MOST of the New York colony which came out to Dickey County were from around Livonia. They organized the colony before starting from the East and sent out a man, Mr. Hogaboom, to spy out the land. This man probably went out in the fall of 1882, and the colony came on April 7^th, 1883. Every one unloaded at Ellendale as that was the end of the road, in fact the only road into the county at that time. They had a special emigrant rate of $22.50 per head for the people and then had to ship their household goods in addition. Some few shipped stock and machinery, but not many.

After unloading at Ellendale six or seven of the members of the party hired a surveyor to run the section lines as only the township lines had been run by the Government. As soon as the section corners were marked they went out and selected their land and put up shanties and other improvements. Some of the party, among whom were Ross Canfield, M. B. Kent, Carl Hayden and Eli Humphrey, left the rest of the New York folks and went off by themselves to locate as they were not satisfied with the pieces assigned them in Yorktown.

Ross Canfield and Thomas Millham came out together. Millham took a homestead farther east and Canfield one in what became Kentner town-ship. He also took a pre-emption and a tree claim, and bought a quarter, living here summers and returning to Livonia, New York, for the winters till he brought his bride, Jennie Mead of Livonia, back with him in the spring of 1891. The Canfields were the first country people to drive a double carriage, the first to drive an auto, and their son drove the first airplane in the region.

It was easy to get an outfit with which to start farming. The man who needed a team, machinery or groceries went to the stores and got all he needed without paying down a dollar. Probably the wholesale houses were backing this for the storekeepers themselves were limited in resources like the settlers. It cost $18.00 a thousand for rough lumber and that was all that was used by some, full width white pine sound and clean. But it cost money to hire a team or man to do anything. Mr. Canfield paid $15.00 to have a man haul out enough lumber on a wagon to build a 7 by 9 shanty, and could not ride at that-had to walk behind the wagon.

Mr. Canfield did a little breaking, about twenty-five acres that first year and got up his shanty and dug a well, and the next year hired some land and put in a crop. The first well was of course a slough well dug shallow, but later they got a good well in a water vein that would supply a thousand head of stock. When the buildings were moved to the new site the artesian well was put in. They used horses and mules for draft animals from the start, although they raised some cattle and broke a few for their own use in later years.

One of the handicaps of the settlers in the early days was the high interest rates. By evasion and discounts the money lender was able to extort as high as 36 per cent for the use of money, and there was no way of getting around it if one had to have the money.

About Christmas that first winter Mr. Canfield and a friend were out on the claim digging the well, and the thermometer went down as low as 56 below zero. There was a band of antelope hanging around and with their Winchester they managed to shoot one of them for food. They went out to the claim once that winter for a couple of loads of hay and stayed over night in the shanty. A blizzard came up and snowed them in, and they had to stay there several days and all the fuel they had was some of the mangers and partitions in the barn. They found one old hen that had been left behind in the fall and lived on that till they could get back to town. They put all four horses on one rig and had all they could do to get back with them. 

Byron H. Tibbetts came to Dakota from Concord, Minnesota, and took up a claim in Kentner Township, the southwest of Section 35. In 1886 he was married to Minnie B. Morrill of St. Charles, Minnesota, and brought her to the homestead he had been preparing for four years. He was a Deacon in the Baptist Church at Ellendale and superintendent of the Sunday School for many years. He was president of the town board for many years and an active worker on the school board. In May, 1905, while fighting a prairie fire that had gotten away from a far-a-way neighbor he was caught in it and too severely burned to recover.

The roll of landowners in this township gives the following names;

The pioneer men were quite well supplied with modern machinery, perhaps more than they could afford to buy, and much of it was shipped out later as scrap iron. The women in the more prosperous homes were well supplied with equipment for doing their work. Schools were provided and while the location of the buildings did not accommodate all, several removals of the school house brought school advantages to the farmers and a good standard of education was maintained in the township. Many of the women in Kentner have been prominent in the work of the Women's Clubs of the locality, the county and the state.

