Couple’s strong ties to Grover help illustrate small town’s history ...Saudi Arabia

GROVER — Al and Dorothy Timm’s stories add vivid details to the exhibits in the town museum.

“There were eight of us in a three-room house,” Al said. “We ate oatmeal three times a day. Cooked it hot in the morning. Had fried oatmeal at night. Whatever was left, we gave to the dog.”

He had four sisters and three brothers.

“We filled a graveyard with family members,” he said.

Like many farmers, Al’s family migrated from the Midwest — his father’s from Germany to Minnesota and his mother’s from Kansas and then to Colorado — because they had an opportunity to buy land. A 160-acre homestead was affordable in northeastern Weld County.

The climate, weather, landscape and soil were very different from what they had left, and some families gave up their dreams of owning farmland and returned to a familiar environment.

Al’s family accepted the new challenges in the Hereford-Grover area in 1908 and began a multi-generational history with the land. They raised wheat, beans, barley and alfalfa.

Although “grandpa’s homestead had a lot of rocks, we lived high and wide for a while in Hereford,” Al, 87, said. “Hereford had a bank and was a lot larger then. Grover was just a cow town.”

Hereford, next to the Wyoming border, is 9 miles north of Grover. It is described as a ghost town by some historical organizations.

Dust Bowl conditions and the Great Depression converged to destroy family dreams.

“At the end of the First World War everything was pretty rosy, but dry weather hit. It was tough going for everyone,” he said. “If you could find work, they feed you and let you sleep in the barn. They didn’t pay you. It was kind of hard on Mother. We baked a lot of bread and milked the cows. It filled our tummies.”

Some families were unable to cope because “it was so cotton-picking dry.

“People got up and left to work in different places,” Al continued. “We’d look through windows and see dishes on tables. People just left.”

According to Al, some of the people who remained benefited from their neighbors’ misfortune.

“In the morning when the school bus crossed the tracks into Grover, we saw where people were tearing down buildings for salvage and firewood,” he said.

The scavenging would happen again later with a different building.

“Cash was hard to come by,” he said. “Folks lucky enough to work on the railroad brought home money, and the grocery store appreciated that.”

It was the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad that linked Sterling and Cheyenne from 1887 until 1973. The train ran twice daily, transporting freight and passengers. Rail service was reduced to one train a day when the railroad lost business to the increased number of merchant and personal vehicles and better roads.

“A lot of people called it the Prairie Dog Express,” according to Al. “Some people called it the Coyote Express. In a lot of places, it was called the B and FM. The Back and Forth Maybe.”

The Grover depot is the only remaining station from that era. It became the Grover Depot Museum in 1989 and is owned by the Pawnee Historical Society. The museum was closed this summer for restoration work, but Dorothy continues to post information about Grover’s history on the historical society’s Facebook page.

Al met Dorothy Gillette when they were students in the 1950s.

“I was a sophomore and Al was a senior at Grover High School,” Dorothy, 85, said. “Al graduated with the largest class to graduate from Grover, 24, in 1955. I graduated with 14 in 1957.”

In 1967, “more than 1,000 people came to the first school reunion. Two of Al’s sisters organized it and tracked down a lot of addresses,” Dorothy said.

“For 65 years straight, there was a member of our family in the school,” Al said.

Grover School was renamed Pawnee School in 1967. Sixty-one students, including seven seniors, are enrolled this academic year. Four seniors graduated last May.

After temporary locations early in the town’s history, a three-story brick school building was constructed in 1918. It was demolished in 1980.

“It was not in good shape,” Dorothy said. “Windows let in cold air, and it would have cost more to fix it than tear it down and build new, with plumbing and electricity updated.”

She remembers “the steps sounded really loud when classes changed. The small gym was in the basement with cement steps on one side. We had no girls sports then.”

Instead, Dorothy was a cheerleader. She later donated the cheerleading outfit to the historical society, and it is displayed in the museum.

The two-story museum has many personal items donated by farm and ranch families and items collected from former businesses including vintage black-and-white photographs.

A June 12, 1980, story in the Pine Bluffs (Wyo.) Post described the school’s demolition:

“Many of the town people and others were on hand Monday to see the activity as the first blow hit the old building around 11 a.m. and into the afternoon when it was reduced to rubble and being hauled to the Grover dump.

“The dump has been the main meeting place and late in the day since then, as people retrieve brick and lumber to use at home.”

Dorothy’s class was the first to attend four years in the new school building. She was class president her senior year, prom queen and victory queen when Grover won the 6-man football state title in 1954.

“We had a large choir with maroon robes and won excellent ratings in contests,” she said. “We had senior class plays to take part in. I sang in a trio, and we won a Kiwanis contest. The girl that played piano and sang went on to be a concert pianist in New York.

“We had small classes, great teachers and a good education.”

Dorothy’s grandparents traveled by train from Iowa to Greeley in 1916 and moved to a homestead south of Grover the following spring. Her family lived 8 miles from town. They raised wheat, millet, oats and barley, Black Angus and prize-winning Charolais cattle.

“We had no inside plumbing till I was in the fifth grade and used a generator at night,” she said. “Going out to the windmill to get water was interesting with flying ants swarming around. During the ‘49 blizzard was the only time I had a bad toothache, and we could go nowhere.”

The Pawnee School District covers 899 square miles and includes many ranches and farms. After deep snow from the blizzard closed the school for six weeks, the buses were equipped with two-way radios for the safety of the students.

Dorothy also has good memories of growing up on the plains.

“My dad’s parents lived in a house next to ours and my mom’s parents lived east two miles from us,” she said. “We went to the same church, and Mom’s parents sang duets and Grandpa played the mandolin. Mom and I also sang duets in church. Grandma made the best homemade ice cream and canned meat.

“In 4-H, I had a calf, chickens, canned items and I had a flower garden.”

Al and Dorothy attended Young Life Camp in Buena Vista “and he asked to see my ring — I’d Rather Have Jesus ring. He kept it and we dated for two years. We were married on Dec. 28, 1958.”

After farming north, south and west of Grover, they moved to Grover in 1977. The couple’s four children moved away from Grover, and Al and Dorothy retired to Fort Collins in 2019.

Their ties to the historical society go back to the start of the organization in 1975. Dorothy’s mother, Lois Gillette, and Al’s sister-in-law, Louanne Timm, were charter members of the society. A plaque with the names of the nine charter members is in the ground at the museum entrance.

“Al and I enjoyed giving tours (of the museum) on Sundays during the summer and during the week when someone wanted a tour,” she said.

They return to Grover in June for the annual Earl Anderson Memorial Rodeo parade.

“I would go to the museum right after the parade and show visitors the museum,” Dorothy said. “We also see friends and some family when we go, to connect with the community.

“Every year, we put flowers on his parents’ and my parents’ graves.”

— Ed Otte is a former editor of the Greeley Tribune and a former executive director of the Colorado Press Association.

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