The decade’s worst night came days before Christmas. Fire took the Scott family home in December 1895, burning the founder’s house to the ground with the holiday almost upon them. In a settlement of perhaps a dozen families, with no fire company, no insurance office, and the nearest real town a wagon ride away, exactly one safety net existed — and it worked. Neighbors took Winfield and Helen Scott in and helped the founding family rebuild.
The episode is small in the record and large in what it reveals. Scott had recruited this colony deliberately: sober, churchgoing farm families who would show up for a barn raising or a burned-out neighbor. In 1895 the recruits passed the test with the recruiter himself as beneficiary. The same pooled labor would be turned to happier purposes the following year, when the settlers organized a school district and raised a one-room schoolhouse with their own hands.
Rebuilding kept the Scotts on their land, and the town’s run of firsts continued without a pause — school in 1896, store and post office in 1897. See 1896 for the next act.