As near as I can tell by old maps and surveys, this is the 80 acres Niklaas Vandervelde at one time long ago called his own. It's where he put up his soddie or lean-to, or where, with the help of friends, he nailed together a 14 x 14 frame palace. Somewhere here, he and his wife and six children pulled off a ragged trail and staked out a claim. They wanted to put down roots on the Nebraska prairie, following the way west to opportunity.
That picture is deceiving. There's a line of cottonwoods in the draw that would not have been there. his neighbor's letters describe the region as all grassland back then, endless miles of it, which made for monster fires.
Raging prairie fires are long gone now. They can still roar farther south, where the land isn't worked but pastured. In Kansas and Oklahoma, grass fires still consume livelihoods and even people. But here in Lancaster County, where once three girls died in a holocaust of flame, a repetition of that tragedy is unlikely.
I couldn't help stopping by. Vandervelde's land is off the beaten path, and there's no historical marker, no sign, not notice of that horrifying long-ago moment in community history, the day an immigrant farmer and his wife, strangers in a strange land, walked out of church and into their own kind of hell. It was 1871. There likely weren't any cemeteries. Who knows where the girls are buried? No one.
I stopped in town at the church that grew out of the immigrant settlement all around, a handsome building in a small town that looked a great deal like many Great Plains hamlets, as if maybe it needed some support to be able to hang on. I may be wrong. Perhaps Firth, Nebraska, is close enough to Lincoln to bulge into a suburb someday. It's undoubtedly a bedroom community already.
But the church looks to be doing well. Not long ago, they celebrated their centennial, but I doubt anyone remembered to note the prairie fire that killed three young women 150 years ago. There may not have been a church in town back then. In 1871, there may have been little more than a post office. When Vandervelde and his vrouw walked out of church that morning, church may well have been a neighbor's sod house.
When the Dutch townships of Lancaster County were first settled, a good deal more people were here on the land. Most homestead were 80-acres, which meant more families lived out here, and the families were bigger--much bigger. Firth may not have been much of a town back then, but the rural community out here was larger.
For years, people couldn't--and wouldn't--forget the prairie fire that consumed so much all around and killed three young Vandervelde girls. It was story told in whispers from one generation to another until, I suppose, it simply lost currency. "Vanderveldes?" people might say. "I don't know that name." Like so many others, the family sold that 80 to neighbors and then left, living up to their name's meaing--vandevelde: "from the fields."
I thought I'd go find the land where those three Vandervelde girls died in a hellish prairie fire. The story stuck with me with such tenacity that I figured I owed that much at least--I needed to pay my respects.
A friend of mine who's Cherokee insists that if you sit somewhere close to where such things happened, things like death in a prairie fire on a clear Sabbath morning, if you just sit there and look and listen long enough, you'll hear those voices in the wind.
There was a time I thought that was silly.
Things couldn't be more different out there on the prairie when I visited. It was cold and snowy, dreary and January gray. There's a tree line, behind it a corn field. The sea of grass in Lancaster County is no longer. The Vanderveldes and much of the homestead community that once existed right here is gone. What you see up there in that picture is nothing at all close to what the man saw that day coming out of a sodhouse church.
But still, today, even in the cold, if you wait and listen, it's like my friend says: you may just hear voices in the wind.
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