Ruben Bisbee furnished the land for the Devizes Cemetery and recorded the plat in 1880 though the cemetery had been established the previous year in 1879. The cemetery was resurveyed by J. C. Newell in 1906 at which time an additional 40 lots were added to the original 80 bringing the total to 120 lots.
The first settlement in the Devizes community arrived in September 1872 when Henry Zimmerman and Herbert Shaw settled a mile west of Devizes. P. T. Soverns and John O'Brion settled about the same time on land 2 miles east. Mrs. John O'Brion was the first person to be buried in Devizes cemetery. In December of that year John DeMott settled on land now owned by V. L. Ballinger and was the first settler to bread sod on the Sappa Creek, which in the Cheyenne tongue means "Black Water".
By the end of 1873, John Page, Victor Clark, Ira and Peter Applegate, Bisbee's, Nelson's, Watts, Billy Page, George Waters, George Hannum, Seth Coates, John Brainard, Henry Lebeau, G. B. Wray, R. F. Hudsonpillar, I. P. Burke, Archie Hewett, Joseph Collins, Fred Foote, H. B. Hannum and John Dopps had settled in the area. John Dopps later became second probate judge of the county.
The first election in northwest Norton County was ordered by the county commissioners to be held in the John O'Brion home in 1873.
The first school at Devizes was established in 1878 and J. C. Pettijohn taught school during the winter of 1878/1879 in a dugout along the Sappa Creek. Total enrollment was between 40 and 50 pupils.
Rueben Bisbee who homesteaded what is now the Magers Farm was born at Bellow Falls, New Hampshire in 1805, coming here from Ontario, Canada. Rueben Bisbee established the first Devizes post office in his home and became the first postmaster. It was Rueben who named the post office Devizes after the post office he lived near in Ontario. J. W. Bisbee, Reuben Bisbee's [brother?] settled in Devizes in 1879 and died in 1883 and is buried in the Devizes Cemetery.
Ed. I. Jones was born in Greenfield, Pennsylvania in 1837 and came to Norton County in 1879. He served two terms as county treasurer, later ran the Devizes store and was first to receive Masonic rites in the Norton Masonic Lodge.
Longtime surveyor J. C. Newell was succeeded by Fred Foote, the first elected county surveyor in 1910.
L. M. Sherburne became the first storekeeper in the area when he began selling items from a small stock of goods which he kept in the Bisbee home. E. C. Fortney opened a store in a log shanty near the mill built on the Sappa north of Bisbee's by Bates and Lindsay in 1877. The post office was moved from the Bisbee home to the Devizes store near the mill in 1889.
Both Sioux and Cheyenne in small bands frequented the area hunting buffalo and deer until after the Indian Massacre in 1876 in which 19 Indians were killed and which indirectly caused the Indian scare and deaths of several settlers in 1878 on the Sappa farther west. Grasshoppers, drought and blizzards plagued the lives of these early settlers. Travel was by horseback and doctor and medicine were many hours of hard riding away, yet the simple pleasures of neighbor visiting neighbor and helping neighbors with the more difficult jobs of building and putting up wood. And it is still possible to hear some of the old timers tell of the tricks and horseplay, the accidents and the intentional dunkings which accompanied putting up ice from the creek.
Compiled by Wayne L. Plucheck, Sr. from notes of unknown authors
İMarch
2001 Ardie Grimes
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