My Genealogy Hound

P. O. HEDLUND. One of the best known young men in southwestern Nebraska, a prominent member of the Phelps county bar and a man of solid business interests of the town of Holdrege, is P. O. Hedlund, the subject of this sketch. He is a son of Olof Hedlund, whose biography appears in this volume as one of the first settlers in Phelps county, and whatever facts may be deemed of interest in reference to the ancestral history of the subject of this notice will be found in his father’s history.

P. O. Hedlund was born in Gefleborg’s Lon, Sweden, September 14, 1856. A year later his parents immigrated to America and settled in Knox county, Ill., where he was reared. He came in 1876 with his father to Nebraska, settling in Phelps county. In 1877 he was elected surveyor of Phelps county, served two years, and was re-elected in 1879. His father having in the meantime been elected treasurer of the county, young Hedlund resigned his position as surveyor to accept a deputyship under his father. At the same time he received the appointment of deputy county clerk and filled these two offices for a term of two years. In 1881 he was elected county clerk and held that office by successive re-elections till January, 1888. He began reading law in 1884 and was admitted to the bar in 1887. On quitting the county clerks’ office he embarked at once in the law, loan, real estate and abstract business, continuing at this since, being now the senior member of the firm of Hedlund & Roth. In November, 1889, he bought an interest in the mercantile firm of Fredricks & Engstrom, the firm becoming Fredricks & Hedlund, which interest he still retains. He is also vice-president of the First National Bank of Holdrege, a stockholder in the Citizens’ Publishing Company and interested in various other enterprises in and around Holdrege. Mr. Hedlund has taken an active part in politics and is one of the most popular and influential men in the county. He is public-spirited and progressive in his views, a hard worker and an enthusiastic believer in the future of his adopted town and county. From his well known personal energy and discriminating judgment his name has come to be an unfailing guarantee of success in any enterprise with which it is associated. Thoroughly honest and correct in his business relations and methods he enjoys the absolute confidence not only of his countrymen by whom the town of Holdrege and the county of Phelps are largely settled, but by all, regardless of nationality, who know him and have had dealings with him.

Mr. Hedlund married, in 1880, Miss Ellen Anderson, then of Knox county, Ill., a lady well fitted to bear him the companionship which he sought with her hand. In his pleasant home in Holdrege, made so by the untiring industry of his amiable wife, he finds rest and relaxation from the worry and anxieties which, as a busy man of the world, he can not find elsewhere.