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Edwin Heman Platt
1863-1952
He was born Nov. 13, 1863 in Chesterfield, ILL, sixth child of Henry D & Sarah Stratton Platt, but the only boy to survive with sisters Annie and Lucy. He was called Heman (“faithful”); Edwin may be for a family friend than serving in the Civil War.
From 1868-71 the Platts lived in Brighton, ILL. Father traveled for the Congregational Assn, troubleshooting and forming new churches. Heman learned to read at home, and to sing. He “wondered how it would feel to lift the latch and walk out the gate without Mother’s permission.” Grandpa Stratton had let the split from Presbyterians to form Plymouth Cong. Church. At age five Heman blacked his nose watching a solar eclipse through smoked glass, “the day so dark that chickens roosted.”
In Lincoln, ILL he started school, skipping straight into second reader class with a nice teacher. The news that week was the big Chicago fire. Soon they advanced him to an unlikeable teacher, so he didn’t mind missing school with measles that spring, and then moving again to a new town, Danvers.
The years 1872-77 passed pleasantly. The new church and close Presbyterian ties; Heman found friends both places. Mrs. McClure of the Pres. gave him annual Xmas mittens. He flew kites, played Two-Old-Cat baseball, skated, and fished in Sugar Creek.
Danvers school had literally one upper and one lower grade. When J. P. Yoder took the upstairs class in ’74, schoolwork came alive for Heman—public speaking, poems and debates, field trips to the Grove for botany specimens. State capitals were learned to the tune of Go Tell Aunt Rhody: “Maine, Au-u-gust-a, on the Salem Ri-i-ver.” To his great surprise he won the prize for highest average in Attendance/Deportment/Scholarship, a Webster’s dictionary he kept for life.
Lessons learned outside school… how to saw five cords of tough crooked elm into 2-foot lengths for the church stove… how to use a bracket saw on cigar box wood, a treadle saw on walnut from the planning mill… how to pick strawberries at 2 cents a quart cash. A mysterious lesson in physics: He was playing a Deacon Jaines’ farm with a know-it-all city kid. As they sat on the hill watching the afternoon train coming from Peoria, the visitor bragged “I can tell when it’s going to whistle.” And sure enough he could—and wouldn’t tell how. Heman had to go home and ask Father.
In the undecided Hayes-Tilden election of ’72, Danvers Democrats raised a flagpole east of the school, Republicans one on the west. Both flags flapped noisily through ice and windstorms until March, when Hayes became president and the Reps raised a victory flag… The first adult play Heman saw was “Ten Nights in a Barroom” staged above the dry goods store by a local cast. His parents, staunch Temperance folk, must have approved.
He loved Decoration Day parades when everyone followed the old red four-horse bandwagon out to the cemetery for speeches, music, prayers, and the decoration of the soldiers’ graves. “When Mr. Brown accidentally poked a hole in his bass drum, he turned it around and beat on the strongest side. One hot dusty day a tire ran off one of the bandwagon wheels. The whole procession stopped and the band and glee club climbed down and proceeded on foot… One rainy morning I asked an old soldier if it would spoil the program. His answer I will never forget: ‘We never stopped the march in the army on account of rain.’”
Does it sound like the River City-zians and “76 Trombones.”? When the Platts bought a 57-acre farm just outside Brighton about 1881, their neighbors were Rosalie, Lida and Lilly Reiniger who joined the Congregational Church and signed Heman’s autograph album. Rosa married J. D. Willson, moved to Iowa, and her son Meredith grew up to write “The Music Man”—ironically just too late for Heman Platt to enjoy it.
