Peter Youngers started the Exeter nursery in 1878 which he later moved to Geneva. He achieved success with subsoil plowing to help sustain plants through periods of drought. Peter was an elected member of the State Board of Managers from 1899-1915 and was the treasurer of the Nebraska Horticultural Society. He also served on the executive committee of the Fillmore County Council of Defense during WWI.
LIFE AND AGRICULTURAL SERVICES OF PETER YOUNGERS
When the news came on the morning of August fifteenth, 1921 that Peter Youngers was dead at his summer home at Mercer, Wisconsin, a feeling of great loss came over his community and the state.
In his passing, Nebraska lost one of her greatest builders in Agriculture and Horticulture.
Peter Youngers, Senior, was born in Belgium, November 4, 1821. He was the youngest of nine children. Upon the death of his father, who in his lifetime had been Burgomaster of his village (as a Youngers had been for generations) and had amassed an estate of ninety acres, which was notable because most of the farms were of four or five acres, the eldest brother, in accordance with the custom of the laws, divided the property.
When Peter Youngers, Senior, found that he had received the mill pond as his share, he was so incensed that the following night he tied his personal effects in his red bandana handkerchief and taking his wooden shoes in his hand, silently left home.
In his wanderings, he finally landed in Paris where he met Barbara Herkle, a native of Prussia, and they were married. They came to America in 1850 and located in Pike County, Pennsylvania. In 1853, the family moved to New York City where the father entered newspaper work and later was employed as Court Interpreter, as he was an accomplished linguist, speaking four languages fluently. In 1871 the family moved to Fillmore County, Nebraska, where on June seventh, 1899 the father died. The mother died in Exeter on March third, 1904.
Our Peter Youngers was born on a farm near Milford, Pike County, Pennsylvania on Christmas day, 1852. At the age of seven, he was a newsboy and bootblack on the streets of New York City. He sold the Daily News. He often spoke of acquiring a part of his education at this time around the wharfs of New York. He learned to swim in the East River and became very daring in diving off the docks and swimming out to meet incoming boats. He learned here the rule of Hard Knocks.
The boys used to play a game with buttons. When he lost, he would cut the buttons from his clothing to pay his debts, although he knew that his mother would whip him for it when he returned home. When he was thirteen, he carried papers on a morning route and by seven o’clock, he had to be at work in a store where he was employed as office boy. At eighteen, his last job in the city was driving a coke wage for N.E. Barry.
His mother insisted on the family coming west. She wanted to get her boys out of New York City. The oldest brother was a Policeman and lost his life in the Draft Riots. Another brother was killed in the Civil War.
On May third, 1871, they started for Lincoln, Nebraska, where they met William Deuell, the first Treasurer of Fillmore County who located them on a homestead near Exeter on May 11, 1871.
Soon after, Peter, Junior, went to work with a grading gang who were building the B & M Railroad west of Crete. When he went to ask for the job, he was wearing his good clothes from New York City, including a stiff hat. He wanted to go to work right away. The boss thought the clothes hardly appropriate, but Peter said, “Never mind the clothes” and went to work just as he was. Thinking to make sport of a green hand, one fellow who had been on the nob for some time made a great many jokes and jibes at his expense, insinuating that the new man couldn’t do much work. After Peter had worked a few days, he began to speed up and poked fun at the old hand for being a little slow. Finally, he made it so warm that the old hand had to get out.
In December, when the season closed on account of cold weather, the gang were near Kearney. Peter and a companion in their working clothes and without underwear started out to walk home to Fillmore County. They carried a dog for the snow was so deep that he could not walk.
When the family came from New York, they had nothing with which to buy stock or machinery. Peter had a watch which he traded a man at Weeping Water for a cow and he and his father drove it home to Exeter. Peter later bought most of the machinery with his wages.
In 1873, he commenced work as a field hand for E.F. Stephens in the nursery at Crete. While he was working in the nursery, he sent his father trees for an orchard. About ten acres were planted. A few of these are still alive. This was the first orchard in Fillmore County. While working at Crete, he often used to walk home the thirty-five miles to save the fare.
After leaving the Crete Nurseries, Peter secured land adjoining his father’s and worked it with his father’s and all the proceeds of the farm went into the common purse until the spring before he was married. That spring, he bought a team of horses and gave a mortgage on them to get them.
Sometime in the early years, he and his father experimented with Alfalfa or Lucerne as it was called. It was growing well until the grasshopper year, when it was killed out and they had no more seed.
Peter often told of a seventy-mile ride on horseback from the farm to Crete and back to get repairs for the binder. He left Exeter at four o’clock in the afternoon and was back and had the machine repaired by daylight so they could go to work in the morning.
Peter Youngers married to Marilla Nicholson in the Congregational Church at Exeter Sunday morning after the church service on November twenty-third, 1879. On Monday morning they started in a lumber wagon to Lincoln to buy their household furniture. Mrs. Youngers was teaching school that fall and she continued to do this for three years. She made the garden and did the chores while Peter was away canvassing. While living near Exeter, there was an epidemic of diphtheria. Peter used to work all day and then go at night to help care for the sick people. Most of those who were able to help with the nursing were too afraid to offer their services.
