Memories resurface at lake
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BY JOE DUGGAN
LEMOYNE — Monte Samuelson came home this week for the first time in 63 years.
From a distance, the 74-year-old retired businessman saw the foundation that once supported his family's house, and his pace quickened, each step pushing into sand as soft as a wet sponge. A coal train wailed in the distance, killdeer pealed through an overcast sky and an unrelenting north wind pushed wisps of sand across what had been the bottom of Lake McConaughy not so long ago.
"There was our garage," he said, pointing to the rectangular foundation on the right. "And there was the porch."
Then he walked inside, stepping over the low concrete wall that has remained surprisingly intact after decades underwater. He planted his sneakers, the same bright white of his wavy hair, in what would have been the living room.
Then he smiled.
In that moment, the years swirled away like all the acre feet of water the drought has drained from the reservoir that entombed the ghosts of Lemoyne in 1941. For a moment, he was again Gus and Lillian's boy, the only child of a postmaster and a storekeeper in a town that stands on the edge of being forgotten.
"That was the kitchen and the dining room," he said. "We had one bedroom downstairs, two upstairs. We had a little ice house and that was the windmill over the well."
Samuelson never really wanted to again set foot on the place of his birth, because he knew only an epic drought would allow him to do so.
He despises the drought and what it's doing to the lake that afforded him a living selling anglers bait, lures and lodging. The lake, and a lot of hard work, allowed him and Dorreen to raise three boys and retire comfortably after selling Samuelson's Eagle's Nest in 1997.
Now he prays for enough rain to make Big Mac big again.
This week, the lake fell to about one-fifth of its capacity. The water has retreated enough that the preserved foundations of Samuelson's boyhood home and the other buildings of Lemoyne came into full view for the first time since 1956.
That year, the last great drought dropped McConaughy to a record low 380,000 acre feet of water, said Jeremie Kerkman, civil engineer supervisor for the Central Nebraska Public Power and Irrigation District. The district, which manages the lake for irrigation and hydropower generation, expects it to fall to a new low of about 350,000 acre feet in coming weeks, barring significant rainfall.
On Wednesday, Samuelson returned to the town site he left as an 11-year-old. He pointed out foundations that once held Carey's Garage, Melville Lumber Co., Brown's Hotel and the railroad depot that was responsible for Lemoyne's founding in 1911. The short-lived town got its name from a rancher who gave settlers a plot of land for a cemetery.
The village in the North Platte River valley grew quickly, then leveled off.
"I think there was probably pretty close to 100 approximately," he said. "Maybe a little more, but it wasn't no 200."
In the 1930s, the irrigation district proposed damming the North Platte, diverting water via canals to irrigate crops in central Nebraska. The Works Progress Administration oversaw dam construction, giving jobs to scores of unemployed. But the lake would put Lemoyne and ranches in the valley under 50 feet of water.
The district offered to pay for property in the lake's path. About seven out of 10 took the offers, said Tim Anderson, a district spokesman in Holdrege. The district condemned the rest.
Cora Baumann, 86, said her family was one of the holdouts. Some challenged the condemnations in court, to no avail. In 1941, as the district prepared to fill the lake, she and the last residents of Lemoyne gathered at the hotel to say goodbye.
"It was a really sad affair," she said. Most moved to Ogallala and places much farther away.
The Samuelson house was the last building jacked, placed on dollies and rolled north up the valley to the new Lemoyne, which never approached the size of its namesake.
Today, the house and the Presbyterian church are the only frame structures from old Lemoyne that have survived.
Back at the original town site, Samuelson strolled and invited the memories to return. He recalled his Uncle Joe Skinner, who saw two strangers rob the Adams State Bank. He remembered his Uncle Tom Samuelson running the filling station/restaurant/dance hall. And his mother selling sundries at the General Store.
He scavenged for something valuable in a mosaic of bricks, pottery shards, rusted Model T running boards and kerosene lamp components frozen in the sand. Then a bundle of orange rubber caught his attention. He pulled it from the sand and quickly recognized the bands of tire inner tube, cut and knotted to form a slingshot sling.
It's entirely possible some six decades ago he made the sling, which fit the Y-shaped wire frame he found on a recent visit. If not him, it had to be one of his buddies: Howard Haythorn, Jim Brecker, Devon Sutton, or one of the Pinkston boys, Warren or Harvey.
The memories flowed easier. Lighting ladyfingers on the Fourth of July. Shooting BB guns. Climbing cottonwoods and swinging from a rope into the north channel of the North Platte with Tarzan yells ringing in their ears.
The time when Monte Samuelson ran the streets of his hometown with a pack of kids who didn't know a thing about the Great Depression.
Reach Joe Duggan at 473-7239 or jduggan@journalstar.com.
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