The Ballad of Mrs. Steele
Pacific Junction, Iowa, was a railroad town.
Three railroads converged in Mills County, about 25 miles south of Omaha, Nebraska. The western terminus of the Burlington and Missouri River Railroad and the eastern terminus of the Nebraska Burlington & Missouri Railroad met at a station on the Kansas City, Council Bluffs, & Saint Joseph Railroad - and that spot was given the name Pacific Junction in 1871.
That was a magical year in American history - in many ways, it marked the beginning of a dramatic industrial transformation of the country from a rural landscape of disconnected farms and frontiers to an inter-connected economic and technological world power. Between 1870 and 1890, the amount of railroad track in the United States tripled1. Total trackage increased from 35,000 miles in 1865 to 254,000 miles in 19162. Railroad magnates took advantage of generous federal subsidies (usually in the form of land grants) and of the lower costs of using steel tracks instead of iron, and they made fortune after fortune from building this new infrastructure - often on the backs of workers who had to fight for fair treatment and reasonable wages. This sometimes led to violence, as it did in Pacific Junction in 1888, during the Burlington Railroad Strike of 1888.
Pacific Junction was also a farm town.
Stock and produce bound for Chicago and Boston, or the West coast, or points South, converged on a place like Pacific Junction, where auctioneers with silver tongues and lightning lips spoke for the Invisible Hand of the market. One of those auctioneers was a man named Frank Shuffler.
Frank was a dashing young man, born in Hubbell, Thayer County, Nebraska, on March 29, 1888. His father was Valentine Shuffler, a farmer who moved his family to Pacific Junction when Frank was 10 so Valentine could work for the railroad. The violent years of the labor battles were ten years in the past, and the steady work of the railroad probably insulated the Shufflers from the notorious boom-and-bust cycle of farming in what we now call the Gilded Age.
In 1907, at age 18, Frank married a local girl from a Pacific Junction farming family. Virginia Ballard was also 18, the second of five daughters of Isaac and Mary Ann Ballard. Her father was a former drayman who later became a railroad man, working as a brakeman on the trains that passed through Pacific Junction. Sometime after 1900, though, Virgie’s parents divorced, and in 1904, Isaac married a girl from Saint Joseph who was nearly half his age and moved with her to Oakland, California. It seems likely that Isaac was not at Frank and Virgie’s wedding in 1907.
But Frank was handsome and popular in town and ran a barbershop with his partner, Thomas Martin. As mentioned above, he was also an auctioneer - and at some point, Frank even served as mayor of Pacific Junction. So we have an Iowa railroad town in 1912 with a thriving young community centered on a barber shop - the only thing missing from this scenario is a charismatic flim-flam man hoping to sell the school board marching band uniforms!
(If you’re not familiar with the 1962 film production of The Music Man, a show set in 1912 in the fictional town of River City, Iowa, please allow me to correct that, now.)
Frank and Virgie had four sons between 1909 and 1915: Don, Darrell, Dale, and Duane. You could almost pick them out of the crowd of children in the park; you could almost see Virgie in one of those magnificent hats, standing with the other young mothers. This family must have enjoyed a wonderful decade after their 1907 wedding.
Sadly, Frank’s dad, Valentine, died on February 1, 1916. And while America had tried to stay out of the growing war in Europe, events conspired to draw the country into it. The U.S. Congress declared war on Germany on April 6, 1917, and on Austria-Hungary on December 7. Some 5 million young Americans - out of a total population of just over 103 million - would enlist over the next year.
Frank and his partner, Thomas, were too old to enlist and had dependent families. However, such a massive disruption to the labor pool created a shortage of workers to operate the railroads the country depended on. Both men quit the barber shop and went to work as switchmen for the railroad “in order to help the government win the war.”
On the night of January 9, 1919, Frank slipped on the tracks and was run over by a moving train, killing him instantly.
Virgie and her four small boys, ranging in age from 10 to 4, were not left entirely alone. Her mother, Mary Ann Ballard, moved in with them to help care for the boys and Virgie found work as a cook in a hotel.
The Arrival of Mr. Steele
Orin Durant Steele was born in Newbury, Massachusetts, on 3 Sep 1882. As a young man, he worked as a weaver in the woolen mill in Newbury. Orin married Estella W Winct in 1903 and they had two sons. After Orin's mother died in 1912, his father, Horace, came to live with Orin and Stella until he died in 1920.
A lot had happened to Orin in that decade. About 1915, he took a job as a state fish and game warden, and about 1917, the family moved to Quincy, Norfolk County, Massachusetts. Then the war came, and Orin enlisted in the U.S. Army on July 2, 1918, He served as a sergeant in the 316th Company Tank Corps (Salvage And Repair). His unit sailed from Hoboken, New Jersey aboard the Kroonland on 30 Aug 1918, and may have participated in the Meuse-Argonne Offensive. He returned from the war and was discharged on 10 Apr 1919.
After the war, things went back to normal, mostly. Around 1925, Orin was hired to be a U.S. Game Warden. His job was the enforcement of the Migratory-bird Treaty and the Lacey Acts for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. He was posted to Council Bluffs, Iowa, from 1925 to 1927. Rather than go west with Orin, Stella went to California, where she married Samuel Willis in 1926. His sons were grown by this point, his older son, Arthur, having married in 1924, and his younger son, Marcus, entered the U.S. Naval Academy as a midshipman.
I don’t know the details, but it is easy to imagine that a game warden based in Council Bluffs would have occasion to stay in a hotel in nearby Pacific Junction. And if Virgie Shuffler was anything like her granddaughter, June (Shuffler) McCullough - or like June’s granddaughter, who I married - then it is even easier to imagine that he would fall in love with her.
When his posting to Iowa ended, Orin spent 1928 based in Kansas City, Missouri. But by 1930, he was assigned to the region based around Cambridge, Maryland, and he took his new wife and her three younger sons with him. Virgie’s oldest son, Don, was married by then and had two daughters, Elaine and June. They remained in Council Bluffs.
Orin and Virgie lived in Cambridge for about ten years, until his career took them to Long Island, and then back to Massachusetts. But Cambridge was home for them and for Virgie’s younger sons. After Orin died in 1950, Virgie returned to Cambridge, where she lived until her death on November 4, 1977, at age 88.
Pacific Junction had already begun to decline, too, by that point. The Pacific Junction Public School, in a building built in 1914, graduated its last high school class in 1961 and closed for good in 1986. The town population, which peaked at just over 700 people during Frank Shuffler’s time had dwindled to 96 by the 2020 census. And those remaining families would have been devastated when the Mills County levees failed on March 17, 2019, flooding the city.
Of course, the moral of the story is that good times and bad times will come - and overcoming the bad times may require some steel.
National Geographic, Tracking Growth in the U.S.
Macy, McInroy, McCown; Iowa University Libraries exhibitions: The Golden Age of American Railroading