Centennial Edition
Settlement on the Upper Elkhorn
Page 232
. . . Another Illinois family that came to Atkinson in 1880 was that of Paul Seger. His parents, Donatus and Margaret Seger, had left Germany for Chicago before Paul was born. In 1878 the nine-year-old boy, with his parents, four brothers, and a sister, moved to Omaha, and from there to Atkinson in a covered wagon. They had one cow which the boys took turns prodding along behind the wagon.
On April 1 they came to a small cluster of buildings on the prairie. They stopped and Paul went into one to ask the way to Atkinson. “You are in Atkinson right now, sonny,” the storekeeper, Frank Bitney, told him. To people who had lived in Chicago or even Omaha, so few buildings did not look like a town.
The Segers homesteaded on the Elkhorn, five miles west and a mile north of the settlement. There Paul grew up, working at home or as a hired hand for the neighbors. Covered wagons were coming to and through the region every day, and camping wherever night took them. The Segers made a practice of visiting those who camped near them, interested in finding out who they were, where they came from and where they were going. One evening the campers they called on were the John Christs, from Darlington, Wisconsin.
John and Margaret Christ had one little daughter, Katherine, and Paul Seger had no inkling, that evening, that he had seen his future wife in the settler’s camp. The Christs homesteaded about ten miles north of Atkinson. Both families being Catholic, they were among the founders and supporters of St. Joseph’s Parish, and Paul and Katherine were married in St. Joseph’s church in 1897. They made their home on the Christ hay claim, west of the homestead, and became parents of eight children.
Paul and his brother Donatus in 1909 bought J.J. Stilson’s farm implement business in Atkinson, and the following year established the first Ford car agency west of Norfolk. Seger Brothers operated this business for twenty-five years or more. Paul and Katherine observed their fifty-ninth wedding anniversary in 1956 and Paul died shortly afterward at the age of eighty-seven, the last of his father’s family.
Page 444
Back in the day when the Seger Brothers started their Ford Car dealership in Atkinson, writes Mark Hendrick, I was about 6 years old. One day in the spring of 1912 Paul Seger drove into our yard in a new Ford Car, or Tin Lizzy, as many called them. After a littler persuasion Paul got granddad to get in and go for a ride. When Paul left, the Joseph and O N Hendricks Ranch has a new 1912 Ford.
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