My Genealogy Hound

NIXON WATERMAN.
Among the one-time residents of Union county whose life work has called them from among us to posts of duty in other sections of our broad land are many whom we still love to call “our own.” Of this number is Nixon Waterman, the distinguished poet and critic, whose clever work in verse and prose holds high rank among the writers of the present day.

Mr. Waterman, who was born November 12, 1859, near Newark, Illinois, the youngest of a family of ample numbers, came with his parents, Lyman and Elizabeth (Wakefield) Waterman, to Union county in the autumn of 1869. The family home was located on the old California trail, four miles south of Creston, then called Highland, an unimportant switch station near the temporary western terminus of the Burlington & Missouri River Railroad (now the Burlington) then in course of construction. The home was known as “The Ten-Mile House,” it being ten miles west of Afton, then the seat of the county. Here with the other youthful members of his household he greatly enjoyed the boundless freedom of the sparsely settled prairies and stored away many interesting memories of frontier characters and incidents which he has since so pleasantly depicted in poem and story. In those old days before trunk lines of railway so closely linked the Atlantic with the Pacific, many white-covered emigrant wagons, “prairie schooners,” sometimes as many as a hundred in a day, passed along the trail, going ever and ever toward the illimitable west. Many of these travelers found shelter in and about “The Ten-Mile House” almost nightly, and sometimes during the winter season, many were storm-stayed for days at a time. In this old home were housed all kinds and conditions of men, and the tales of bold adventure and amusing incidents told in that “wayside inn” if properly chronicled would fill many an interesting volume.

Here under always the best of parental instruction and discipline, and in the primitive country schools, and, later, in the graded public schools of Creston, the subject of this sketch secured his education, which in later years has been considerably broadened and augmented by that larger, surer enlightenment which all men obtain in the world’s great “School of Hard Knocks.” With the desire felt from earliest youth, to become a writer and publisher, Mr. Waterman, while a boy, was, for a short time, the original “printer’s devil” in the office of the first genuine newspaper printed and published in Creston, The Headlight, a name in perfect keeping with the character of the town at that time when most of its population was in the employ of the great trunk line of railway of which the town had been made a division station. Some years later, after having taught a country school during two winters, he was in the employ of S. A. Brewster when the latter issued the first daily paper published in Creston, The Advertiser.

On March 14, 1883, Mr. Waterman married Miss Nellie Haskins, of Menasha, Wisconsin. Later he became editor and half owner of the Every Sunday Morning, of Creston, a home, society, literary weekly. Seeking a larger field of endeavor, he disposed of the paper after having ably conducted it for a period of two years, and became traveling correspondent for the Omaha Republican for the territory between Omaha and the Rockies. This was followed by two years of editorial work on the Omaha World-Herald and Bee, and four years on the Chicago Herald and Post, when the increasing demand for his verse and sketches prompted him to give up journalism for a more purely literary career. In 1895 he removed to Boston where, in one of the city’s most beautiful suburbs of grove-crowned hills overlooking the city and the sea with its sail-flecked harbor, he built the home wherein, with the exception of the winters spent in Florida, he and his accomplished wife, a devoted student of flowers, birds and butterflies and all phases of outdoor study, have spent the intervening years.

Mr. Waterman is a member of the leading literary clubs of Boston and the east and is the author of a number of volumes of poems, essays, etc., including “A Book of Verses,” “In Merry Mood,” “Boy Wanted,” and “Sonnets of a Budding Bard.” His contributions in prose and verse are to be read in all of the leading magazines and reviews.