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Evalena Henderson lived in Yuba City, CA with her parents, Thomas Jefferson Henderson and Anna Jane Fox Henderson from 1903 to 1908 at 109 Forbes Street, Yuba City, CA. Before moving to Yuba City, her father had been a miner in several locations within a 33 mile radius.
Evalena was a Methodist. She gave her small Sunday School bible to her daughter Virginia and it remains with her heirs. She really thought the Lutherans were just too narrow minded.
Marriages:
1884 -- Thomas Jefferson Henderson married Anna Jane Fox on September 28, 1884 in Honcut,...
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Evalena Henderson lived in Yuba City, CA with her parents, Thomas Jefferson Henderson and Anna Jane Fox Henderson from 1903 to 1908 at 109 Forbes Street, Yuba City, CA. Before moving to Yuba City, her father had been a miner in several locations within a 33 mile radius.
Evalena was a Methodist. She gave her small Sunday School bible to her daughter Virginia and it remains with her heirs. She really thought the Lutherans were just too narrow minded.
Marriages:
1884 -- Thomas Jefferson Henderson married Anna Jane Fox on September 28, 1884 in Honcut, Butte County, California.
1902 -- Beatrice Henderson Samson, born on August 9, 1885 and died November 24, 1952 in Yuba City, CA. She married James Omar Samson who was born July 22, 1878 and died May 20, 1959. They were married in Marysville on July 10, 1902 and lived in Yuba City. No children. They were of the Mormon faith. They lived in Yuba City, CA.
1907 -- Lillie Versa Henderson Herr who was born August 27, 1888 in Honcut, Butte County and died June 26, 1931 of ovarian cancer. She married Henry Harrison Herr on August 11, 1907. They lived in Yuba City, CA.
1914 -- Evalena Henderson born November 25, 1890 married Alexander Juhl on May 28, 1914 in Kearney, Nebraska. She died May 2, 1938 by her own hand. She was in the advanced stages of diabetes. Alexander died as the result of a car accident on January 16, 1951. They are buried side by side in the Riverdale Cemetery.
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April 18, 1906
At 5:13 a.m., an earthquake estimated at close to 8.0 on the Richter scale strikes San Francisco, California, killing hundreds of people as it topples numerous buildings. The quake was caused by a slip of the San Andreas Fault over a segment about 275 miles long, and shock waves could be felt from southern Oregon down to Los Angeles.
San Francisco's brick buildings and wooden Victorian structures were especially devastated. Fires immediately broke out and--because broken water mains prevented firefighters from stopping them--firestorms soon developed citywide. At 7 a.m., U.S. Army troops from Fort Mason reported to the Hall of Justice, and San Francisco Mayor E.E. Schmitz called for the enforcement of a dusk-to-dawn curfew and authorized soldiers to shoot-to-kill anyone found looting. Meanwhile, in the face of significant aftershocks, firefighters and U.S. troops fought desperately to control the ongoing fire, often dynamiting whole city blocks to create firewalls. On April 20, 20,000 refugees trapped by the massive fire were evacuated from the foot of Van Ness Avenue onto the USS Chicago.
By April 23, most fires were extinguished, and authorities commenced the task of rebuilding the devastated metropolis. It was estimated that some 3,000 people died as a result of the Great San Francisco Earthquake and the devastating fires it inflicted upon the city. Almost 30,000 buildings were destroyed, including most of the city's homes and nearly all the central business district.
Evalena moved from Yuba City, CA to San Francisco, CA in 1908 to study at the German School of Nursing which was renamed the Franklin School of Nursing in 1917.
Yuba City was about 130 miles from Sacramento. Evalena could have taken a train which went on a boat and then disembarked from the boat to go back on the railroad to Alameda. She would have ridden a ferry from Alameda across the bay to the Ferry Building.
The first railroad ferries on San Francisco Bay were established by the San Francisco and Oakland Railroad and the San Francisco and Alameda Railroad (SF&A) which were taken over by the Central Pacific Railroad (CPRR) in 1870 to become an integral part of the First Transcontinental Railroad.
