HISTORIC FIGURE ANSWERS LAST CALL AT BLAIR HOME

Mrs. L. W. Osborn, Wife of U.S. Consul General of Samoa

HUSBAND DIED IN ‘02

Mrs. Luther W. Osborn, who died Sunday afternoon at 80 years of age, was a victim of the heat. Although she had been an invalid for five and a half years, she had seemed especially well throughout the spring.

As Margaret Ann Rogers, she was born March 10, 1854 in Hart county, Kentucky, of a race of pioneers. The first of her ancestors here, William Byrd, adventured into the American wilderness as early as 1650 with a royal grant as receiver-general of the Colony of Virginia. His son, “The Black Swan of Virginia”, was head of the colony for years and founder of Richmond. And today Admiral Byrd is again in Antarctica.

In revolutionary days General George Rogers Clark raised an army to penetrate the forests west of the Alleghenies, and save the upper Mississippi valley. His brother was William Clark of the Lewis and Clark expedition. Of them the Geographic Magazine says: “It is one of the coincidences of American history that two brothers should have been largely instrumental in carrying the American frontier 2,000 miles westward.”

Byrd Rogers, Mrs. Osborn’s great great grandfather, advanced into Kentucky with the Boones, the Lincolns, the Todds, the Clays and the Crockets. He volunteered to treat with the Indians, and these stuck him full of pine splinters and set him afire.

Mrs. Osborn’s brother, the late J. W. Rogers of Omaha, was with the first party ever to flatboat down the unexplored Yellowstone river and the Missouri. He had been in the first gold rush into Montana and was later in the first Klondike rush.

Mrs. Osborn’s own pioneering began at the age of four when Kentuckians settled the southern third of Illinois. But everybody had chills and fever there. So in 1868 the family came on to the healthful hills of Omaha. Their house was beside the well known spring in Bemis park. They arranged to purchase a farm which took in Bemis park and the present Walnut Hill reservoir. But in three years their only crop was grasshoppers, so they lost the chance of being one of Omaha’s first families and realty subdividers.

Mrs. Osborn was one of the early day Brownell Hall girls. On Saturday they could drive up into the old state capitol grounds, where Central high school now is, and shoot quail. Mrs. Osborn first came to Washington county in 1872.

On December 16, 1874 she was married in Omaha to Luther W. Osborn of Blair, who though he had been in the state but five years, was already in the legislature, and the Nebraska member of the Republican National committee for the Hayes and Wheeler campaign.

The original Osborn residence on West Grant street stands almost unchanged from that day, except that the present forest trees were then only ten foot switches. A boxelder which Mrs. Osborn herself planted 59 years ago paralleled her life, itself succumbing to age only three weeks earlier than she.

In 1897, after 23 years on Grant street, Mrs. Osborn again pioneered, voyaging to what was then thought the end of the earth, the mid-Pacific island groups of Samoa and Tonga, 4,600 miles beyond San Francisco, where her husband had been named as United States Consul General. There she went through a native uprising; marines barricaded on the veranda, machine guns on the front steps, a side of the kitchen cut out for a rapid fire gun. A defective six inch shell exploding prematurely, riddled the dining room table and chairs at the dinner hour, but the family fortunately was absent. Mrs. Osborn, herself left alone, stood off a hundred or so of warriors bent on getting at native goods stored in the building - starry banner in one hand, navy 45 in the other.

Following the war, a commission from the United States, Germany and Great Britain dismissed all the treaty officials except Mr. Osborn, whom they made chief justice, or head of the native government under three powers.

Upon her husband’s death in office, the widow returned to the United States in 1902 with the body. For three years she lived in Omaha where her only son, Stanley R. Osborn of Blair, was on the staff of the Omaha Bee. After seven years’ absence, she reopened the Grant street house for three years. Then she was for one year in Sioux city and eleven years in Chicago. Early in 1920 she returned to the old home which she liked to keep as nearly as possible as it was in her early days. The funeral Tuesday afternoon was there, with interment in the Blair cemetery.

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

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