The following article appeared in the Madison, Indiana Courier on April 13, 1881 under the heading LETTERS FROM THE PEOPLE.
NEBRASKA FARMING
Editor Courier:
As I promised to write to a number of my friends in Jefferson County I will take this method of complying with my promise. Wheat looked well through Illinois and Southern Iowa. The farmers in this part of Nebraska are expecting good crops the coming season. There is a great quantity of corn to be gathered before the farmers can go to plowing. This last winter has been hard on the cattle men out here by not having enough feed and shelter prepared for their cattle, the winter being so uncommonly hard that it has been difficult to get feed for their stock. I hear some say that they have been in Nebraska eight or nine years and have never seen such a winter as this has been. Some say that they have wintered their cattle without feeding them a particle except what they could get in their stalk fields. Some of the farmers have commenced breaking sod. It will be a week or two before there will be much plowing done for corn. I am very well pleased with my Western home, considering the weather. Since I arrived, up to last week, the weather has been very disagreeable, but the last week the weather has been fine.
We are nine miles north of Lincoln, in a splendid looking farming country in Oak Creek valley, a branch of the Union Pacific Railway, running from Lincoln through this valley forming a junction with the main line some where on the Platte River. It is a new road, just completed last spring. Raymond, a flourishing little town, is situated three mile north of us. It is about one year old, and contains three stores, telegraph office, large flouring mill, post office, hotel, blacksmith shop, shoe shop and several dwellings.
For fear of taking up too much space in your paper. I will close.
W. R. Hollenbeck
Raymond, Lancaster County, Nebraska
March 31, 1881.