The earliest railroad ferries ran from Oakland Point and from Alameda Terminal when Alameda was still a peninsula. The ferry pier at Oakland Point was greatly enlarged to form the Oakland Long Wharf. These railroad ferries mostly carried passengers, not trains, although there was some ferrying of freight cars to San Francisco.
When the Central Pacific re-routed the Sacramento to Oakland segment of the Transcontinental Railroad in 1876, a ferry across the Carquinez Strait was established, and the world's largest ferryboat, the Solano, was built (later joined by a sister ferry, the slightly larger Contra Costa), to serve the crossing. This railroad ferry actually carried whole trains. These ferries became part of the Southern Pacific Railroad (SP) when it assumed many of the facilities of its affiliate, the Central Pacific. These large train ferries were idled when a railway bridge was completed over the Carquinez Strait in 1930.
The then-new steamer named Capital City was put in operation between Sacramento and San Francisco about October 1910.
Objections about overhead lines disappeared after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. The quake and resulting fire destroyed the power houses and car barns of both the Cal Cable and the United Railroads of San Francisco Powell Street lines, together with the 117 cable cars stored within them. The subsequent race to rebuild the city allowed the URR to replace most of its cable car lines with electric streetcar lines. At the same time the independent Geary Street line was replaced by a municipally owned electric streetcar line, the first line of the San Francisco Municipal Railway (Muni).
By 1912, only eight cable car lines remained, all with steep gradients impassable to electric streetcars.
She worked and lived at the French Hospital for several years with her best friend Sophie Dorothy (Bunny) Bundesen, a fellow nurse from Petaluma, CA. The French Hospital built in 1894 at Geary and Fifth was reconstructed in 1963 near the same location at 450 6th Avenue. The old French Hospital had capacity for 171 patients...the new French Hospital had a capacity of 219 beds.
The French Hospital, costing over $300,000, was built in 1894 at the current location which then cost $48,000. This was the full block on Geary Boulevard, bounded by the 5th and 6th Avenues and Anza Street in the rear. Early portraits of this site show two or three buildings in each direction, with acres of open space surrounding the hospital. It was surely considered to be on the outskirts of town, if not in the country at that time. In 1963, a new building was constructed and replaced the old French Hospital.
(On the 1910 Census she is "Lena E. Henderson" while she was at the French Hospital.)
The hospital was later renamed Kaiser Permanente Medical Center French Campus in 1989. The hospital was delicensed in 2001 as there was no need for acute beds.
The original hospital, located at 2425 Geary Blvd., was joined by our state-of-the-art, 8-story medical office building at 2238 Geary Blvd. in 2000. Currently the medical center has 15 buildings and over 4,000 employees, including almost 500 physicians, 1,200 registered nurses, and 70 nurse practitioners. Additionally, the French campus, named because it sits on the site of the original French Hospital founded during the Gold Rush, is home to over 10 specialty departments. (Shirley Spencer purchased a poster owned by someone in Pacifica, CA in 2015 from E-Bay celebrating the 125 anniversary - founded December 31, 1851- of the hospital in April 1977. It was labeled as "California's oldest private hospital.")
At the 60th Anniversary of Kaiser Permanente (SCPMG) at the Anaheim Convention Center on September 28, 2013, it was noted that Dr. Sidney Garfield was credited with bringing the prepaid healthcare plan to the French Mutual Benevolent Society which owned the old hospital. (Otis Spencer, husband of Evalena's granddaughter Shirley, was employed by Kaiser Permanente for 23 years as a medical group administrator
for Southern California Permanente Medical Group (SCPMG) at the Woodland Hills Medical Center. Otis received his MBA from San Francisco State University in 1976 after retiring in 1974 from the U. S. Navy on Treasure Island as a Master Chief Hospital Corpsman E-9.)
Alexander Juhl and brothers John and Charlie left the Buffalo County, NE homestead in 1907-1908 and made their way to San Francisco (there had been an earthquake in April 1906) where Alexander worked as a Teamster for several years. The brothers had a dispute with their father who refused to pay them wages for their work on the farm. Brothers John and Charlie had returned to Nebraska before 1910. Alexander returned to manage the homestead farm north of Riverdale sometime in 1913-1914. His father had left the farm in 1912 and John had lived there until Alexander returned.
