The Baldwin Brothers – the Boys from Nickerson

(NOTE:  Many people contributed to this project.  I'm especially grateful to Baldwin family members Karolyn Jones, Marc Lyons, Jennifer Leyda, Roger Bell, and the late Bill Baldwin, all of without whom I would not have been able to develop this story.  I'm indebted to Ruth Ann Connell,  John Miller, Perry Beguin, Arline Schaefer, Monte Wilson and Karen Miller for their encouragement, assistance, and patience as I dawdled far too long in completing this account of three pretty remarkable fellows, the Baldwin brothers from Nickerson, Kansas.)   

~~~~ Larry Miller, Spearfish, South Dakota.

Undated Photo of Curtis, Ernest, & George
 Baldwin taken in their later years.

"Those Baldwin Boys Can Fix Anything!"

So wrote Whitney, Nebraska historian Mabel Kendrick in 1987, referring to oft-attributed comments about three Kansas-born brothers who helped the American heartland become the “breadbasket of the world” during the decades immediately following World War One.

Curtis, George, and Ernest Baldwin were born in the late 1800’s to Charles and Ella Baldwin, who had settled in the barren reaches of western Kansas in the 1880s, seeking their fortune in farming.

The three bothers would cobble together careers inventing and building farm machinery, spending most of their lives seeking their fortunes in Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, and California.   

Perhaps their most renowned achievement was developing the Baldwin “Gleaner” combine in the 1920’s.  While the three brothers have long since passed, the “Gleaner” brand remains well-known and respected across farmlands in the Americas and Australia. 

George and Curtis

Their lives began in 1887 near Eminence, a small Finney County farming community in Western Kansas, where the oldest brother, Charles "Curtis" Baldwin, was born in a dugout on September 8, 1887.  About a year later, November 18, 1888, George Deal Baldwin was born; then Ernest William Baldwin on February 26, 1893.  Another son, Wilson, was born in 1895, but died at age 12. 

The Baldwins moved to Reno County where the boys attended school.  Their father would take them out of school each spring to help plant corn – a common practice in rural America in those years.

George and Curtis Baldwin are shown at left, decked out with real sidearms in an undated photo.  (Click on the photo to see a larger image.) They truly were fledgling entrepreneurs, beginning their own threshing business while still teenagers.   That's where our story about the Baldwin boys begins...

   1.  EARLY YEARS 
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