The Civil War not a month old, Mormon elder Jacob Gates returned to where he had buried his wife and a daughter 14 years earlier.
Winter Quarters, the footprint for the Nebraska territorial town of Florence.
What Gates saw on his arrival was the remnants of the settlement that began with great aspirations in 1854.
There were the Florence House and Willet House hotels. The post office. A doctor, a lawyer and a druggist.
And several abandoned buildings with broken windows, which Gates saw as cheap lodging for a next wave of his church's western migration to Utah.
What had happened to Florence, named for a relative of town founder James Comly Mitchell and not the romantic Italian city?
Mostly, it was the Panic of 1857 that came at the worst time for land speculators and banking. Also the failed attempt to bring the Pacific railroad across the Missouri River at Florence.
Mitchell was linked to it all.
He was the deciding vote in the territorial legislature to make Omaha City (our original name) the capital. This from a man with great disdain for the competition to his town.
Mitchell's reward/bribe for choosing the hill at 20th and Dodge Streets -- Capitol Hill, now Central High School's campus -- was 60 lots in "Scrip Town." It was formed on the city's northwest outskirts to curry favor with lawmakers and make Omaha speculators richer.
A month after Mitchell's decision, he put those lots up for auction and netted about $3,600.
Likely his deposit went into the Bank of Florence.
The bank of "Rock Bottom" -- Florence's slogan from its boast that the river had a rock bed along its shore -- went bottom up in the winter of 1858.
Its three-dollar bills were, well, as phony as they came.
The first warning of the wildcat bank failing was the refusal of an Omaha bank to accept $100 in Bank of Florence notes.
"Florence money is not now worth in (Omaha) 15 cents on the dollar. Its failure will undoubtedly bear heavily on the people of eastern Iowa, where it has a large circulation,'' wrote the Omaha Nebraskian.
Later in the year, the Nebraskian, obviously not a fan of Mitchell, said the bank, "brought into existence by the strenuous exertions of the Hon. James C. Mitchell, has caved in and instead of a full-grown cat is nothing now but the unstuffed skin of one, having in its day caterwauled the people out of a good $100,000, illustrating the fact that if Florence did stand upon Rock Bottom her bank didn't."
The bank failure followed the renegade wrap-up to the fourth session of the territorial legislature at Florence.
Upset by attempts to remove the capital from Omaha to south of the Platte River, 21 House members and eight from the Council (the upper chamber of the territorial legislature), referred to as the "Florence Seceders," ran out the clock on the legislative term by accepting Mitchell's invitation to furnish a meeting place (two empty storefronts), lodging and carriage travel in Florence.
New territorial governor William Richardson recognized none of the Seceders' actions.
If it hadn't been for Mormon migration, now with immigrants taken by the New York and Erie and Chicago, Burlington and Quincy (today's BNSF) railroads to Council Bluffs, Florence might have gone the way of Winter Quarters. Abandoned.
Florence was the main outfitting point for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from 1857 to 1863. The town bustled during the summers as more than 50 wagon companies embarked on the western journey.
Train travel from Iowa City, where the LDS handcart brigades had been outfitted previously, was preferable because of poor overland travel conditions in that 275-mile stretch to the east bank of the Missouri.
The 1860 census counted 1,156 people in Florence Precinct. Many of them were not permanent residents. Also counted were 118 unoccupied buildings, most of them houses.
Florence flourished in the summers through 1863. Then the LDS outfitting moved on, to now-defunct Wyoming in Otoe County from 1864 to 1866, North Platte in 1867 as the Union Pacific build-out reached there and Wyoming Territory in 1868 to follow the railroad.
But the rest of the time, Florence was failing. Hundreds of lots were put up at tax auction in 1860, along with many in Saratoga and Elk City (both subjects of previous columns). Sheriffs and chancery land sales abounded.
Mitchell's death in 1860 is said to have derailed Florence's bid to be the eastern terminus of the Pacific railroad.
Alex C. Pyper's Florence Store of general merchandise relocated to Omaha in 1862. In 1866, grocers Hall, Lyon & Co. bought and moved buildings from Florence, including the Methodist Episcopal church, to downtown Omaha.
Said the Omaha Weekly Republican in 1867 of Florence: "They congregated here in considerable numbers, cultivated the soil, planted trees and flowers and made the wilderness glad with culture and fruitfulness.
"The trees still stand, the wild sunflower blossoms from the seeds planted by these people and other evidences remain to mark the thrift of this marvelous sect (the LDS). But Florence is essentially 'played out.' Forty of its houses were moved down to Omaha on wheels by sturdy western oxen and from that moment Florence waned and Omaha became the larger town.
"The grandeur of greatness went with the Mormon exodus."
The 1879 Nebraska Gazetteer and Directory listed four businesses in Florence -- Hamilton's saw mill, Weber's saw and flouring mill (still standing at 30th Street and Dick Collins Road), the Florence Hotel and saloon and postmaster John Stelon's dry goods emporium.
Florence gained rail service with the St. Paul & Omaha line opening in the early 1880s. The relocation of Omaha's water works pumping plant to Florence in 1887 further revived the sleepy burg.
Within four years, there was a new $18,000 brick schoolhouse, four groceries, two hotels, two meat markets and three saloons.
From its low point of 395 residents in the 1870 census, Florence was on the rise. But a boom town it hadn't been and never would be.
The final installment on Florence, taking its history through annexation by Omaha and beyond, also will debunk some myths.
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