In poor health at age 16, Heman was advised to leave school for outdoor life. Father rented ten acres and Heman with horse and hand planter raised a corn crop, bought a $25 cow, found more land to grow wheat, and traded labor with neighbors to get their help at harvest. He came out healthier, $60 richer and wiser in the business of farming, but teaching also appealed to him. When Brighton Academy closed in ’81 he got his teaching certificate and spent four winters in schools near home. He copied Mr. Yoder’s ‘up-to-date’ methods, adding his own gentle touches. Fifty years later one of his youngest students. Peter Jacobi recalled: “It was Mr. Platt who carried me up and down the hill when I could not keep up with the others. He taught me the alphabet and a lot of other things. He let me go to the door right during school to watch my grandfather chop down a huge oak tree. In the spring he let me go down to grandmother’s house for a good big slice of bread and butter and jelly.” Progressive methods, indeed!
Spelling lists from the “blue-backed Webster” have a swinging poetic rhythm:
Bland’ish fun’ish wel’kin pip’kin crock’ery frip’pery
Brand’ish burn’ish nap’kin bus’kin mock’ery fop’pery
And when half the class caught the mumps, so did he!
When he felt the urge “to go west and grow up with the country” Heman, a level-headed young man of twenty-two, chased no romantic rainbows. He wrote to the Neb. Home Mission Society for advice, and then made a three-week visit to Franklin County, meeting church and academy folks, checking the spirit of the community along with the lay of the farmland. He noted that the town board had refused to license a Pool Hall… Pleased with his findings, he bought three 80-acre tracts for the family, and then returned to Brighton to teach one more year. Sister Lucy also started teaching. Father sold the Brighton farm. Annie, the older daughter, died just before the others left Brighton. “In March 1886 Father and I loaded a few cows, machinery, chickens etc. in one combination freight and stockcar. Four work horses, a colt, and household furniture in another. Left by Burlington RR, changed in Monmouth and went westward. Second morning in Lincoln, Neb., landed in Red Cloud that night and on to Franklin early Friday. Were we tired of being kicked about. Got goods and stock out to the farm. A nice warm day; neighbors were cultivation spring wheat. Within 48 hours came quite a snow and zero morning. The small, rather open house was not very home-like. “We did not et out to church.”… Until the following week, when they joined the congregation and settled down.
Music still flourished in the new prairie home. Lucy played the parlor organ for family singing. Once a Bro. William Ewing was caught by rain at the farm and joined in their music, rendering his favorite back-East hymns with a broad Virginia accent: “Brighten the cawna wha you ah! Some fah from hahbah you may guide across the baah.” (Heman, I might add, had a drawl too; he made four syllables out of “pa-ray’-a-rie”… At church he met Miss Rhoda Beitel, a shy little thing from northern Illinois, then visiting her older brother Howard in Franklin… Choir and Sunday School teaching brought them together. They were married in Illinois on Christmas Day 1889, and returned to the farm one mile east of Franklin.
Two sons were born, Arthur 1892, Howard 1896. Heman taught school a few more winters, then devoted himself to full-time farming Excerpts from his 1900 journal:
Jan: Shelled corn—milk to creamery—load cobs—put feathers in ticking—clean chicken house—butcher hog—Pink had calf.
April: Seeded 15 acres oats—disced oats—harrowed oats—set cherry trees & mulberries—oiled buggy & team harness
By summer he was too busy to keep records. He served on the Franklin Academy board, attended public meetings, helped neighbors with fences, and drove to the doctor when Howard was feverish. He delivered wood and coal to the school, visited Arthur’s classes. Some years he hared an Academy boy to help with farm work until his own sons grew big enough. (Arthur at 8 could shell corn and tend the grinder.) They grew popcorn, peanuts, watermelons, berries and froze homemade ice-cream.
During his 66 years in Franklin Heman served the church in every possible capacity—clerk, deacon, treasurer, SS Supt, conference delegate, taught S.S, moderated meetings, sang at funerals, set up tables, braided cornhusk mats for the annual bazaar. He sang tenor in the choir and for a while directed it, packing sixty minutes of singing into a one-hour weekly rehearsal. In fact he did almost everything, at one time or another, except preach the Sunday sermon, and he could have done that too, capably and joyfully if the occasion had demanded.
