Sandoz Society receives Dawes County ranchland

She is Esther Pilster, the widow of Raleigh Pilster, a long-time agribusiness educator who grew up on the ranch. His parents, John and Grace Pilster, built the ranch from a quarter section to nearly 6,000 acres and for many years had the largest flock of ewes in Nebraska.

Announcement of the gift, which totals $932,705, was made Friday morning at the Mari Sandoz High Plains Heritage Center at Chadron State College by Dr. Ron Hull of Lincoln, the Sandoz Society president, and Dr. Janie Park, the president of Chadron State.

The funds will be used for an endowment to provide support for the Sandoz Center and several programs that Mrs. Pilster has designated. They include the Pilster High Plains Lecture Series, establishing ranching exhibits, range and forage crop management and agronomy research, building a repository of materials reflecting the settlement of the region and sponsoring institutes and workshops.

Raleigh Pilster was born on the ranch Oct. 4, 1913. He graduated from Whitney High School in 1932 and attended Chadron State College two years before going to the University of Nebraska to earn a bachelor’s and master’s degrees in agriculture. He taught vocational agriculture and was the advisor to Future Farmer of America chapters at several Nebraska schools, including Chadron in 1949-50, before the couple moved to Omaha. He initially was a salesman and manager for Allied Mills, a large feed business, before returning to education in the early 1960s. He taught at Lewis and Clark Junior High for several years before joining the faculty at Burke High School in about 1970.

Although agriculture was not a major curriculum area in the Omaha schools, he developed ag-related judging teams that placed high at state and national competition. He was named Nebraska’s outstanding vocational education teacher in 1984, when he retired at age 70.

Esther grew up on a farm at Wymore, Neb., and a was a teacher and school administrator 44 years, including the last 21 years as principal of the Boyd Elementary School in Omaha. A park at 88th Avenue and Boyd Streets in Omaha is named for her. The couple had no children.

After their retirement, the Pilsters traveled to more than 50 countries. Following Raleigh’s death in 2002, Esther established the Raleigh and Esther Pilster Foundation.

A paragraph from a book published by the Omaha Community Foundation states that the dollars the Pilsters saved “by living a life focused on others, rather than themselves, and the modest lifestyle they embrace, enabled them to continue their legacy to their beloved Omaha community.”

Esther attended the dedication of the Sandoz Center in September 2002 shortly after it opened.

Some 2,443 acres of the land was donated to the Sandoz Society in December 2005. The remaining 1,287 acres was once farmland that is now planted to grass and is enrolled in the Conservation Reserve Program, and will be transferred to the Sandoz Society in January 2007. The land has been appraised at an average of $250 an acre.

The land has been leased to the Schuhmacher Ranch, owned by John and Jean Schuhmacher, their son, Mike, and his wife, Celeste. The Schuhmachers have offered to purchase the property, but Hull said the Sandoz Society board of directors has not acted on the offer.

Arrangements for the contribution of the land to the Sandoz Society were made by Jeanne Bishop of Lincoln, a graduate of Chadron State, a long-time supporter of the Sandoz Society and a friend of Mrs. Pilster. Bishop said Esther wanted to leave the land to an entity in western Nebraska as a memorial to her husband and his family.

“She believes this is what they would have wanted,” Bishop said. “I cannot overemphasize how important this guideline has been to her in developing her philanthropic plan with the Sandoz Society. She has truly been their advocate in memorializing this endowment to them.”

The land was homesteaded by Raleigh Pilster’s grandparents, Henry and Hulda Pilster, in the late 1800s. According to an article written by a family member for a Dawes County centennial history published in 1985, Henry Pilster joined the Germany army in about 1863 when he was 15 years old. A year later, he deserted and hid in an apple barrel on a ship headed for the United States for three days before making his presence known.

He spent time with an uncle in New York and a niece in Boston, where he learned to use copper to make barrels, before going to Pittsburgh, Pa., in 1869. He built a house in Pittsburgh and traded it for 120 acres of farmland. He married Hulda Steubgen in 1872.

In June, 1886, Henry and a friend, Joe Sides, came to Dawes County to seek homesteads and built dugouts a short distance northwest of Whitney. Later in the year, they returned to Pittsburgh and brought their families west. The Pilsters had five children when they arrived. Four more were born in Nebraska.

John Pilster, father of Raleigh, was 5 years old when the family landed in Nebraska. When he was 19, John purchased a quarter section of land in the same neighborhood northwest of Whitney where his parents had homesteaded.

John married Grace Burnidge of Elgin, Ill., in 1911. At the time, he told her he would never have a sheep on the place, but as the ranch grew to nearly 6,000 acres it became the home of 1,200 ewes, making it the largest flock in Nebraska. The lambs were prized by Colorado feeders.

John and Grace had four children, two of whom died in infancy. Raleigh was born in 1913 and Hazel in 1917. Shortly after graduating from Crawford High School in 1935, Hazel married Wade Campbell, the ranch foreman. The Campbells managed the ranch until their deaths in the mid-1980s. After that, the land was divided with Raleigh and Esther receiving the north portion that is made up of rolling ranch land and the Campbells’ two daughters, Carolyn Orlovich of Boise, Idaho, and Hazel Ann Montague of Chadron, receiving the buildings and creek bottom, along with more ranch land. A few years later, Orlovich and her family purchased the Montagues’ share of the property.

John and Grace died of natural causes a few hours apart in the Chadron hospital in February 1965. He was inducted posthumously into the Dawes County Agriculture Hall of Fame in 2000.