Addison Sheldon was a pivotal, historical figure in the Nebraska State Historical Society. He helped open a publicly oriented Society museum, raise funds for the Society to build its own facility, and edited the Nebraska History magazine for over 25 years. Sheldon’s greatest legacy was his success in broadening the Society’s reach and promoting the importance of history to the public.
(A paper read by James C. Olson, Superintendent of the Nebraska State Historical Society at the Agricultural Hall of Fame, College of Agriculture, University of Nebraska, February 4, 1947, based in part on information furnished by Philip Sheldon of Scottsbluff, and in part on records in the Nebraska State Historical Society.)
Addison Erwin Sheldon was born in the little village of Sheldon, Houston County, Minnesota on April 15, 1861. He died at his home in Lincoln, Nebraska 24, 1943. A son of Rolland Fuller and Mary Adel (Hassett) Sheldon, he was descended from old American families, tracing his ancestry in the paternal line to Isaac Sheldon who was in New England as early as 1628. Rolland Fuller Sheldon, the father, was a pioneer Middle Western Baptist minister and physician. He died in 1863 while the family was still in Minnesota. Mary Sheldon, the mother, like the father, was a descendant of New England families, and was a musician and a teacher of gracious talent.
In the year 1869, Addison Sheldon with his mother, homesteaded in Seward County, Nebraska. During the period 1869 to 1877, young Addison attended country school for a total of eleven months. His playmates were Pawnee Indian children. Educational opportunities expanded somewhat in the next few years, and from 1878 to 1883 he was a part-time student at Doane College and the University of Nebraska. He received the degree of Bachelor of Arts from the University of Nebraska in 1902, and the further degree of Master of Arts in 1904. In 1908-09 he spent one year in residence at Columbia University in New York City, subsequently completing the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy which was conferred upon him by that institution in 1919.
While at Doane College, young Addison met Jennie Almira Denton, the daughter of Daniel Denton, of Denton, Nebraska. They were married at Omaha on October 18, 1884. To this union were born four children: Robert Lynn, who died in infancy; Esther, who died in 1904 at the age of sixteen; Philip Lisle, at present editor of the “Business Farmer” at Scottsbluff; and Ruth, Director of the Home Service Department of the Washington Gas Light Company, Washington, D.D. Jennie Denton Sheldon died on July 20, 1897. On September 19, 1907, Mr. Sheldon married Margaret Eleanor Thompson, a native Nebraskan who had spent her childhood on her father’s frontier ranch.
From 1884 to 1887, Mr. Sheldon served as editor of the Burnett Blade. This was followed by two years as a homesteader near Cody in Cherry County, and from that period dates his active interest in Nebraska’s agricultural problems.
Returning to newspaper work in 1888, Mr. Sheldon became editor of the Chadron Advocate and in the subsequent decade continued as editor of this paper and of the Chadron Signal. The more routine duties of journalism were relieved by his service as a war correspondent at the battle of Wounded Knee, 1890-91. Almost thirty years later, it is interesting to note, he again became a war correspondent, going overseas with the American Forces in 1918-19.
In his youth, Dr. Sheldon had been a Republican. In 1888 he relinquished this allegiance to become a member of the Prohibition party. Two years later in 1890 he joined the Populist Movement in which he was an active figure for some ten years. He was chairman or secretary of Populist county committees from 1890 to 1901, and was a delegate to the Populist National Conventions of 1892 and 1896.
In 1897 he entered public life as a member of the Nebraska House of Representatives, distinguishing himself during his tenure of office by introducing the statute forbidding further sale of school lands. He always was interested in problems of government, and as early as 1910 advocated the one house legislature.
From 1893 to 1901 Mr. Sheldon was secretary of the State Printing Board, and in 1907 he founded the Nebraska Legislative Reference Bureau, of which he was director until 1919. During this period he also was associated with the Nebraska State Historical Society, first as Superintendent of Field Work, and finally in 1917 as Superintendent, the position which he held until his death in 1943.
During his long tenure as Superintendent of the State Historical Society, he so impressed his vigorous personality upon the Society’s affairs that his aims became its aims, and it was difficult to think of one without the others. Despite this pre-occupation with the affairs of one institution, however, his interests ranged over broad fields. This is illustrated by the organizations to which he belonged, and in which he served. He was a member of the Nebraska Press Association, the Nebraska Academy of Sciences, of which he was secretary for ten years; the Nebraska State Teachers Association; the American Historical Association; the National Geographic Society; the National Association for the Advancement of Science; The Folk Lore Association; the Nebraska Society of the Sons of the American Revolution, of which he was a charter member; the Laymen’s Club of Lincoln; the Lincoln Chamber of Commerce; the Young Men’s Christian Association; the Lincoln University Club; the Modern Woodmen of America; and the First Plymouth Congregational Church of Lincoln. In 1934 he received the medal of the Lincoln Kiwanis Club awarded for distinguished service.
