Frederick Kemper Freeman

Background

Frederick Kemper Freeman was born on June 15, 1841, at the family home, “Greenfields, ” Culpeper County, Virginia.

Education

Freeman attended an “old-field school” for several years and at the age of ten accompanied his uncle, Frederick Thomas Kemper, to Boonville, Missouri, where he entered Kemper Family School, now Kemper Military School, of which his uncle was a founder.

He returned four years later to his parents’ home then at Gordonsville, Virginia, where he attended Kemper College, conducted by a cousin. While a student at a college at Union, Monroe County (now West Virginia), he enlisted on May 9, 1861, in the Confederate army.

Career

After taking part in the battle of Manassas, Freeman was transferred to the Signal Corps, in which branch of the service he had attained the rank of lieutenant by the close of the war.

In 1866, with his brother Legh (originally Leigh), he went West for the purpose of rebuilding the family fortune, and at old Kearney City, in Nebraska Territory, the two began the publication of the Frontier Index, a tri-weekly, from a hand roller press abandoned by Gen. Joseph E. Johnston, who prior to 1861, was in command of United States troops in the West.

The paper made its initial appearance in May 1866, but soon the “press on wheels” began to move. The brothers followed the temporary terminus points of the Union Pacific Railroad, doing what Freeman called a “land office” business in the printing of advertising circulars for miners, prospectors, adventurers, former soldiers, and railroad employees as they rushed into each new town.

Their second place of publication was North Platte, to which they were moved by ox teams driven by Mexicans. In January 1867, they moved on to Julesburg, and a few months later the Index was one of the first enterprises to reach Cheyenne, where it was housed in a tent.

Equipment was next shifted to Laramie, 105 miles farther west. Freeman was seriously injured on this move and for many months wrote editorials and news from a hospital bed at Ft. Sanders. Later he visited Brigham Young at Salt Lake City.

While Freeman was operating the Index at Laramie, Legh was publishing a branch paper at Bear River City, near coal-mines in northern Utah to which they had filed a claim with the Federal government. They opened these veins and brought out coal to a country in which all fuel was costly and scarce.

When the wealth of these mines became known, others who wanted the property incited a mob to burn the Freeman plant and to force the brothers out. In the resulting confusion of land titles, they lost all rights to the mines.

This double loss prompted Freeman in 1869 to ship the equipment at Laramie to Corinne, near Ogden, Utah, where his brother resumed the publication of the Index under the title of Freeman’s Farmer, and to return to Virginia.

He had served on the Nebraska Territorial Council as the adviser to Gov. David Butler in 1867 and was elected to the state Senate following Nebraska’s admission to the Union.

From 1869 to 1874, he lived in Virginia, removing then to Georgia where he became a pioneer pecan grower and where he engaged in the wholesale grocery business.

Achievements

• During its brief existence under Freeman's leadership, the Frontier Index became more than a novelty. First, its readership extended well beyond the rail workers, business people, and speculators in the boomtowns where it was published.

Views

Quotations: "Our citizens should support a strong police force and help them to put down crime and rowdyism. We were told yesterday of two bands of horse thieves and highwaymen that have their dens on Crow and Dale creeks, each numbering thirty or forty men. They are circling around Laramie, playing Indian. We say go for 'em. "

Connections

Freeman's wife was Mary Julia Roper, whom he married in 1896.

Wife:

Mary Julia Roper