Fred Roth the son of Jonas s. Roth and (Virginia Eubanks) Roth was born on Jonas S. Roth?s homestead near Comstock Nebr. July 21, 1889. In 1891 the family moved to Gialliam Mo. and returned to the Nebr. homestead in 1896.

When asked about school he always said I went to the 4th grade. I don?t know if it was a joke or true, I suspect it was true.

On Oct. 9 1912 at Ord Nebr., he married Meda Virginia Elliott, together they had four children: Margaret, Lucille, Roger, and Virgil.

Where they lived from 1912 to 1919 is not quite clear from the stories I remember hearing, I think it was on a farm either on or near the homestead. In 1919 he spent a very short time in the World War 1 army medical core at Fort Leavenworth Kansas, being discharged in 1919.

After being discharged from the army he worked a short time for the Custer county road Department in Broken Bow Nebr. In the early 1920?s automobiles were becoming very popular and there was a great need for roads. He moved to Comstock Nebr. and borrowed 5000 dollars from his father Jonas and bought a Caterpillar and road Grader and started grading township roads. The demand was so great that in a very short time he had two road outfits working full time. Each road outfit consisted of a Caterpillar, Grader, grease wagon and a road shack. The road shacks were built on wheels and were 8 feet wide and 20 feet long and contained a wood/coal burning cook stove, table, chairs and beds that folded into the wall.

Business was so good he was looking for an investment in 1928 when the government started selling some prairie land in South Dakota. He went to South Dakota and purchased 320 acres and leased other land from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, bought another Caterpillar and a 12 bottom sod plow to break the sod on the land. The nearest market was Gordon Nebr. To get there required traveling over 4 miles of trail road to Batesland S.D. and then 30 miles of graded dirt road to Gordon Nebr.

He realized that some grain storage would be needed on the place so he hired a crew of carpenters and built what at the time was a good size grain elevator, the lumber. cement, etc. to build the elevator was hauled from Hot Springs S.D. over a 100 miles away. Water was hauled from a school house well a quarter mile away.

While building the elevator the crew lived in tents and Mother cooked for the crew on an outside camp stove.

It was always intended that trips would be made to S.D. to plant and harvest and return to Nebr. each year, to the road business. For a place to camp during harvest a window and a loft was added to the corner grain bin. The first harvest was in 1929, for the harvest he bought a new 16 foot Nichols & Shepard combine and 3 new 1929 Chevrolet trucks. The first harvest was flax and wheat. His nephews, Levi Roth and Ray Roth, each received one of the trucks after the harvest as part of their wages for their work. The stock market crash and bank failures of 1929, followed by the depression and dust bowl drought of the 1930?s, affected both the road business and the farm. The next few years a trip was made to South Dakota each year to plant and harvest, but crops were poor and either lost money or barely paid expenses. The next year or two road work was very slow.

Fred thought things were going to be a lot better when he received a contract to build 6 miles of black top road through the sand hills (highway 20 ) between Woodlake and Valentine Nebr. That contract was a disaster and he lost money, wind storms moved the dry sand as fast as the road machinery could put it in place. When the contract was compete, one caterpillar , grease wagon and grader were driven to the South Dakota farm.

The next few years road work was limited to small jobs, most being connected to or assisting W.P.A.. workers, the government pay was low and barely paid the expense of operating the machines. He took me with him on several of the small jobs. One that I went with him on was when the government hired him to dig a large hole in a field and use his truck to haul some cattle out to the hole. The truck was backed up to the hole and the cattle were forced to jump out of the truck and land in the bottom of the hole, even above the bawling of the cattle you could hear bones break as they hit the bottom of the hole, but it did not matter for two men stood on the bank with rifles and shot the animals as they struggled to get up. Because of the drought there was no feed for the cattle and no market for them. the government program would buy the animals only on the condition that they be destroyed and not be used in any manner, this was at a time when all over the U.S. there were long lines of people standing in line at what was called soup kitchens waiting for a free meal.

We lived in town with a small barn behind the house and had a milk cow. Our cow survived because dad dug a trench in the lot next to our house and made silage out of Russian thistles and weeds.

