JIM McKEE For the Lincoln Journal Star
As settlement in Nebraska moved westward, the earliest inhabitants coined being “the first” in numerous fields, with John Mickey among them.
John Hopwood Mickey was born in 1845 on his parent’s farm near Burlington, Iowa. Mickey joined the Union Army as a private serving under Gen. Sherman and as a soldier was able, under a special law, to vote at 19 for Abraham Lincoln for president.
After the war Mickey finished high school at Mt. Pleasant, Iowa, then studied for two years at Iowa Wesleyan University. After teaching for two years, Mickey and his wife moved in 1868 to the 1-year-old state of Nebraska. Deciding on land in Hackberry Precinct in then-Butler County, he became the first homesteader to be issued land at the U.S. Land Office in Lincoln and became the first homesteader in what was to become Polk County.
Circuit rider Rev. James Query delivered the first sermon in the county at Mickey’s cabin in May 1869 and that fall, as other families settled, Mickey was elected school treasurer.
Polk County finally split off from Butler County in August 1870, with the county seat established at a point named Osceola. John Mickey was named the county’s first treasurer with his home becoming the de facto courthouse.
The following October the question of moving the county seat to a more central location arose, and, by a 14-vote majority, settled on a site just three miles to the west. Mickey was then chosen to head a committee to pick 40 acres within the newly designated area for the county seat. This new site, again named Osceola and in the new Osceola Precinct, was then surveyed and platted by Mickey.
In 1872, Mickey moved to the new Osceola site, built one of the first three houses and was later appointed General Agent for the Union Pacific Railroad Land Office in Polk County.
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Evan Mickey, John’s son, was born Jan. 26, 1874, the first birth in Polk County.
Rev. Jesse Jackson Fleharty floated the concept of establishing a Methodist “conference school” in Osceola and was immediately joined in the project by Mickey. The school, named Nebraska Wesleyan University, opened in September 1879 with 11 students and four teachers, but closed two years later with the school’s foundation “destined to become the base for the county courthouse.”
Mickey opened the Mickey Bank on the south side of the square in 1879 as the first bank in Polk County with a capitalization of $5,000. The bank was incorporated in 1881 as the State Bank of Osceola, with C.H. Morrill and Albinus Nance as partners and Mickey as president.
Mickey was elected to a one-year term in the lower house of the Nebraska legislature in 1881. Two years later Mickey built the large frame house at the south end of then Hawkeye Street, now State Street, at what would be near the southeast corner of today's State and Beebe streets.
Although the extant house is noted on its nomination to the National Register of Historic Places as being built in 1883-84, a steel engraving of the house appears in Andreas’ History of Nebraska which was written in 1881 and published in 1882. As Mickey is noted as having built the first frame house in Polk County and the present house has admittedly been added onto a number of times, it is interesting to ponder if its origins may date to the 1870s.
When Mickey's wife, Marinda, died in 1886, John married Flora Cinderella Campbell and later was elected to the Board of Trustees at Nebraska Wesleyan University in University Place, Nebraska, becoming the board’s president. Mickey’s tenure at Nebraska Wesleyan was long and fruitful and, in 1901, when the school’s chancellor was paid $1,000 a year, Mickey pledged $6,000 to enable the school to pay salaries, debts and taxes.
Mickey was elected Nebraska’s governor in 1902 and served two terms. Although the terms were considered successful and generally positive, his tenure is most often remembered for his granting 12 pardons and issuing 65 commutations “amid charges that he abused the pardon and parole system.”
Mickey, cited as being one of the largest land holders in Polk County, died in Osceola on June 2, 1910, after a protracted illness. He also was one of three governors who lived in Osceola. Albinus Nance, a business partner of Mickey’s, served two terms beginning in 1879, and Ashton Shallenberger, who grew up in Osceola, became governor in 1909.
Although a fire in 1895 destroyed all of the businesses on the south side of the city square except A.P. Mickey’s Hardware and Mickey’s 1892 bank building, his house on the south side of the city is extant. After his death the house was converted into a hospital, then in 1956 returned to a residence and in 1967 became the home of the Polk County Museum and was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1976.