Thomas B. Skeen, born January 19, 1838, in Buchanan County, Missouri, is one of Nemaha County, Nebraska’s oldest residents. His family, originating from England and later Scotland, emigrated to America, with his father, Alexander D. Skeen, settling in Nebraska in 1854. Thomas experienced pioneer life, including interactions with Native Americans and participating in the Pike’s Peak Gold Rush. He married Eunice Harger in 1860, and they had several children. Thomas became a successful freighter and landowner, eventually operating a flouring mill and engaging in the cattle-feeding business. He moved to Auburn in 1888, where he continued farming and became a prominent local figure. Active in the Methodist Episcopal Church and a Master Mason, Thomas’s life exemplified diligence, perseverance, and community involvement.
Thomas B. Skeen, who was christened Thomas Hart Benton Skeen after the great Senator Benton, for whom grandfather Blevins was a warm admirer, is one of the oldest living residents of Nemaha County, Nebraska. He was a boy of seventeen on his father’s farm near Nemaha City when the surveyors were running the base line in August and September of 1855. He was born in Buchanan County, Missouri, on a part of the Platte purchase, on January 19, 1838.
The family originated in England, among the English nobility, and had its seat in Scotland for many generations. Great-grandfather Skeen was the ancestor who came from Scotland and founded this particular branch of the family in America. Jesse Skeen, the grandfather of Thomas B. Skeen, was born in South Carolina, November 24, 1764, but emigrated to Tennessee, where he was a farmer and distiller. He and his wife, Kezia Taylor, who was also Scotch, born in 1777, reared four sons and four daughters, and two of the latter joined the Mormons and went to Salt Lake City. These grandparents died in old age in Tennessee.
Alexander D. Skeen, the father of Thomas B. Skeen, was born in Sumner County, Tennessee, near Gallatin, December 18, 1815, and died in Nemaha City, Nebraska, in the early spring of 1892. His wife was Mary Blevins, who was born in Green County, Kentucky, in 1817, and was a daughter of Daniel and Mrs. (Roberts) Blevins, who were Kentucky farmers, and the former was in the Black Hawk War. Alexander D. Skeen and his wife were married at the respective ages of nineteen and sixteen, and they began farm life near Independence, Missouri. He had left home in his teens and became a Mississippi river trader, going to St. Louis at an early day, and it was there that he met his wife. After the Platte purchase was opened he went viewing, and an old French trader, Roubidoux, urged him to take a claim on the Missouri near the mouth of the Blacksnake, which was the ultimate location of the city of St. Joseph, but he was not pleased with that locality and took a claim in the dense timber, seven miles southeast of the present St. Joseph. He built the log cabin in which his son Thomas B. was born in the following winter, and as he was poor he had to work for wages to keep the wolf from the door, often cutting and splitting rails for twenty-five cents per hundred. He enjoyed the pioneer experience of going sixty miles to mill, with his blind horse loaded with corn. He found this life too arduous, and shortly afterward pre-empted one hundred and sixty acres in Atchison County, Missouri, where he began life anew, but still in humble circumstances. He moved to Nebraska in 1854, and he died on the old homestead which he had settled forty years before, and his wife followed him in 1899. He and his wife were members of the Christian Church, in which he was an elder, and he had served in the militia which routed the Mormons from Jackson County, Missouri. He was a quiet, unobtrusive man, living at peace with his neighbors, and attended strictly to his own business.
There were eleven children born to these parents, but a son died in infancy. Mrs. Margaret Snow, a widow of Auburn, was born in Buchanan County, Missouri; Jesse died at the age of twelve; the third in order of birth is Thomas B.; Elizabeth is the wife of David Tourtelott, of Lincoln, Nebraska, and they have six children; Lucy Jane, deceased wife of James Hiatt, left four children; Richard is a retired farmer at Red Cloud, Nebraska, and has two daughters; Kenyon died in Arkansas in 1896, leaving his wife, a son, and two daughters; Mary, wife of Henry Shubert, her second husband, lives in this county and has four children; John W. is at Broken Bow, Custer County, Nebraska, and has one son and one daughter; Nancy Ann is the wife of James Linn, of Lincoln, Nebraska, and has one son and one daughter.
