#1-Published in the Tribune June 13, 1918

Scott Allen received a telegram yesterday morning announcing the death of Mrs. Adeline McPherson, mother of Mrs. Allen, at Denver. The remains will arrive here Friday and the funeral will be held from the Congregational Church Saturday afternoon at 2:30. Mrs. McPherson was about 68 years old, and was a former well-known resident of this county, having located in DeSoto in 1856. She had been ailing for some time, but it has only been for the past two weeks that her condition was considered serious. Mrs. Allen went out to Denver to be with her mother about two weeks ago and will accompany the remains to Blair.

#2-Tribune 20 June 1918

Mrs. Dan McPherson, Pioneer, Laid To Rest Friday

Mrs. Dan McPherson, who died at Denver, after seventeen years residence there, June 11, 1918, was one of the grandest pioneer women of Washington county, coming here with her parents in 1855. When we first knew her on the Long creek farm she had the finest flower garden we knew of, and we later bought plants of hers to sell to our friends. The tall cream colored flags, so common here now, and the ribbon grass – like we had in our garden in England – we bought of her sold so fast to our German customers we had to go back several times for a fresh supply, as well as other plants. Along in the seventies when her husband was in the Black Hills she showed me her three room frame cottage she had planned and with her own hands weather boarded and shingled, done much of the carpenter work, and painted it inside and out, and she was proud of it, as she had a right to be, as she had drove around the country and bought chickens that she took to Omaha to get the money to build it with her own earnings, and she often stopped to buy things of me, so we knew her well.

Her two daughters, brought up on that isolated farm became grand women. The present wife of Scott Allen, became one of the best loved school teachers we knew of and Co. Supt. Henderson told us she kept her school in his district.

In the hard winter of 1855-6 nearly all their cattle and horses died and Mrs. McPherson’s mother saved one horse by keeping it in the cabin at nights with the children. These grand pioneers are fast passing and the present generation have too little ideas of what we today owe to those who helped to make the wilderness blossom as it is today.

When her father drove his teams here from the east he put his money into $20 gold pieces and then put them in an old fashioned wooded tar bucket, covered them with tar and when he need money his wife washed a piece as needed. One time at DeSoto their money ran out and then searched where the bucket was emptied and found one they needed bad.

W.H.Woods

~~~ Obituary courtesy of the Washington County Genealogical Society. Newspaper clippings on file in the Blair Public Library at Blair, Nebraska.~~~