In January 1873 The Marshall County News published a compact history of settlement along the Black Vermillion Valley in northeast Kansas, which had been written by F. G. Adams, President of the Kansas Historical Society.
Although the feature took up four full columns of the front page of that week’s paper, nearly a third of that space was devoted to a retelling of the most famous crime in early Marshall County history: the abduction and eventual murder of Julian Changreau’s sister-in-law at the hands of Kaw marauders.
A few days later the newspaper received an intriguing response from former Marshall County resident Gerat Henry Hollenberg, then living in nearby Washington County.
Henry Hollenberg knew firsthand about the settling of Marshall County, having arrived on the scene in January 1855. Shortly after his marriage to Sophia Brockmeyer in 1858, the couple moved to northeastern Washington County to establish a way station on the Oregon-California Trail where they served migrants, stagecoach travelers and, very briefly, Pony Express riders.
Looking over your columns, I find a history of the south half of Marshall county. It is a good one, and will bring credit to you for your enterprise.
This history is very interesting to those old settlers. It brings to mind the strange and stirring scenes of a pioneer life, long since passed away, and half forgotten; and it will give an insight to the new comer of the danger and difficulties of a stormy and desperate frontier life, and the hardships of those who laid the foundation of our proud and prosperous country.
Never shall I forget the time and the bond of friendship that bound those earliest settlers together. Never have I resided among a better and more honest class of people than those early settlers on the Vermillion.
Mr. Editor, there are a few mistakes in the history, that I would like to correct if it is not too late.
Hollenberg took issue with the characterization of the first settler, Louis Twomble* as a “Sioux Half-Breed,” insisting that he was, instead a Pottawatomie half-breed, and should not be counted along with Changreau and his Sioux household since the Changreau family did not arrive until 1855.
The pioneer then proceeded to point out the correct order in which various pioneers had trickled into the valley, named the first child to be born there - more than a year before the young man who had been cited for the honor by the Kansas Historical Society, and added a few names which had been omitted altogether, among them the writer's late brother George Hollenberg who was actually the second settler in the region after Twomble* in 1854.
Henry Hollenberg also singled out another Marshall County pioneer for mention, one who had arrived with the second wave of settlement in 1856.
The first buffalo was killed by Tom Lovel, three miles from Elizabeth.
Thomas Lovewell, who had arrived in the valley in the summer of 1856, would be counted among the eligible voters of Marshall County each year until 1859, when he joined the Pikes Peak gold rush, while his wife Nancy returned to Iowa with their young daughter Julaney, born in Kansas Territory in 1857.
The town of Elizabeth can be seen on the map above, a small settlement northeast of Irving, and probably in the neighborhood of Thomas Lovewell's cabin. Elizabeth had sprung up near a popular crossing on the Black Vermillion.
Eighteen months after writing his letter setting the record straight on a few points, Gerat Henry Hollenberg died shortly after setting out on a voyage to visit his native Hanover, then a province of the Free State of Prussia. He was buried at sea.
* The pioneer's name is also sometimes rendered as Tremble, Tromley and Twombly, all very likely to be honest efforts to reproduce the sound of the French-Canadian Tremblé.