Thomas B. Skeen was reared and inured to farm life from an early age. Owing to his father’s financial circumstances and the primitive surroundings in which they lived, his education was meager, and the old schoolhouse in which it was obtained was of the fashion now passed from history, being roughly made, with puncheon floor, slab seats, fireplace, and other equipment and appliances known to the schoolboy of sixty years ago. In 1854 he and his father came to Nemaha County, Nebraska, where they laid out a claim and built a double log house and cattle shed. They were among the first comers and “batched” it the first winter, as the family did not come until the following April. The Indians had not yet removed from their old camping grounds, but they lived at peace with the whites, their only depredations being the stealing of corn once in a while, nor were they polite in their visits or ever backward in begging for food. The first winter that Mr. Skeen spent there was a hard one, the deep snow making existence for the cattle especially precarious, and some of their sheep perished, the red men eating the dead animals in the spring.
Mr. Skeen remained at home until he reached his majority, and in the spring of 1859 was among the stampeders to Pike’s Peak. Denver then had about twelve houses, and from there his party of eight went to the Clear Creek and Boulder region. They were turned back by the deep snows on the east side of the mountains and established claims at Twelve Mile Diggings, and they have since been thankful for the outcome of the expedition, for had they reached the other side of the mountains their bones would have later been found there by some subsequent wanderers. After spending one summer in this new experience, Mr. Skeen returned to what seemed God’s country, in Nebraska. But he was not satisfied with his western experience, and he soon afterward engaged in freighting, taking about ten wagons, drawn by four or six oxen or two or four horses, and loaded with flour, bacon, and other provisions, to Denver and other parts of the state, where he sold the flour for sixteen dollars per hundred, his corn for nine cents a pound and other prices in proportion. He began this enterprise on borrowed money, and at the end of four years quit with two thousand dollars to the good. He had bought eighty acres of land, trading one hundred and twenty acres of wild prairie toward it and borrowing three hundred dollars at five percent interest per month. He and his family moved on this property in 1861, and in the spring of 1865 he sold out for twelve hundred dollars and went to Jackson County, Missouri. He soon returned, however, and invested in a flouring mill two miles east of Auburn. He conducted this with success for nine years, and in 1873 sold his half interest in it for ten thousand dollars. During the following summer he was in the Northwest Pacific coast country for the purpose of locating land, but in the end came back to Nebraska, and settled on one hundred and seventy-three acres of improved land, where he was engaged in the stock business. In 1879 he bought two hundred acres near Nemaha City, and from then until 1898 engaged in the cattle-feeding business, shipping about five carloads each year. He moved into Auburn in 1888, farming by proxy for one year and then came back to the two hundred and eighty acres three miles southwest of Nemaha City, but a year later he sold this for fifty dollars an acre, which was then the top-notch price for land. He then bought two farms nearer Auburn, and in 1892 built his good home on a quarter of a block of city property. He owns these two farms, for which he paid forty-five dollars an acre, besides one hundred and sixty acres one mile north of Howe, for which he paid fifty-four dollars an acre. He has since refused seventy-five dollars an acre for some of his land, and he is now one of the prosperous landowners of the county, all of which he has made by his own well-directed efforts, beginning with nothing at the start in life. Diligence, perseverance, and honorable methods of business dealing have brought these rewards to one of the best-known pioneers and citizens of Nemaha County.
On October 10, 1860, Mr. Skeen was married to Miss Eunice Harger, who was born at Muscatine, Iowa, a daughter of Jarias and Elizabeth (Wickersham) Harger, who came to Iowa from Indiana at an early day, and the latter was connected with the family which settled Yellville, Arkansas, in the early history of that state. Mr. and Mrs. Skeen are the parents of the following children: Mary Elizabeth, born January 14, 1862, died when two years old; Eunice Eulalie, born April 7, 1864, is the wife of James Armstrong and has one son; Ada Frances, born March 19, 1867, is the present wife of Riley Turney, residing on one of her father’s farms, and she has one son by her first husband, James Whitcomb Fairbanks; George B., born September 13, 1869, is in Grant County, Oklahoma, on one hundred and sixty acres which his father bought him, and he has one son and three daughters; Lydia May, born May 25, 1872, is the wife of William Harris, of South Auburn, and has one daughter, and she was a teacher before her marriage; Ford, born July 31, 1877, is on one of his father’s farms, and has one daughter; Adelbert died in 1892 at the age of eleven; Cora Ethel died in 1874, one year old. Mr. Skeen is a Master Mason, and he and his wife are members of the Methodist Episcopal Church, in which he has been an official for many years. In politics he is a Republican.
Source: Lewis Publishing Company, A Biographical and Genealogical History of Southeastern Nebraska, 2 volumes, Lewis Publishing Company, 1904.