King District Items

Mr. and Mrs. John Forney were visiting in the Hollow Sunday.
Raymond Pierce and Gerald Clapper were in Shenandoah Wednesday.
Alvia Campbell was called to Glenwood Monday because of the serious illness of his grandmother.
Gerald Clapper fell in the Green Hollow ditch recently, where it was about twenty feet deep,Raymond Pierce and Orval Weight went to his assistance an Gerald was not badly hurt.
J.E. Weight took dinner with Alvia Campbell and Family Sunday.
Arlene Haynie was visiting during the holidays with Josephine Pierce.
Mr. and Mrs. Sey Welchon visted with relatives in Green Hollow Sunday.
Earl Maxwell was in Green Hollow Sunday
David Campbell was absent from school Monday because of sickness.
Mrs. Clayton Pierce visited with Mrs. Harry Hatcher Sunday.

 

Kings District Items

Miss Ella Hummel was in Sidney Sunday.
Alfred Reade was in Green Hollow on Business Monday,.
Mr. and Mrs. John Bachler visited at the Andy Bachler home Sunday.
Mr. and Mrs. J.E.Weight visited at the James Waltenberry home Sunday.
Mrs Mabel Campbell visited with Misses Ida and Viloet Schooley on Wednesday.
Glee Study visited last week with his aunt and uncle, Mr. and Mrs. John Forney.
Mr. and Mrs. Alfred Reade and Mrs. Mildred Reade visited in Green Hollow Sunday.
Mr. and Mrs. Harry Hatcher took dinner with Mr and Mrs. Floyd Howery Sunday.
John Forney and Delbertu VanArsdel were at the horse shoe games Saturday at Omer Pierce's.
Harl Schooley and Alvia Campbell helped Clarence Forney pick a load of sweet corn one day last week.
A-nine and one-half pound daughter was born to Mr. and Mrs. Omer Pierce Monday. They have named her Wonda Lee.
Mrs. Jessie Chaney and Mr. and Mrs. Bain Study and Mr. and Mrs. Oakley Kimsey and Mrs. Paul Pierce visited at the Bud Study home Sunday.

 

Jess Moves to P. J.

Jesse Moles, who has had a barber shop in Glenwood for several years moved to Pacific Junction Wednesday, where he will engage in the same work.   His father, Walker Moles and Mrs. G. W.   Pierce went up Wednesday and assisted int he moving.
(Jesse Moles was the Husband of Pauline Pierce)

 

Green Hollow southwest of Tabor, has always had the reputation of having more kids to the mile than any section   of country in this part of the state, but few people are aware of the fact that A. W. Turner has 150 kids on his farm.
They are of the Augora breed and the number is being increased daily.   A represenative of tlhe Beacon drove over to Mr. Turner's farm the first of the week and found   that he had the largest goat farm   in the United States , Having 380 head at present.   He has had   an offer for the entire herd and may decide to sell out and begin over again.

 

Newspaper Article: Omaha World Herald   Staff writter :   John Taylor

 

