Brookdale Trip to Beaver Crossing

Jon Kruse drove the Seward County Shuttle today and took 10 of us Brookdale residents on a tour of Beaver Crossing. It is one of our several small towns in the county, some 18 miles from Seward, with just over 400 residents. I have written about early Childhood memories of the Earle Smiley Water Gardens there and was very familiar with the town during my baseball & early SCS days. We even had reason to go there for Grange and other things after returning to Nebraska in 1980. However, our visits have been very infrequent during the past 20 years. A tornado did considerable damage to the town in 2004 and we have been back only a few times until today. We were fortunate in having several people along today who had lived there and were very familiar with the town. When we approached the "Gate" shown in the picture, I commented that it was something I remembered but was reminded of its change from having an Arch over the big post before tornado damage. Passing through the "Gate" took us past where a big old round swimming pool and Smiley gardens were located.

 One of the new buildings is this Congregational Church built on the site of the old school building where I had played High School basket ball with Garland against Beaver Crossing. The Pankoke Hardware store is probably one of the largest family owned hardware stores in the state. Our trip took us past many corn fields that were tasseled out and others growing seed corn, had been detassled. We also went past the Beyer Wheat Research facility off I-80 near Goehner. That German company has been in the news recently with their purchase of the American Monsanto company.