Evalena Henderson rode the train from Sacramento to Kearney, Nebraska in May 1914 and married Alexander Juhl on May 28, 1914 in a civil ceremony. She probably spent two nights on the train.
What did Alexander tell Evalena of the life she was coming to? Could it be that he might have exaggerated the luxuriousness of the lifestyle? The contrast between living in San Francisco, being near the Pacific Ocean with the fog coming in everyday and then moving to a homestead farm on the prairie of Nebraska with the wind blowing everyday must have been a culture shock. Just contending with the ever present dust, dirt and mud would have been a challenge.
In 1910 the population of San Francisco was 416,912 while there were 21,907 people in all of Buffalo County. In 1910, there were cars on Market Street, San Francisco, going at a speed of 10 miles per hour, the speed limit. People were dressed very well. There were several options for entertainment.
The Cliff House, Sutro Baths, Golden Gate Park, Conservatory in the Park were a few of nearby attractions to Evalena working and living at the French Hospital.
The Scarlet Plague was a post-apocalyptic fiction novel written by Jack London and originally published in London Magazine in 1912.
The story takes place in 2073, sixty years after an uncontrollable epidemic, the Red Death, has depopulated the planet. James Howard Smith is one of the few survivors of the pre-plague era left alive in the San Francisco area, and as he realizes his time grows short, he tries to impart the value of knowledge and wisdom to his grandsons.
Kearney, 16 miles from the homestead, was 1733 miles from San Francisco and 1733 miles from Boston. Kearney had electricity in 1910 and an opera house. It was thriving. Farm life was a struggle.
There was fun to be had despite the struggles. The Juhl children with neighbors gathered at the South Loup River at Sartoria for swimming and tubing. Watermelon feeds were also shared.
Riverdale was the nearest village about four miles away. Electricity came to the farm in 1950-1951 thanks to the Rural Electrification Act (REA). Farmers were still using horses to pull the farm equipment in 1914.
The Kearney Hub was founded in 1888, and was first published on October 22, 1888. The name "Hub" was chosen because the town was considered the "hub" of the continent, located 1733 miles from both Boston and San Francisco. It was the delivered daily newspaper.
Alexander and Evalena lived on the homestead 1914-1919 without electricity or phone service or indoor plumbing while starting their family with the birth of Harold, Dorothy and Virginia. Evalena's medical training and nursing skills were appreciated by the family and neighbors.
Women getting the right to vote: Nebraska was one of the last states west of the Mississippi to grant the ballot to women, who did not win full suffrage until 1920, when the national amendment was ratified.
When California voted for woman suffrage in 1911, followed by Oregon, Kansas, and Arizona in 1912, the new momentum of the suffrage movement was confirmed. In 1913, the suffragists finally pushed east of the Mississippi River for the first time and gained the suffrage in the more industrialized and densely - populated state of Illinois. In 1912, the Progressive Party, headed by Theodore Roosevelt, endorsed woman suffrage as one of its platform planks. But the movement did not prove victorious everywhere, voters in Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota failed to pass woman suffrage in elections. By 1914, twelve states permitted women to vote.
On the international scene, World War I was said to have begun in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, by a young nationalist seeking a greater Serbia. The four and a half years that followed, as the war spread throughout Europe, the Middle East and Asia, reshaped the modern world in fundamental ways. World War I, also known as the First World War, was a global war centered in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918. Nine million lives in total were lost.
Recall that in 1917, The German School of Nursing of San Francisco was renamed as the Franklin School of Nursing due to anti-German sentiments.
Later, the younger three children, Howard (1920), Dolores (1922), and Romona (1923), were born after Evalena and Alexander moved to a craftsman bungalow home in 1919, at 32 Walnut, Riverdale. Ferdinand and Sophia had moved to a smaller home in Riverdale in 1913.
During this period Evalena was writing a column on her typewriter regarding local social happenings for the Kearney Hub. The Kearney Hub is a daily newspaper published in Kearney, Nebraska since 1888 and is the primary newspaper for south-central region of Nebraska.