His first interest, though, was always the telling of the story of Nebraska, and particularly of Nebraska’s agriculture. He wrote voluminously and well on the subjects which interested him, and has to his credit an extraordinary number of volumes, including the following: Semi-Centennial History of Nebraska, 1904; Nebraska Constitutional Conventions (2 volumes), 1905-07; Poems and Sketches of Nebraska, 1907; History and Stories of Nebraska, 1907; Report on Nebraska Archives, 1910; Nebraska Blue Book and Historical Register, 1915; Land Systems and Land Policies of Nebraska, 1919; Comparison of Nebraska State Constitutions in 1866, 1871, 1875, 1919, 1920; Documents of Nebraska Life, 1923; Nebraska Civil Government, 1925; Nebraska the Land and the People (3 volumes), 1931; Nebraska Old and New, 1937.
He founded the Nebraska History Magazine in 1918 and served as its editor until his death, contributing many articles to its pages. In addition to the vast quantity of published work bearing his name, there are in the files of the State Historical Society some 518 addresses delivered at various times on historical, literary, and scientific subjects.
There are many who feel that Dr. Sheldon’s best work was his Land Systems and Land Policies in Nebraska. It is no accident that this book, dealing with the basic element of economic life in Nebraska, stands pre-eminent in his long list of publications. His earliest Nebraska associations were with the land. Throughout his life he was an owner of Nebraska land, and his active, eager mind was constantly engaged in seeking out new and improved methods of working that land. The early homesteading venture has been mentioned. In 1919 he purchased a half section of land in Scottsbluff County which came under irrigation about twenty years later. The crops on this farm were always carefully rotated, and sheep were fed in the winter for additional fertilizer. He always took the greatest pride in this Scottsbluff County land.
Then, in the tradition of so many of the great pioneer Nebraska agriculturalists, he had a deep and abiding love for trees, especially fruit trees. He early planted windbreaks on his land, and one of his last farming projects was the planting of four acres of orchard on dry land, even though there was no irrigation water available, and, as his son, Philip Sheldon, relates, they “had always had trouble in getting enough water for a good stock well.” Still he planted the orchard because nothing satisfied him so much as the planting of trees in Nebraska soil. Indeed, Dr. Sheldon was something of a mystic in his love for the land. Even as an old man he liked the feel of the soil on his bare feet, and nothing delighted him more than to work in his garden without shoes just after a rain.
His deep study into the history of Nebraska’s past convinced him of the importance of the land and agriculture to the future of this state. Nowhere are his views on this subject better expressed than in the last paragraph of his monumental three volume work, Nebraska: the Land and the People:
The future of Nebraska, in its main outline, seems clear. Always an agricultural state, more completely so than any other state in the Union. Her life to be is bound inseparably with the fortunes of farming. So long as man shall find his chief food supply from the earth, Nebraska will be at the center of all questions and controversies affecting farm life. From her prairies will come, in the future as in the past, prophets of politics, production and distribution. Her future poets, novelists and dramatists will find their material in the early records of frontier life and in the moving frontier of farm life as it presses onward toward its future goal. Her architects and builders will, as in the new and world-famous Capitol Building, put the spirit of the prairie into enduring farms.
His influence on the historical traditions of Nebraska has been immeasurable. Writing shortly after Dr. Sheldon’s death, Mr. J.E. Lawrence, President of the State Historical Society, said of him:
There was the spark of the dreamer, the poet, and the practical philosopher amazingly well engrained in Doctor Sheldon. So happy was the observation of one speaking of him, who said: “He is more of a Nebraska than most of us born here. To him this state is not a mere geographical subdivision but a fatherland, an empire to love and defend.”
He was more of a Nebraskan because the fields of wheat and of other small grains, and of corn waving in the winds, were the music of the industrious hands of men who found happiness in the simple life of the soil. He loved the land in passionate devotion. He loved the farm, the hills and the valleys, the timber and the birds. He loved the little animals of the prairies. Such were the qualities that made him a distinguished interpreter of Nebraska life in all of its vicissitudes and its triumph.
Truly, Addison E. Sheldon’s place is secure as the first historian of Nebraska, and the pioneer chronicler of Nebraska’s pioneer agriculture.