The first spring after Mr. And Mrs. Youngers were married, Peter bought hedge plants from the Crete Nurseries and sold them over the county. There was such a demand for hedge that he planted his own seed the next spring. This was the real start of his nursery business.
He was so interested in home grown fruits and berries, that he put up samples from the home garden in little jars of alcohol and carried them in his canvassing. He also used to exhibit these jars of fruit at the State Fair in trying to interest others in the growing of fruit at home.
About this time, he took in partnership, a man named Philip Preston and they called the nursery the Exeter Nurseries. In 1886, they procured eighty acres of land near Geneva, changing the name to Geneva Nurseries. This year, Peter Youngers, Philip Preston and A.J. Brown formed a partnership at Geneva with the firm name of Youngers and Company, for the purpose of growing and handling nursery stock.
The first planting was made the following year, consisting of sixty thousand Apple grafts, three or four thousand each of Plum and Cherry, a larger quantity of forest and hedge seeds and a general line of evergreens, shrubs and ornamental trees. In 1889 Mr. Preston withdrew from the partnership. At this time, the timber culture law was in force and there was an almost unbelievable demand for forest tree seedlings for planting timber claims, each claim requiring twenty-seven thousand seedlings. To meet this demand, Youngers & Company plated annually from a hundred to a hundred and fifty acres of forest tree seedlings grown in rows two feet apart and ten to twenty plants to the foot, amounting to millions of plants each year, and employing as high as a hundred and fifty men during the season.
With the repeal of the timber claim law, Youngers and Company turned their attention more to the growing of a general line of nursery stock, importing Apple seeds from France and growing as high as three million Apple Seedlings annually. They built one of the largest packing and storage houses in the West.
Youngers and Company nurseries soon became known as one of the largest and most reliable nurseries in the United States. They shipped trees to nearly every state in the Union and to every province in Canada.
The Company was the pioneer in planting the first orchards in the Grand Junction country in Colorado and later shipped many carloads of fruit trees into this section. There is not a fruit belt in the United States that does not have large commercial orchards planted with Youngers & Company trees.
After almost thirty years of strenuous work, owing to declining health and desiring some leisure in the evening of life, the business was discontinued in 1916.
Mr. Youngers was elected to the State Board of Agriculture in 1898 and enjoyed the most unusual distinction of being appointed at the same meeting as a member of the Board of Managers. He served here until 1906 when he was elected President of the Board, serving two terms.
During his term, the Fair was relocated in Lincoln and owing to the extremely hard times, it was necessary for the Board to borrow money on their own responsibility to tide the society of the Fall Fair. He served on this Board continuously, except for two years, until his resignation in 1918.
For fifty years, he was deeply interested in Agriculture and was recognized as one of the most progressive farmers and nurserymen in the state. He was one of the first to experiment in the growing of crops. He was a great lover of flowers, plants, and trees and was interested in the development of new varieties.
Mr. Youngers has been honored in many other public activities among which he has held the following offices.
He was Treasurer of the State Horticultural Society for thirty-three years, holding that office until his death; was Superintendent of the Horticultural Exhibit at the Trans-Mississippi Exposition at Omaha in 1898 and 1899.
He had been President of the Western Association of Nurserymen. For two years, he was Treasurer of the National Association of Nurserymen and for many years was on the Executive Board of the same.
On July first, 1920, a certificate of Honorary Membership in the American Association of Nurserymen was given him, of which he was very proud.
Mr. Youngers was also a member of the Executive Committee of the Fillmore County Council Defense in the duties of which his calm deliberate judgment was of outstanding value to his country during the world war.
He was the President of the Citizens State Bank, of Geneva, one of the old established banks of the county.
The ability that Peter Youngers had of impressing himself upon his associates, his spirit of comradeship, his imposing figure and distinctive style of dress, his every ready fund of apt and humorous stories, his undenied executive ability, made him a marked figure in any assemblage.
At the National Nurserymen’s Conventions, he was easily the most popular figure. His fame had gone into every nurseryman’s’ home and when wives and children accompanied the members to the conventions, their first wish was to meet Peter Youngers.
His love for land was so great that when he had any surplus money, it always went into buying more land, until he had accumulated about twelve hundred acres of the best land in Fillmore County.
After retiring from the nursery business, his two recreations were his summer home in Mercer, Wisconsin, located among the Pines and Balsams of the North, and the eighty acres just north of Geneva. This particular land had his personal care. A small creek runs through it and it was his pleasure to add to its landscape by planting all the hardy plants, shrubs and trees that would grow there.
When we sum up the life of Peter Youngers, we find him a wide-awake, live boy. He was a dutiful son, an aggressive, strong young man, an energetic, pushing businessman with a wide vision. Words fail to depict him as the loving husband and most tender father to the wife, two daughters and grandchildren who survive him. When he was appointed guardian of children who were worse than fatherless, with wonderful kindness he did more than his duty. He took them into his home and cared for them as if they were his own.
A friend to all, but to those whom he took into the inner shrine of his friendship, he was a friend indeed. All their people became his people. There was no sacrifice too great for him to make for his friends.
When he had a public duty to perform, he did it nobly as if it were a trust and in every walk of life, he stood unswerving, a full stature of a man.
All honor to Peter Youngers and may his example be a beckoning light in the pathway of those who follow him.