During this period, Evalena was visited by her father Thomas Jefferson Henderson, and sister Ruthe B. Samson, both of Yuba City. Evalena's best friend, Sophie Dorothy (Bunny) Bundesen from Petaluma, CA also came to visit at that time prior to going on a world-wide trip in 1925 with her sister Lillie Bundesen. Evalena's mother, Anna, did not like to travel but preferred to stay in Yuba City to help her daughter Lillie with her children.
Bunny had worked at French Hospital with Evalena as noted on the 1910 census. Bunny' s parents were both born in Germany. She had a sister named Lillie as did Evalena.
Neither sister married. Bunny and Lilllie applied for passports in 1924 to travel in 1925. Their first ship was the SS California which took them to Hawaii.
Bunny wrote to Evalena and it has to be assumed that Evalena enjoyed the correspondence with her old friend. A letter from Bunny arrived for Evalena the day after Evalena died on May 2, 1938. Bunny lived to be 103 and died in Petaluma, CA in 1990. Her sister Lillie had died in 1973.
After a year back on the homestead, in March of 1926, the family of six children moved to a farm one mile west of the homestead farm and the address was Amherst. This became known as the "homeplace" for future reference.
Alexander had acquired the farm home and land using the proceeds of his inheritance from his father Ferdinand 's death in 1924.
After having attended District 55 for a few months, the children were enrolled in District 74 on April 1, 1926. The one-room school house was located one mile of walking distance west from the "homeplace" of the farm Alexander owned. Later Alexander and Evalena each took turns serving on the School Board. Alexander was Santa Claus at least one year.
In 1932-1933 The Prairie Dell School District No. 74 had Frieda Dannull, teacher with Howard Juhl, Dolores Juhl, and Romona Juhl were three of fourteen students.The school board was:
Blaine Jameson, Director
Evalena Juhl, Moderator
A. A. Juhl, Treasurer
Burom Walker, County Superintendent.
There was no well so water was carried from home to the school. The coal burning pot-bellied stove sat in the center of the room. There were two separate outhouses designated for boys and girls. Gophers and snakes were a possible diversion at recess time. (Shirley can write this from personal experience since she attended this school which closed when her mother Romona graduated from the 8th grade and was re-opened when she was in the 3rd grade and attended through the 5th grade. They were then bussed into Amherst for school which had all twelve grades in one two-story building. Shirley had six classmates instead of being the only student in her grade. Shirley later enrolled at Kearney High School as a Sophomore and graduated in 1959 on a class of about 240 students.)
Howard Juhl recalled in his memoirs that in 1926, Alexander had purchased a 1926 Dodge sedan for the family, but when the Depression came, the automobile was set on blocks as it was too expensive to maintain. There was a Model T, but it was not used regularly. In 1929, Alexander bought a Ford truck, and that was the family car until 1933, when he bought a Chevrolet.
That 1929 Ford truck was the means to transport the family and neighbors to the Loup River for swimming and picnics. There are many family stories about swimming on the Loup River and the fun they had.
The South Loop River originates in the Sand Hills and flows 30 miles north of Kearney and transverses the northern edge of Buffalo County as it flows eastward to its confluence with the Middle Loup in southwestern Howard County.
The family, parents Alexander and Evalena, and children Dorothy and Howard drove to Chicago in the 1933 Chevrolet for the 1933 World's Fair.
Evalena often listened to Aimee Semple McPherson on the radio in the 1920s and 1930s. The celebrity evangelist did her broadcasts out of Los Angeles from a location which was a short distance from where son Howard would eventually live on Rampart Blvd.
Evalena did return to Yuba City, CA for the funeral of her mother Anna in 1934 and stayed with her sister Ruthe Samson. Sister Lillie had died in 1931. Her father Thomas Jefferson Henderson, who died in 1936, moved into Ruthe's home after his wife's death.
The 1930's were very challenging times. The unusually wet period, which encouraged increased settlement and cultivation in the Great Plains in the 1920's ended in 1930. This was the year in which an extended and severe drought began which caused crops to fail, leaving the plowed fields exposed to wind erosion. The fine soil of the Great Plains was easily eroded and carried east by strong continental winds.
Then, beginning on May 9, 1934, a strong, two-day dust storm removed massive amounts of Great Plains topsoil in one of the worst such storms of the Dust Bowl. The dust clouds blew all the way to Chicago.
