My Genealogy Hound

ALFRED JOHNSON, a large and influential farmer of Phelps county, is a native of Sweden and was born June 15, 1844. He was reared in his native country and lived there till the age of twenty-five, coming to the United States in 1869. He settled in Minnesota and began life in the new world with $3 in his pocket. He found his first employment as a common laborer. He applied himself industriously to whatever he could find to do and saved his wages as they were earned. Coming to Nebraska in 1878, he settled in Phelps county where he took a homestead, the northeast quarter, section 22, township 6, range 18, and began farming. The first few years of his residence in the county were not noted for any astonishing amount of progress. He began in an humble way, but his progress was steady and his success assured from the beginning. He bought other land as he accumulated the means, all of which he improved, giving to the details of the business his undivided attention, to which fact much of his success is due. Mr. Johnson is justly regarded as one of the most intelligent and successful farmers of his community. What he has is the result of his own industry and perseverance, he being in the truest and best sense a self-made man. He owns a half section of as fine land as there is in Phelps county, lying four miles northeast of the county seat, Holdrege, nearly all of which he has under cultivation, in some shape. Mr. Johnson is a wide-awake man, an enterprising, public-spirited citizen. He is a member of the Farmers’ Alliance of Phelps county and identified with the best interest of the farming community. He is an active member of the Lutheran church and a man of benevolent impulses. His home gives evidence of the system and good management that prevail on his place, and at it all are alike welcome. Mr. Johnson, careful and deliberate in all things, was unusually so in the selection of a life companion. He did not marry until July 25, 1889, taking to share his life’s fortunes with him at that date Miss Josephine Larson, who is also a native of the Fatherland — the snowy kingdom amid the icy seas.