1928 James Ammiel Ollis

JAMES A. OLLIS, CITIZEN

By Horace M. Davis

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Read Wednesday, January 4, 1928, at the Annual Meeting of the Nebraska Hall of Agricultural Achievement

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History is best written after a lapse of years, Contemporary history or biography can scarcely be separated from reminiscences and anecdotes and the inevitable conclusions that result from their analysis. Few men are really great in the eyes of those who know them most intimately; rather love for their admirable qualities and admiration for their courageous performances transcend the appellation of greatness accorded by those who view from wider angles and broader horizons.

Nebraska is rich in pioneer history and it grows increasingly interesting as the frontiers have recognizably passed beyond our state and national boundaries. Civilization, conveniences and luxuries, differing in degree only, are now commonly found from ocean to ocean, in cities and villages, forest and mountain, farm and range.

In keeping with its environment and its ancestry the present generation is living easier and faster than the generation of yesteryear. It is not to be urged that removing physical barriers enervates the present generation nor threatens to undermine the stamina of future generations. Hazards, multitudinous and temperamental, are being met and overcome, perhaps with less serious thought and worry, and the superstructure of our twentieth century culture is being safely built upon the sure foundation laid with pain and travail by hardy men and women who founded our first schools and churches, who turned the first sod and built the first fences for the cattle on a thousand hills.

The American people are not a race of idolaters. Individually and collectively, they are fact-finders. Arbitrary standards of citizenship are set up as touch-stones by which men are measured. In the degree that they approach the stern standard they are labeled as good, bad or indifferent, and the saving grace insured by our democracy is, that each individual is free to supply his own yard stick and take his own measurements of his fellows.

If the late James Ammiel Ollis could speak today I am sure that he would prefer that his title should go into Nebraska history as ‘Citizen” Ollis, rather than Senator Ollis. And for the very simple reason that it was his highest ambition to be an exemplary citizen. He was not vain of position or ambitious for a place of power. Perhaps the writer is more guilty than anyone else of urging him to accept public office. Invariably he would ponder carefully and reply by suggesting one or more other men who were more deserving, he thought, of the honor, if such it be, and who could better discharge the responsibilities.

J.A. Ollis, Sr., will always seem to me to be the most puritanic of the Puritans. He was a stern, orthodox churchman of English ancestry; tall and gaunt, and with an immobile countenance that invited no familiarity. He lived up punctiliously to his high ideals of integrity, industry and stern justice. Scant of praise and equally wordless of criticism he was fairly eloquent with silence and never employed two words where one sufficed. Thus, he ruled his household. Into this atmosphere J.A. Ollis, Jr. was born, October 12, 1859, on an Illinois farm. His mother died while he was in his teens and he moved to Valley county, Nebraska, with the father and two sisters and his girl wife when he was twenty-three years of age.

“James”, as his father called him, was more familiarly called “J.A.” but affectionately known to his sisters as “Ammie”. I never knew any man in Valley county to speak of the senior Mr. Ollis in any familiar way nor do I remember of any old neighbor or friend calling the junior “Jim”, as he later was called by his familiars of the state board of agriculture.

Although physically frail “J.A.” was the first of his neighborhood in the field with his team in the morning. He gave himself and his horses the shortest noon hour and stayed the latest. When he broke the virgin sod it was done at the proper time and the furrows were the proper depth. He planted his corn at the right time, with the straightest rows and with the least waste space at the end of the rows; when he cultivated it was to stir the soil and kill the weeds. He was one of the first to see the future of alfalfa in Nebraska. And if the first or the second sowings were not complete successes, he bought more seed and did the planting in a different and a better way. He was never discouraged by hail nor frenzied by drought but started in immediately to save the pieces and prepare for another and more fruitful harvest.

As his acres grew, as a result of his work and thrift, he employed help. He was a firm believer in preserving the integrity of families, so he built tenant houses and hired men with families, sometimes at specific wages and sometimes on shares, but always with the understanding that he should supervise the work, as to crops plated, how cultivated and when harvested.

Little by little, and in this respect, he showed his unbounded faith in the future of the country and in his own ability to carry heavy responsibilities, he acquired titles to hundreds of acres of fertile and gently rolling prairie land that spread out for miles to the south and west of his beautiful farmstead which stood just on the foothills of Mira Valley, and acquired more than a thousand acres of rougher land to the north that furnished pasturage for his cattle.