On April 14, 1935, known as "Black Sunday", 20 of the worst "black blizzards" occurred across the entire sweep of the Great Plains, from Canada south to Texas.
There were severe long-term economic consequences of the Dust Bowl as was harder for farmers to gain access to the credit they needed to buy capital to shift crop production. While Nebraska was not in the "dust bowl" and hit as severely as Kansas and Oklahoma, it was impacted. Dust pneumonia was a cause of death for infants and the elderly.
In the 1930's, Mrs. Mattie Breeding, who lived across the street from Good Samaritan Hospital in Kearney became a close friend of Evalena's and later surrogate mother to Evalena's daughter Romona. Evalena had advanced diabetes and dearly wished to leave the farm. Mrs. Breeding had a basement apartment which was made available to Evalena when necessary. Mrs. Breeding was three years older -- her birthday was November 26, just one day following Evalena's birthday.
Alexander did not not give Evalena her requested financial assistance to live in Kearney. She had advanced diabetes. At home on the farm, on May 1, 1938, Evalena made a decision to end her life by overdosing on her accumulated sleeping pills from hospital stays.
(Since insulin was discovered in 1922 and widely marketed by Eli Lilly in 1923, and with her having been a nurse, perhaps she did use insulin for her diabetes.)
She did not wake up the morning of May 2nd, 1938. At age 47.5 years, her death came one month after daughter Virginia had married Leverne Nelson and two years after oldest daughter Dorothy had married Rudy Carmann. Evalena saw her first grandson, Harvey Rudolph Carmann, die at age three months.
After her death, Harold, Howard, Dolores, and Romona left home. Howard joined the Navy and the other three headed for Casper, Wyoming to work. They had their memories of happier times and lots of laughter. Her burial was in the Riverdale Cemetery, Riverdale, NE just a mile south of the home she had once lived in and where she had given birth to the three youngest children.
Alexander was laid to rest next to her in January 1951 after dying in a car accident. Oldest daughter Dorothy and her husband, Rudy Carmann were buried nearby as were Evalena's son Harold, grandson Clair John, brothers in-law George and John, and sisters-in-law Lena Berkheimer and Anna Dennis.
Evalena had a typewriter, Oliver 9, and wrote about local social news for a Kearney newspaper.
Evalena's oldest daughter Dorothy years later wrote a weekly social column for the Kearney Hub. Evalena's typewriter is now with her great granddaughter, Serena Alexis Spencer of Pasadena, after having been treasured by her son Howard Henderson Juhl of Los Angeles, California.
In 2015, the "homeplace" farm is owned and managed by youngest daughter Romona's only son Ron while the homestead farm is owned and managed by Dorothy's oldest son, Glenn.
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Son of Daughter Virginia Juhl Nelson
Jerry Nelson
May 7, 1947 - May 20, 2011
Jerry Nelson, 64 years of age from Axtell, Nebraska passed away on Friday, May 20, 2011 at the Clarkson Hospital in Omaha. Jerry was born on May 7, 1947 in Kearney, Nebraska to Leverne and Virginia (Juhl) Nelson. He grew up in the Axtell area and graduated from the Axtell Community School in 1965. On September 4, 1966 he married Bonnie Beahm in Minden, and they lived and farmed near Axtell.
(Aunt Virginia gave Jerry his Grandmother Evalena's small bible she had received at the Methodist Church, Yuba City, CA about 1904 or so and then gave it to her daughter Virginia. Virginia was passionate about her mother and would describe her mother's final years as HELL!)
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7 Drugs that Changed the World:
aspirin (1899);
Insulin (1921);
penicillin (1928);
cancer drug (1949);
Valium (1950s);
oral contraceptive (1960);
AZT (1987).
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Blood Transfusions:
1900 Karl Landsteiner discovers the first three human blood groups, A, B and O.
1902 Landsteiner’s colleagues, Alfred Decastello and Adriano Sturli, add a fourth blood type, AB.
1907 Blood typing and cross matching between donors and patients is attempted to improve the safety of transfusions. The universality of the O blood group is identified.
active immunization
Polio. 1956 |
