Sometimes something as seemingly unimportant as a middle name can lead to an interesting story. Such was the case as I began looking at the first settlers in Lancaster County and discovered that a University of Nebraska physics professor who was born in Connecticut had the middle name of Prey, intriguingly the same as John D. Prey’s last name. As it turned out there was indeed a direct connection.
In 1856 John D. Prey, a slater by trade, who was born in 1798 in New York City, determined to settle in the developing west with his son John W. Prey. Leaving Milwaukee, they first traveled overland to Chicago, then to Alton, Illinois, by boat where they took a steamboat to St. Louis finally ending up at Council Bluffs, Iowa.
At Council Bluffs the Preys purchased a team of oxen for $105 and with Zebediah Buffington, whom they chanced to meet, set out for the Elkhorn River valley. Finding the area already overly occupied for their tastes, they headed south where they had heard of an area of good timber in what was known then as Clay County. On June 15 they camped on Salt Creek three miles south of the then city of Lancaster, not to be known as Lincoln for just over a year.
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They there encountered seven men from Plattsmouth who were examining land near what would develop as the village of Hickman. Buffington considered land at the area of Roca while the Preys staked out land in what would later be surveyed as Centerville Precinct. In July they bridged Salt Creek and built a temporary shelter as the “earliest settlers in Clay County,†which would two years later become the south portion of Lancaster County.
The shelter was made of forked posts and poles with brush and sod for a roof and canvas sides. John D. Prey left for Wisconsin to get his family, leaving his son John W. Prey with his two yoke of oxen, two yoke of cattle, two cows and two colts to survive the harsh winter, primarily surviving on wild deer and turkey meat.
The following spring the families briefly decamped to Weeping Water during a false Indian scare. On their return they found U. S. land surveyors camped in their unfinished cabin. While John D. joined the surveyors’ party, John W. was elected Clay County Treasurer until it was dissolved, giving the north half to Lancaster and the south half to Gage County. Shortly after Clay County’s demise, John W. moved to Lincoln where he served two terms as a Lancaster County commissioner.
During this county transitional period, John W. also became embroiled in controverys involving a land purchase/sale of 320 acres in the “saline lands northwest of Lincoln, which J. Sterling Morton held as agent for eastern owners.†The question swirled around whether the land transferred to Nebraska on statehood, becoming saleable, or if they were retained as saline lands as reserved by the federal government.
John W. and his wife Frances Prey’s daughter Annie, who entered the University of Nebraska in 1890 earning bachelors and master’s degrees, subsequently married Harry Jorgensen whose father was a Congregational minister, their son Theodore Prey Jorgensen was born in 1905 in Connecticut and grew up in the northwest corner of South Dakota.
In 1923 Theodore “hopped on his motorcycle†and headed to his mother’s alma mater, the University of Nebraska. Theodore received his bachelor’s degree in 1928 and master’s in 1930 after which he headed for Harvard where, finding their physics department inferior to Nebraska’s, finished his Ph.D. in 1938. Theodore stayed at Harvard a year, then taught two years at Clark University before returning to the University of Nebraska.
In 1942 Jorgensen moved first to Chicago, working on the Manhattan Project, then was stationed at Los Alamos where he designed and built a device to measure shock waves from the explosion of an atomic bomb. Back after the war, at the University of Nebraska, in 1946, as a professor of physics, Jorgensen urged the creation of a Ph.D. program in the department and lobbied the Board of Regents to finance an ion-accelerator. The regents committed $5,000, which was supplemented by grants from the National Science foundation. What was termed the Cockroft-Walton accelerator was completed in 1950 and refurbished in 1988.
On a more down-to-earth project, Jorgensen built, much by his own hand, a solar friendly house complete with radiant heating at 3455 L Street. On retirement from the university in 1975 he continued his interest in golf which he first encountered while courting his wife, and using his obvious talent in science and mathematics, he wrote The Physics of Golf in 1993 at the age of 88.
Theodore Prey Jorgensen died in 2006, the great grandson and grandson of the earliest pioneers of Lancaster County, son of a noted Cather scholar and well-known feminist while he was himself a respected physicist, water colorist, nutritionist, violinist and a more than passable golfer.
Historian Jim McKee, who still writes with a fountain pen, invites comments or questions. Write to him in care of the Journal Star or at jim@leebooksellers.com.