52 NEBRASKAland • JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2016
There was a Harry. There was a prosperous farmer with a
botanist's eye and a flair for the experimental. There was a
husband, and for a time, there was a father. And before all
that, there was a child born the son of a carriage maker in
the Pine Barrens of southern New Jersey, in a town called
Hammonton, "the liveliest looking town on this part of the
road," wrote the eminent poet Walt Whitman in 1879.
Harry's father, Henry True, arrived in Hammonton, New
Jersey – midway between Philadelphia and Atlantic City – in
1858. A wheelwright by trade, Henry built the house Harry
would grow up in, known locally as "the octagon house,"
or sometimes "the round house." Named for its eight-sided
shape, it was likely the only one in Hammonton, though
strangely, it wasn't the first Henry had lived in. Just four
years earlier, he'd built a similar eight-sided home in the
Greek Revival style on the shore of Messalonskee Lake in
Oakland, Maine. In 1977, "The Pressey House" in Oakland
was added to the National Register of Historic Places.
That creative gene seems to have cast a net over the
entire family. Harry's uncle, George W. Pressey, also a
wheelwright in his early career, later became an inventor
of national renown, patenting – among other products – a
carriage spring known as "Pressey and Farnum's Lever
Spring," the widely used Pioneer Stump Puller, the Pressey
Folding Umbrella, and a bestselling chicken brooder. In
1888, he patented his most popular invention, the American
Star Bicycle, later sold and manufactured by the H.B. Smith
Company and currently on display at the Smithsonian
PHOTO
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HISTORICAL
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H.E. Pressey purchased the homestead of Civil War veteran Ferdinand Zimmerer, pictured here with grazing horses and cattle,
in 1903. Zimmerer originally constructed a soddy along the South Loup River, and later upgraded to a framed wooden house.