   Thurman, Iowa----- People who live in the hills have been taught by the outsider to be defensive.
    The attitude is not inbred,but learned ,for they know the outsider come with preconceived notions.
      The outsider is a prisoner of the exaggeration, a story told and retold until fact becomes mixed with myth and fantasy with fiction until the truth is layered over the fossils in the hills.
      So hillfolk react with a certain mistrust of the outsider, until this, too, becomes part of the myth, part of the color of the hills as viewed from the outside.   Each side squares off, the hill person from inside his parapet, the outsider peering in , happily assured that ,yes, folks who live in the hills are quite different, quaint, maybe even a little dangerous.
    All of it, of course, is true. And none of it is.
Make Fun
    Buryl Pierce looks up from beneath the raised hood of a 1968 Chevrolet that is making rasping sounds.
    "Let me shut this thing off so I can stop burning that 'cheap' gas," he says to a visitor whose words can't be heard over the noise of the engine.
    The engine stops, the blue smoke from the exhaust curls up toward the hill behind the house, the one with a camper built into the wall.
    "You want to do a story on Green Hollow?" Pierce says. There was some guys up here not long ago who took some pictures.   I didn't like that much. They were trying to make fun. You're not trying to make fun, are you?"
      Pierce leans against the car, sliding gradually into a conversation, glancing now and then at the camera of one of the visitors.
    He is wearing bib overalls, a tan shirt buttoned to the throat,and a light jacket that shows signs of having been mended. His face carries the white stubble of three days growth and white hair pushes out from beneath a cap that sits squarely on his head.
    "Go on up and talk to the Pierces, " has been the advice down in Thurman, three miles to the south.
    There had been other suggestions, too.   don't go to Green Hollow alone. Why? Just don't go alone.   They don't like outsiders much . They used to live in dugouts. They keep pretty much to themselves.
    Green Hollow is just that, a hollow, a cleavage in the hills.   From Interstate 29, you can see the hills to the east. As hills go they're not much, little more than interruptions in the stretch of corn fields.
LITTLE SHACKS
    The town of Thurman sits off I-29 a couple of miles.   It's an old town , founded in 1857 by Mormons.   The town gets its name from a politician.   It has been called Fremont City and Plum Hollow.
    Wayne Pierson and his wife have lived in and around Thurman the biggest part of their lives.   For Pierson that has been 80 years; for Mrs. Pierson 82 years. They don't know when folks first moved to Green Hollow.
      "There used to be a big settlement up in there," Pierson say.   "There were all kinds of little shacks."
      In the 1930s, Pierson was foreman at the rockquarry at the edge of the hills.   He was also town marshal for four years.
    "I had to go up there about every week and serve papers," he says.   "They were always in a row among themselves.   One would sue the other."
    He recalls "one or two families "living in dugouts in the side of the hills in the '30s'.
    People dug holes in the bank and covered them up with lean-tos," Pierson recalled.
PAY BILLS
    Ralph Street, Fremont County deputy sheriff, also recalls the stories of the dugouts.
    They just had a little community of their own, he says.   "Ran it like they wanted to. It wasn't that they were afraid. They just didn't care to associate.   Claude Sheldon, Thurman mayor, has heard the stories, but he defers to the old-timers in the telling of them.
  "They pay their bills on time, I'll say that for them," he says.
    Buryl Pierce doesn't smile while the question is asked.
    "Oh, hell, no," he says.   Like everybody else, they lived in some pretty shabby-looking places.   "Course everybody did who lived back in them hard times.   I still do.   I ain't got no fancy house there but it ain't no dugout.
  " No, NO dugouts, People had log housed, but hell, they have them everywhere.   As far as digging cellars and living in them, no there wasn't nobody. That was a bunch of bull people hear.
    Pierce is interrupted by the offer of a cigarette.   "No Thanks, I'm not much of a hand to smoke."
  LITTLE PATCH
    Luke , his 78-year-old brother, observes the conservation from a distance. Buryl answers for him;
      "HE don't smoke either.   He belongs to the church."
    The Pierces have lived in the hollow all their lives. Buryl, 64, has anyway. There used to be John, the father, Rosella, the mother, and seven boys and two girls.   Now there's only Buryl, Luke, Tom and Opal (Katy).
  "We don't farm, we raise stock---cattle, hogs," Pierce says.   "If you have a little patch of ground, you can live.   You can't afford to go to town and buy it all."
    He likes it in the Hollow "better 'n any place I ever lived." He has never liked any place else and wouldn't. "I wouldn't live in one of these big cities if you could give it to me and put a fence around, it" he says.
      He doesn't know when his family settle there . "I heard my mother talk about it, " Pierce says.   "Came in a covered wagon, her and her dad I suppose."
      Pierce lives in a house on the side of the hill with Luke and Opal.   Tom lives nearby.   Across the one-lane road on which someone has thrown some rock in an effort to stabilize the ruts is what Pierce call " The Ditch."   "Call it a ditch or a canyon or a ravine," he says, pointing to the 50-foot-deep chasm yards from the edge of the road.
    " That was started there from a plow, " he says. " A guy plowed down through there , my dad said. Had a team hooked onto a plow .... Started that ditch. Water started running down there. Said this was all pretty bluegrass.   There wasn't no ditch here at all.
  The Pierces rode out the Depression in the hollow.
  "Boy , she was rough back in them days.   We had to live on what we could find.. Raised our garden. Pretty near had to back them days."
    Pierce chuckles suddenly, remembers something he "Heard a guy say on the radio" once.
  "Take a piece of fat meat and put it down in the beans and hold it there for a little bit   and then take it out and hang it on a nail.' He recites the procedure a second time, this time laughs at the though.
    Over there is called Plum Hollow. and they're just as bad off as we are. They're Plum Hollow and we're Green Hollow . He laughs at his joke.
      There's no big secret how Green Hollow got it's name.   " Because it was all pretty and green years ago.   Some old woman named this place to facilitate the finding of cattle that wandered off from the surrounding farms.
14   PERSONS
  Only about 14 persons live in the hollow now, Pierce says.   There are a couple of trailers tucked into the hills, but on a hill above the Pierces a new home is going up.
    Heard a man say the other day it's going to cost $65,000,he says.   "I wouldn't want to see as many people as there used to be.   This place was so full of kids and people lived back here in WPA times.   There was a hundred that lived up here or better.
    Pierce doesn't look much like the kind of person who would, as the stories went, hunker down, waiting for the next outsider's car to get stuck in the much so he could make a couple of dollars pulling eh vehicle out.
  "I've pulled people out. If they wanted to pay me I'd take it. And the distrust of outsiders? "Oh, hell, no, we're civilized up here. I've got as many friends as anybody in the United States.   There was some smart alecks came up here one time.   I heard they were from Des Moines. Coming up here and making a lot of fun. I guess they thought people was crazy. I know a woman. She just lived over across the ditch. She grabbed a gun . Shot up in the air and I guess they really took off.
  Pierce laughed at the memory He was chuckling 20 minutes later as he bade goodbye to his visitors. " don't do like those other guys," he shouted at the opened car window.
"They called us all crazy up here. I wouldn't have minded it if it was true. But, hell, I'm the craziest one up here."

 

Sightseeing in Waubonsie  

 

Thurman Times : May 11,1938

Rev. and Mrs . Peter Jacobs conducted the first of a series of summer tours Saturday afternoon for the week-day Bible school children to the Waubonsie hills.   Five cars took a group of 23 children, all of the fifth and sixth graders except one.
    Those who furnished cars were R. Peter Jacobs. Floyd S. Young, Guy E. Smoke, Mrs. Walter Nixson, Mr. Lester Walters. The route took the group west on highway No. 3 then north and west through Anderson , to the highway north of Sidney and then the highway almost to Thurman.
    Going north the old Thurman and Tabor road they entered Dutch Hollow then turned to the top of the hills marking the southern entrance to Green Hollow.   The children followed the upper and lower gulch far enough to see the extent of the erosion in those hills.
    Stops were make enroute through Green Holow and the children were given an opportunity to visit with some of the residents of that era.   The red bud was almost through blossoming.   The children enjoyed seeing the blue wood   sweet william and the jack in the pulpit. They climbed some of the steep bluffs.   Leaving the hollow the route took them along the bluff, passing the rock quarries and on into Thurman.
    Here the trail went south around by Knox and   then to Sidney and home. It was a day of many thrills for these youngsters as it was their first trip to Green Hollow for many of them.