Northwestern Reporter (Permanent Edition, 27 February-29 May 1897, West Publishing Company, St. Paul, Minnesota, pp. 237-238)
Like most things, I really wasn’t looking for this when I found it.
I was aware of Ehmen Park in Gothenburg, Nebraska. I’ve been there twice and the park has a Pony Express Station, which was moved there from a more rural location in order to preserve it. The first time I visited the park was with my grandparents in the early 1990s and I was aware of its connection to my family.
Ehmen Park, in Gothenburg, Nebraska, is named for William Ehmen, who settled in the Gothenburg area in the 1870s. According to family tradition, Ehmen encouraged other Ostfriesian immigrants to settle in Dawson County, Nebraska, where Gothenburg is located. In addition to being a farmer, Ehmen was apparently a part-time Lutheran minister as he baptized my great-grandmother Tjode Goldenstein in a rural Dawson County church in 1882.
He was apparently successful at encouraging immigration to Gothenburg as several members of the Ehmen-Goldenstein family from Wrisse, Ostfriesland, settled there, including a brother Jurgen Tonjes Ehmen (who died in Dawson County in 1897), and a nephew Fokke Goldenstein (who homesteaded near William Ehmen).
He created a subdivision in the City of Gothenburg sometime shortly before his death in 1890. And the plat, which was recorded at the courthouse, included a block denoted as Ehmen’s Park.
But he never actually deeded the park to the City of Gothenburg. And that was the problem.
His widow, Tjede M. Ehmen, sued the City of Gothenburg in a local court and lost. She appealed to the Nebraska State Supreme Court which also did not rule in her favor. These images in this post are from the mention of the appeal in the Northwestern Reporter (Permanent Edition, 27 February-29 May 1897, West Publishing Company, St. Paul, Minnesota, pp. 237-238) and were obtained via search of GoogleBooks (http://books.google.com).
Apparently the demarcation of the property on the plat as a “park” with no alleys through it was sufficient for the court to rule that intent was to allocate the property to public use. The Ehmens lost their case.
If I wanted to pursue this further, there should be records of Ehmen’s estate settlement in records of the Dawson County Circuit Clerk. There should also be the original court file of Tjede Ehmen’s suit against the city. As some of her children were minors at the time and they were a part of this legal action there may be guardianship records for them as well.