In his barns were thoroughbred Percheron horses, purebred cattle and pedigreed Duroc-Jersey swine. His annual sale of purebred stock was almost as much of an event as the county fair or the celebration of the Fourth of July. No man fed as many steers nor fattened as many hogs. He used all of the corn and alfalfa he could raise and bought the surplus crops from his neighbors.

He could estimate the value of a train load of cattle or sheep in the twinkling of an eye and could negotiate a purchase or sale with the use of few words. It was particularly fortunate that as his operations broadened his boys quietly and efficiently assumed responsibilities. For about this time Mr. Ollis’ health had become uncertain, although he never complained and kept the whole program moving along smoothly.

From the very beginning of his farming activities he was guide, philosopher and friend for the entire growing neighborhood. In the early days, many an inexperienced homesteader did not know how to break sod or till his fields. “J.A.” tried to tell him, but if that failed, he would drive his own team and machinery into the neighbor’s field and spend a day, if necessary, showing him how to do the work. Among the first to own a self-binder, he used it to harvest more wheat for his neighbors than grew on his own land. His farm implements were for the general use of the community, and his pastures, his wells and watering places were open for neighborhood use; for pay if they could pay, but free if necessary.

So interested was Mr. Ollis in the development of better stock in the country that he always kept more sires in his barns and yards than he needed for his own use and their service was free, or at nominal fees, for other farmers.

Privileged with little book education, Mr. Ollis was zealous for schooling for his children and the young people of his district. As I remember it, he was always a member of the school board and, as I also remember, he did all the hiring of teachers and provided the most of the coal and the water for the pupils’ comfort. Born and reared a Presbyterian he was a regular attendant at the neighborhood church which stood on the next section and, probably, paid more for the support of the church than his share.

During the years while Mr. Ollis was particularly active in business and politics partisan feeling ran high and his critics - for he had opponents as every other worthwhile man has enemies - said that Ollis was over-stern with his family. While they might have thought so, it was far from the truth. It was the quietest family circle I ever knew, and the busiest. There was no lost motion and no energy spent in the ordinary childish chatter and controversies. I well remember a circumstance that shows something of the family regime or discipline:

It may have been on Decoration Day, or possibly a circus day, that Mr. Ollis brought his eight children into Ord, in the big spring wagon. A lunch had been brought for the family and feed for the horses, which were tied to the wheels after being unhitched on a vacant lot near my office. Promptly at the appointed hour each one of the children returned to eat lunch and then scattered again for the afternoon. Again, at an appointed hour, Mr. Ollis and Elmer hitched up the team and all of the children, but one, clambered in and sat down to await the coming of the tardy one. I never learned what caused the delay, but that family sat there with scarcely a word spoken for possibly two hours. When the belated member of the family did arrive, she got in the wagon and the homeward journey started without a word of recrimination, or explanation. I have never known of Mr. Ollis scolding a member of his family and I can say sincerely that I have never found such faith, “no, not in Israel” as those eight boys and girls have always evinced in their father.

Mr. Ollis was active as an officer and exhibitor in the early county fairs in Valley county and as a representative of the county society graduated into the State Board of Agriculture, where he was a valuable member for several years before he served as president in 1916 to 1918. He was also president of the Improved Livestock Breeders Association.

As a member of the board of county commissioners in his home county for many years he made it his business to see that they county’s business was managed efficiently and without partisan bias. I well remember the ultimatum that he delivered to the so-called “bridge trust” in the early nineties and the resultant savings thereafter to the county treasury.

Imbued with a sincere and prophetic interest in agriculture and its handmaiden, livestock husbandry, his earliest efforts in the legislature were directed toward securing adequate appropriations for the support of the state fair and its activities, for generous appropriations for the agricultural college and experimental farms and for the organization of county agricultural agents.

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Mr. Ollis was not one to carry his heart on his sleeve or advertise his benevolences. In the early days of his larger farming operations there was a particularly notable immigration of Bohemians, Poles and Danes into the central part of Nebraska. They could find work on his ranches. If they made good and were thrifty, they naturally sought to become landowners themselves. This usually involved additional capital or added credit. I do not know half of the list of the substantial farmers of Valley county who were given that kind of help but do know of many of those men who today respectfully touch their hats when the name of J.A. Ollis is mentioned.

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When the wife of Mr. Ollis’ young manhood died he was left with eight children, five daughters and three sons, one, Jamie, but a few days old. Relatives and neighbors insisted that he should allow the babies to be taken into other homes. Some thought him stubborn when he refused, but “McGreagor sat at the head of the table”, and he became both father and mother to the best family I have ever known.

