'Never that far from your roots'

Gale Mares said the story begins with his great-grandfather, Jacob, who came to America from Moravia in the 1800s.

"In the Czech Republic, in Europe at that time in 1875, the kings and queens owned all of the land," Gale said. "You couldn't get a piece of land to farm to save your soul."

Requests had to be made to the king and even then, people would only get an acre or two they could farm on their own time.

A colonization agent, Gale said, is what led them to Schuyler.

"They got talked into coming to America because the land was cheap," Gale said. "There was plenty of it and they wanted people to settle it."

Jacob, his wife Anna and their two daughters left for America by steamboat from Germany. It took them two weeks to get here, Gale noted, and they arrived on July 17, 1875.

After docking in New York, the family immediately took a train to Schuyler, Nebraska. They purchased 80 acres located 9 miles northeast of Schuyler, Gale said. On the land, there had been a two room building, a small shed and a chicken house.

"They got it all for $800 – $10 an acre," Gale added.

The couple went on to have several more children including Gale's grandfather, Joe. Jacob continued farming and purchasing more land before his death in 1890. He had gotten injured in an accident with a horse, Gale said, but it's not known for how long he was injured before passing away.

After Jacob's death, Anna moved into town and the farm ground was rented out.

As a kid, Joe worked at a grocery store in Schuyler. Joe's sister got married and moved to Oklahoma to take advantage of the land rush. Not yet old enough to start his own farm, Joe worked for his sister.

In 1903, Gale said, Joe married and purchased a farm just a quarter of a mile away from the homestead. As Gale's son, Seth, tells it, Joe and his wife started having kids — 13 in total — as, back in those days, you needed a lot of children to help run the farm.

"They had a big house, but they had to keep adding onto the house because they had too many kids," Gale added. "The house just got bigger and bigger."

They had a massive garden as well, Seth noted, as they grew the food they ate.

The family was also the first in the neighborhood to have electricity. Seth said they had a windmill that charged a bank of batteries in the cellar so that, at nighttime, they could just go downstairs and flip on a switch to get electricity.

That was most likely in the 1920s; Gale's father, Vic, was born in 1913 and told stories about having electricity.

Vic got his farm in 1940, and, in 1966, Gale started farming. Around 1995, when he graduated from high school, Seth began farming 40 acres. As time went by, Seth farmed more and more of Gale's land.

When Gale started in the business, he used four-row equipment. After about 10 years, he transitioned to eight-row equipment. These days, Seth uses 16-row equipment.

Even with new technology, Seth noted, the basics are still the same.

"There's not much difference between pulling a tillage machine behind the horse and pulling a huge tillage machine behind a tractor, you're still doing the same thing. You're just doing more per hour," Seth said.

The Mares family now has 1,000 acres of land and they grow corn and soybeans. Sometimes they'll have livestock, but that is mainly for the kids' enjoyment.

Gale "retired" in 2016 but still helps out quite a bit. Seth's oldest son, Jacob, just graduated from high school and farmed roughly 40 acres on his own last year. This year, Jacob will farm about 80 acres and attend Central Community College.

Seth has another son, James, who is about 2-and-a-half years old.

Gale and his wife, Kathy, now live on the farm that Vic had purchased. Seth and his wife, Erin, live down the street in a house that Vic built around 1974 as a "retirement home."

The Mares family, Seth said, has always believed in the importance of keeping history alive.

"A lot of people move on, forget where they came from, forget what has happened, forget what has happened to other people," he added.

This history has been recorded through family ancestry books, written accounts and the retelling of stories.

One of these stories, Seth shared, involved his great-great-grandfather, Jacob, the one who moved half-way across the world to settle in Schuyler.

In those days, going to town would be an all-day affair. Jacob would hitch up the wagon to the horse, Seth said, and, on his way into Schuyler, would drop wheat off at a mill on Shell Creek. Jacob would finish his errands in Schuyler and then would need to get a bucket of grease as he had to grease the bearings on the wagon before stopping in at the mill and finally returning home.

In the 1930s, Seth said, it would be so hot and so dry that the family would sleep outside in the yard.

"They couldn't get a break from the heat until about four o'clock in the morning and then by the time they finally got to sleep, the sun was out, it was hot, it was time to wake up again," Seth said, chuckling.

There's much more to the family's history than can easily be recounted through a simple article, though Seth noted his grandfather had an airplane in the 1950s that he would use to travel to Fremont for parts.

Joe Mares, Gale added, had been the first person in Colfax County — and maybe Northeast Nebraska — to put in an irrigation well.

They said the family had helped pioneer the irrigation of crops in this area.

After he got better at bringing water up out of the ground, Seth noted, he took to leveling the fields so water would run down.

"That changed the whole picture of farming in this area because suddenly ground that may have produced something but not enough could produce enough to make something," Seth said. "… That would have been in that would have been in probably the late '40s when they started."

They had failed at first, he added, but didn't get up on it and eventually figured out how to get a well in the ground to pull enough water to water the crops as much as needed.

Throughout that 148-year history, the Mares family has moved its home base only a few miles from the original homestead.

That homestead is still in the Mares family, Seth said, with a distant cousin. Through records, they know where the house had been located.