 1900.
With that background, we are ready to see what we can learn. First, the 1885 Nebraska census gives no evidence that any of our family lived on the Brown property. This is not surprising, since we know not only that Peter D and Sarah lived in Farmers Valley at that time but also that the first child who married (Johann) did so in 1889, four years after that census. In short, the 1885 census has nothing to contribute to the question before us.
The 1900 census, on the other hand, contributes a great deal. As expected, it lists Johann, Anna, and their two children near Mountain Lake, Minnesota. Three of Peter D and Sarah’s children were living in Henderson township: (1) Peter P, Margaretha, and their four children; (2) Katharina and Heinrich Epp and their four children; and (3) David S. and Margaretha Epp Buller (married in 1898). Cornelius, who had married Maria Goosen in 1898, was living near Enid, Oklahoma. The four youngest children—J. P., Henry, Abraham, and Mary—were all living with Sarah on the Farmers Valley home place.
That leaves one child: Sarah. She had married Peter Dick on 13 March 1898, which was the same month and year that Peter D’s heirs (probably the widow Sarah) exercised the right to purchase the first 40 acres of the property in Brown township (see here). The timing of the marriage and the land purchase seems a little too convenient to be mere coincidence. The 1900 census leads me to think that it was no coincidence at all.
In that census, Peter and Sarah Buller Dick are living on and renting a farm in Brown township, which certainly raises the possibility that they had moved to the family property. Among their neighbors were a number of families named Mierau, including John Mierau. According to the census, Jacob Wiens also lived nearby. In short, many of the names that we see surrounding the Peter D Buller 80 in the 1911 plat map below are listed in close proximity to Peter and Sarah Buller Dick in the 1900 Brown township census. The only reasonable conclusion is that they were indeed living on the Brown property at that time.
We will probably never know if Peter D leased the 80 acres in Brown township in order to give one of his children a start on establishing their own farmstead. It does seem likely, however, that his widow Sarah did just that when she purchased the two halves of the leased property in 1898 and 1899. That is, she apparently purchased the land so that her newly wed daughter, also named Sarah, could live and work there with her husband, Peter Dick.
In 1900, we can conclude, one of Peter D and Sarah’s children was living on the Brown township property. How long did this continue, and what happened after that? These are questions for a future post.
* On 3 March 1879 the Forty-Fifth U.S. Congress passed an “act to provide for taking the tenth and subsequent censuses,” which included a provision encouraging state governments to conduct their own censuses midway between the federal censuses, that is, in 1885, 1895, 1905, and so on. See section 22 of the final legislation here. Few states actually took up the federal government’s offer to reimburse half the cost, and Nebraska did so only once, in 1885. Read more about the 1885 Nebraska census here.
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