It was not until the youngest of his children approached manhood that he married Mrs. Eliza Knott, the widow of a former tenant, in 1905. She had two sons and two daughters and they at once became his sons and his daughters.

The writer has lately interviewed perhaps a score of the most intimate friends of Mr. Ollis as to what they considered his outstanding qualities and the secret of his success.

Almost without exception they have credited him with being a fighter. “He had a fine courage,” says one. “I never knew a man so persistent and yet so patient,” says another. “He was a high type of political strategist,” volunteers a political opponent. A man who worked with him both in the legislature and state fair has said, “Ollis believed in Nebraska and her possibilities and he was honest in every move he made.”

One man who knew him rather intimately during his last twenty years speaks of his patience. “Although he was carrying on his shoulders the tasks that belonged to two men or a dozen, he was never nervous or frustrated. He seemed to work to a schedule but with the advance knowledge that it would not work out just as planned.”

Let me quote what Ellis E. Wolf of the Lincoln Star succinctly says:

“Determination and persistence in putting over what he had undertaken were outstanding qualities in the personal makeup of Senator J.A. Ollis, as his legislative associates knew him. He used no spectacular methods but put every ounce of his great personal energy behind the projects in which he was interested.

“Mr. Ollis always had a clear idea of what he wanted to achieve, and he went after it in the most direct way. In the many hard legislative battles which he fought; he was always cool, never excited.

“His stockyards regulation bill was the hard fight in the 1911 session, and many times it looked as though the measure would fail. But Ollis stayed on the job through the whole of the long, tedious struggle and emerged, as usual, victorious. This was probably the most notable triumph of his whole career at the capitol.

“His colleagues had the utmost respect for his judgment and confidence in his leadership. A conspicuous instance of this was when the state senate in 1913, although dominated by the opposite party, virtually put itself under his personal direction in the contest between the two wings of the legislature over university removal. Though Ollis and the senate had the unpopular side of the question, he believed himself to be in the right and forced the lower house to agree to let the people themselves decide it at the subsequent election.”

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An unexpected slump in the prices of stock when he had his yards filled and when the corn crop was short, along with a shrink in land values, brought Mr. Ollis’ farming enterprises to an unfortunate crisis.

His health had failed markedly during the last few years and he had served several terms in the state senate, at a recognized loss to his personal affairs. It will be remembered that when he was a member of the legislature, he was very active in support of some important measures, chief among them, a law to compel a physical valuation of railway properties, a law to place regulation of stockyards under the state railway commission, a law to provide for the organization of cooperative enterprises, another to prevent discrimination in prices by corporations operating at several points. With a deeper vision into the future than he was then credited with, he emphatically favored removal of the city campus of the state university to the state farm.

In some of these measures he encountered firm and organized opposition. At one time when his active support of a reform measure was all-important for the success of the measure his motives in borrowing a large sum of money for a business deal was construed as an attempt to invite a bribe and the false interpretation, whether real or fancied, hurt him financially - but he secured the passage of the bill. I knew of the details of the transaction at that time and nothing can be farther from the truth than the thought that J.A. Ollis would fix a price on any act of his where judgment and principle were involved.

Mr. Ollis was taken sick with pneumonia when on an errand for the Federal Land Bank of Omaha, with which he was connected, and died there April 4, 1922. Invoking that strong power of will that had marked his life he made a courageous fight to recover his strength but to no avail. Tarrying on the borderland of the physical and while his mind wandered from the past, through the present and on into the future he kept telling the watchers at his bedside that he could see three majestic ships sailing a level sea. “Why three,” he inquired. “One of them is for me, but why the three? And why so large a ship for such a weak, unimportant old man?” He thought he could discern his Savior at the helm of one of the ships and he hoped that that ship would be the one upon which he would take passage. If the ships were coming to take all of his friends with him, he yet could not see why the three were necessary. He wanted his family and his closest friends, of course, but only if they were ready to go.

And so, Citizen Ollis gently slipped out of this busy life on a welcome voyage across a placid ocean. I think that the Christ whom he loved and obeyed was at the helm and came for him, and it pleases one to believe they are together voyaging. I believe that Citizen Ollis is contented in the thought that he pioneered for the general good of society, that farming and stock raising might be better advanced as a result of his large endeavors, if feeble results, and that he did his unselfish part in bringing this day and age up to its flower and fruition.