Published in the Omaha World Herald
BOW VALLEY, NEB. - Boarded up businesses. Abandoned farmsteads. Families moving to the big city. Those are the legacies most often mentioned for rural areas.
And then there's Bow Valley.
The unincorporated German-Catholic hamlet of about 100 people in extreme northeast Nebraska has two general stores, a soaring cathedral with fresh paint and gleaming stained glass, a huge dance hall and a can-do spirit.
Sure, some area farms are gone and the economic future isn't quite as rosy as in big-city suburbs.
But with nary a nickel from any government program, local residents have built a town where people go out of their way to support local businesses. It's a place where young adults move back to work, and where projects such as paving streets, erecting streetlights and plowing snow are accomplished by willing volunteers, not unwelcome tax bills.
"As soon as it snows, everybody just jumps on a tractor and starts plowing," said Art Kathol, the semiretired owner of a local heating and air-conditioning business. "We plow the streets and the driveways. It's done in a few hours."
Sociologists looking for ways to stem the exodus of people from rural areas might be well served to drive up the oil roads that lead to Bow Valley, nestled amid the high hills that rise from the nearby Missouri River. They'll find a place where, when something needs to be done, people just do it.
The question of why the village, founded around 1869 and named for the adjacent Bow Creek, has weathered the storms of decline garners many answers.
One is unity.
Many local residents, known as "Bow Valley Dutch" locally, share a German farming heritage. Many are related.
Only a couple of its residents do not belong to Sts. Peter and Paul Catholic Church, which serves 150 families and has undergone more than $200,000 in renovation in recent years. About 50 kids attend the Catholic grade school, an enrollment that is holding steady.
"We have one of the nicest churches around. We're proud of that," said John Thoene Jr., 83, a retired Bow Valley farmer and the brother of former Gov. Charles Thone.
The former governor, who changed the spelling of the old family name (pronounced "tane-ee"), had a Hartington address but, his brother pointed out, "Bow Valley is really his home."
The town's perseverance could be because of communication. Oddly, a handful of local businesses and residences have two separate phones lines. One affords toll-free calls to the Cedar County seat, Hartington, and other points south. The other allows free calls to Wynot and other towns north along the Missouri River.
It isn't because of location. No busy highway runs through Bow Valley, though two are a mile away. The village is close enough to larger towns like Yankton, S.D., and Hartington, Neb., for people to commute to jobs there.
It is not because of an active town council. Bow Valley, as an unincorporated village, has no town board. There is no mayor, though the ceremonial title gets passed around to the person who most recently moved into town. That is now Bud Sudbeck, whose son runs one of the general stores.
Bow Valley seems to get along fine without a formal governing body.
Years ago, folks needed some way to drain their septic tanks. So Kathol and some other townspeople built a drain line to the creek.
Years later, a state regulator drove up the valley and said that system really didn't meet state codes.
So a village meeting was held in 1989, and the residents formed a sanitary and improvement district - a legal entity customarily used by developers of suburban housing tracts.
For drinking water, Kathol (pronounced "coddle") and his crew built a system of lines connected to his private well. He collects about $15 a month for the service and maintains the system to meet all state testing requirements.
"It's one of the few privately owned, municipal water systems in the country," Kathol said. "Somebody said there was another one in New York."
The SID has worked so well that it has branched out, using excess funds to buy street lights. Some towns have cleanup days; Bow Valley had a street-light party.
"We went down to Omaha to get some used street lights pretty reasonable and hauled them back to Bow Valley. And now we have street lights, 19 of 'em," Kathol said.
Back in 1988, townsfolk started pressing the state and county to pave the gravel roads to nearby State Highways 15 and 12. Both declined. So Bow Valley folks decided they'd raise the money, organize their own paving crew and do it themselves.
Cedar County finally relented, offering to do it if locals paid 25 percent of the bill. The money was quickly gathered in a door-to-door collection.
Just about everything in town is a team volunteer effort, from hanging the village Christmas lights, to installing a handicapped-accessible entrance to the church, to manning events at the Bow Valley Dance Hall.
The hall, also recently renovated, was founded by 24 German families in 1896 and hosts 30 to 35 events a year (none during Lent, the somber period of the Catholic calendar).
"We have a lot of people who donate a lot of time," said Dave Sudbeck, a longtime member of the board that runs the hall.
Bow Valley is a town of traditions, whether it's stopping at the two general stores (known as "doing the stations" in town, a play on words of the Catholic stations of the cross) or an old German festival, the Schuetzenfest.
That festival was quietly dropped during World War II. But in 1996, the 100th anniversary of its start in Bow Valley, the hall resurrected it.
Once a three-day celebration, the Schuetzenfest highlight is when a circle of men in costume shoot a wooden bird perched atop a tall pole. The man whose shot finally topples the bird off the pole is king for a year.
The talk these days at the two Bow Valley "stations" is that Schuetzenfest will be resurrected in 2000.
The stations themselves are a combination old-time general store and modern convenience shop.
The older of the two, the Bow Valley Store, sells a wide assortment - two-buckle rubber overshoes, fresh milk, feed and vaccines for cattle, bird feed, auto parts, vanilla wafers, furnace filters, crayons, mouse bait, fishing lures, greeting cards, heads of lettuce and cans of beer.
Ron Hochstein, who has owned the store with his wife, Diane, since 1968, will change a tire if he's in. Diane pumps gas for most people, in part so the ancient pumps aren't broken by people who aren't accustomed to such old machinery.
The store is open every night until 10.
"The only day we're not here is Christmas," Diane said.
Just across the road is Sudbeck Service, which is more like a modern convenience store, with its video rentals and pop and beer cooler. It has an attached feed store, gas pumps and a full-service restaurant, featuring a Friday fish fry and good-natured joshing.
"We're pretty crabby in here. Don't get too close," Dave Sudbeck warns as he devours a club sandwich and plays a hand of 13-point pitch.
"He's a poor card player, and when he loses, he's worse," said a fellow card player, Sylvan Thoene, trying to explain the gregarious Sudbeck.
A 27-year-old relative, Leo Sudbeck, and his wife, Carrie, bought Sudbeck Service from another relative two years ago.
Animal feed is the bread and butter for both stations in Bow Valley, and at least one farmer said he splits his purchases 50-50 between the two businesses to help keep them open.
"You've got to support your community," said Jean Hochstein, who lives near Fordyce. "Once you don't have your community, you don't have nothin'."
Whether the two stations, and Bow Valley, will remain prosperous is uncertain.
The poor farm economy is causing more area farmers to quit for jobs in the city, and most folks don't see an improvement in the future. Fewer farmers means fewer customers, fewer kids for the school, fewer folks to get things done in Bow Valley.
Yet, locals say this town's people have a trump card in the game of rural survival. They're just too bullheaded to quit.
"We're German here, and Germans are working people," said Bob Thoene, a nephew of the former governor. "They don't give up easy."