From 1920 to 1944 Heman and Rhoda lived in a pleasant stucco home on the east edge of town where they had close neighbors and could walk to church and stores, but still kept cow, chickens and cornfield. Behind the house was a big garden, a small “garridge”, woodpile with two-handled bucksaw, a block for decapitating Sunday dinner, and a white slatted box like a beehive on stilts: the official Franklin County Weather Station. Heman enjoyed this unpaid record-keeping, and he loved the wondrous variety of Nebraska weather, be it hot or cold, windy, rainy, dry or muddy.
His many letters combine an eye for detail, an ear for poetry, and a quiet sense of humor.
12/23/43: Winter came in most quietly and beautifully. A little ice and more snow on every tree and bush, two inches of fluffy snow evenly over the ground. Full moon came out toward morning and sun shone all day. Couldn’t have been prettier.
3/22/26: Spring seems to have arrived. If not, birds and pieplant and greens and elm trees are in for a disappointment.
5/14/44: Five Arkansas kingbirds just flirted about in the tree by the thermometer shelter. Saw a grosbeak yesterday. The English mockingbird came Thursday and sang to me as I planted sweet corn. Flew up a few feet singing as he went and showing white belts on his wings, and then dropped back to his perch in the mulberry tree.
9/24/41: We were home before ten Thursday night, in time to see that wonderful display of aurora, those waving streamers reaching past the zenith. To look straight up it looked like fine waves of snow drifting southward.
2/6/35: Just after supper Monday evening I went out, taking the field glass Aunt Agnes gave us, and didn’t I see a beautiful sight? Venus, Mercury, and the new moon bunced quite close together, with just the thinnest crescent of moon showing bright. Old as I be it was the first time to see Mercury for certain. It never gets far enough away from the sun to be seen when it is really dark. My old astronomy book says it is really brighter than any of the fixed stars, at times. Its circuit about the sun takes only 88 days. Years would not be so long there. Weather would be hot, I imagine.
A series of letters after Christmas 1923 described his enjoyment of the homemade radio Howard gave them.
12/29/23: The way I have been traveling is something wonderful. Have taken in concerts in Denver, Ft. Worth, Memphis, Kansas City, Omaha, and at the present time am in Chicago listening to a Christmas program announced by a woman. Wonderful! Wonderful!!... When the new headset comes I can have company in listening to good things. That will make it seem less selfish, won’t it?
(They sat up till 1:30 AM New Years Eve listening to religious programs from Zion City, Illinois.)
1/18/24: Heard W. G. Hay of KFRX Hastings sing “Cradle of the Deep”, descending slowly step by step to the bottom of the cellar so smoothly it was magnificent. Since a boy I have almost been envious of any man who could do that.
(from Arthur to Howard 1/3/24: Great stuff, this radio, when it will cause our staid old parents to forsake their beds and sit with heads covered with metal to listen to what the wild waves are saying.)
He appreciated modern inventions but not all the resulting uproar…
6/27/24: Our old farm which used to be so quiet and peaceful is now putting up such an unearthly roaring. Five racing cars from St. Jo arrived in one freight car the other day, and they and other racers must rehearse their parts before the great days (July) 3rd and 4th. A great wicked waste of time and money and energy it seems to me, and humanity none the better for it all.
He regretfully declined the chance to drive to California in 1947…
I should like to get a panoramic view of our country between here and the Golden Gate, but am hardl sure I could live up to such a strenuous life for 1750 miles and back.
But he had by no means retired to the rocking chair.
3/22/47: Spring came with a great rush yesterday. Pruned grape vines; have been cleaning up garden patches. Wednesday evening I walked to schoolhouse to band concert, a fine lot of youngsters, 39 of them… The week before I was guest speaker at Garden Dept or the Women’s Club… This afternoon I took scythe to the garden spot where I had two plantings of sweet corn. Will probably rake by hand and burn stalks, then plant about half in spuds, balance for sweet corn.
The next hear he sat down and wrote his “Bit of Autobiography”, 22 well-ordered hand-written pages covering his ancestors as far as he knew them, and his own youth in Illinois. He died in 1952, age 88+, and is buried in Franklin, Nebraska.
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