In 1936 Margaret graduated from high school and left home . Lucille still in high school was (and had been for some time ) living with and working for Mary Lukuesh, who ran the Comstock creamery. Dad obtained two small road contracts to repair the road west of Comstock and removal of a hill near Loop City Nebr. Before he could start it was necessary to rebuild a pair of caterpillar tracks. The closest machine shop that had equipment to handle the tracks was in North Platte Nebr. The owner of the shop said Dad could use the equipment but he would have to do the work himself. Virgil and I went with him,after working two days on the way home late at night he went to sleep and rolled the truck off the grade just west of Comstock.

The winter of 1936 was so cold that the Comstock water tower froze and the town was without water for several days.

In the spring of 1937 in debt, bank account exhausted and no prospects of any roadwork or contracts in sight, the decision was made to move to the South Dakota farm to stay. The conditions there were the same as it was in 1929: trail roads, no electricity, telephone, etc. water still being hauled from the school house well. We moved into the corner grain bin of the elevator. It had worked OK for camping during harvest and planting. But in the winter the cold South Dakota wind whistled through the cracks and at times brought the snow in with it.

In the spring of 1938 arrangements were made with Jay Roth , dad's nephew who was an independent trucker with a flatbed semi, to remove the wheels from one of the road shacks, load it and haul it to South Dakota to live in.

That summer I helped build a sod building for live stock. After the harvest during the winter with the aid of some pipe and a pitcher pump we hand drilled a well to a depth of 200 feet and shortened the distance we had to carry water.

When the move was made to South Dakota one of the road graders was left in a township north east of Ord Nebr. In April 1939, the board of that township asked if they could get several of their roads graded. Jay Roth was called and hired to haul the caterpillar from South Dakota to Ord Nebr.

I was hired to be the cat skinner and ordered to crank the cat at 4 am. each morning and wake up all the farmers within 5 miles. Dad said "When you shut it off at night I want all the farmers you woke up at 4 am to say thank God they shut that thing off, these farmers are paying for this machine by the hour and I want them to know it ran all day."

In those days it was customary for he farmers to take there eggs and cream to town on Saturday sell them, buy what they could with the money, then stand on the side walk and street corners and visit with their neighbors until late at night before going home.

Through the summer, on Saturday the road work was shut down early and we usually drove to Comstock and spent Saturday night and Sunday with Dad's brother Ed and his wife Minnie. We finished grading roads in September near Gates Nebr., parked the grader in a farmyard, loaded the cat on Jay Roth's semi truck to be hauled back to South Dakota. ( later the grader was given to Curtis Dowse). On the way home Dad was offered a sub contract to build several small earth dams in the ranch country north of Martin S. D. the original contractor had leased equipment at the site of the first dam. Dad took over the lease on the equipment and accepted the sub contract. We lived in a tent at each dam and took turns operating the equipment, keeping it running 24 hours a day in order to finish before the bad winter storms. We finished just before Christmas. That was the end of Fred Roth's construction business, the caterpillar was traded for a rubber tired farm tractor.

There were many changes during the forties and fifties, rain fall gradually returned to normal, the road to Batesland was graded, the road from Batesland to Gordon was shortened and blacktoped, trees were planted for a windbreak, the sod barn was replaced with barns built with lumber, a house was built with indoor plumbing, R.E.A. brought electricity.

I enlisted in the Navy Seabees because of World War II. Virgil enlisted in the navy with the Korean war.

In 1956 Fred and Meda retired and had a farm auction, they sold the farm equipment and land and moved to Martin S.D.

The new owners of the land bought it to farm and removed the trees and all the buildings and returned the area where they stood, to farm ground. The schoolhouse was moved to a new location. R.E.A. removed the power line, time and mother nature removed the roads.

Fred Roth died March 2 1960 and was buried in Martin S.D.

Meda Roth died July 11 1986 and was buried in Martin S.D.

Lucille Roth Hemminger died 1988 and was buried in Rapid City S.D.

Virgil Roth died Feb.. 25 1997 and was buried in Payson, AZ.