Prairie fires were bad, and one set by a Soo locomotive burned over a great territory and consumed the hay and feed of the farmers and burned off some fine groves that had been started at great labor and pains by the settlers. The railroad company settled for the damage but could not restore the work of the pioneers in their groves.

The Tuttle Ranch in the northeast part of the township has been a land mark since the early days. This was known as the Emery ranch in the first years, as it was the work of a unique Yankee from Providence, Rhode Island. Mr. Emery had been through years of experience on the plains further south and had the notion of founding a big farm in the new territory which afforded cheap land. He brought out a lot of young fellows from the cotton mills and had them squatting on quarters that could be bought by him later. To carry out this plan he had a number of shanties erected in the township east for later occupancy, but was using these men to hold down some land nearer his own location which he had chosen on the southwest of 2 and the northwest of 11. The neighbors to the east knew the purpose of the extra shanties and pushed them down as they were unused.  The Emery people would put them up again but each time the lumber seemed to be scarcer and finally many of the would be shanties disappeared, whereupon Mr. Emery concluded it was useless to fight against "providence" and confined his attention to his home locality. He built up from the pre-emptions in Kentner township a farm of 15 quarters on which he raised wheat for the main crop.

He was not a really practical man as he bought and brought out here two car-loads of horses that had been used on the streetcars of Chicago, and among the whole lot there was only one team that was able to haul a water tank for his threshing crew. He had his shanty on the northwest of 11 with the shanties of the men, his barns and corrals, and a long house for serving meals, in which he had a long table for his helpers. When he built a better house he decided the easiest way to clean up his old shanty was by fire, so after removing the desirable belongings he set the shanty on fire and made his cleaning in that way. He traded this ranch to a Mr. Jones of the Plano Company and for several years it was managed by Mr. Owen, an intelligent farmer who introduced newer methods and later machinery.  At a later time the big farm came into the possession of Mr. Tuttle and in that way got its name as known in more recent years.

Martin & Strane, who were carrying on a large line of business in Ellendale had a ranch in the northwest part of Kentner Township, north of the homestead of Hans Johanson and reaching up into Maple Township. 

Among the later residents of the township are the two Jury families, Robert Kraus, E. J. Williams, Mike Schmierer, Conrad Mattheis, H. D.  Collett, Albin Dahl, John Miller, H. H. Ackerman and others.

Kentner Township has the questionable honor of having the first murder in Dickey County, in 1885. Hacket was a storekeeper and blindpigger down in the neighborhood of Watertown, but had been up in northern La Moure County looking for a new location. Dille, an old veteran of the Civil War, and his wife, a half-breed Chippewa about half his age, had been employed by Hackett. The party of three were in Ellendale with a load of goods on a wagon en route to the new location. Hackett had been drinking and had been ordered out of town. They left town and camped about a mile east of the southwest corner of Kentner Township, and that night Hackett was killed in camp. Nobody knew anything about this happening until the body was found in a slough on Jo Blumer's land in the northern part of the township on Sunday some days after the murder. Jo Blumer and Henry Barnaby were going over to Blumer's land and noticed something in a slough on the northeast quarter of Section 2. They immediately notified Dr. Thomas the coroner who went out and held an investigation, and the body was turned over to Mr. Emery near whose ranch the finding was made. His two hired men, Ole Bye and Ole Enger, served as undertakers and buried the body in a coffin made from a box in which header machinery had been shipped.

Dille and his wife had gone on to LaMoure and from there to Browns Valley, Minnesota, where they sold the horses and wagon and boxed up the goods and shipped them to Soldiers Grove, Wisconsin, where the Dilles had lived before coming to Dakota. The only clue was a part of an express tag found in the pocket of the murdered man. From this the identity of the man was learned and a brother found. Dille and his wife were found at Soldiers Grove and brought back to Ellendale. They were indicted by the grand jury, put on trial and by confession of the man found guilty. Further investigation ordered by the court confirmed Dille's confession. No marks of violence had been found on Hackett's body at first, but a second examination showed that Hackett had been shot in the ear.   Both Dille and his wife were sentenced to the penitentiary for seven years. Afterwards both were pardoned, Mrs. Dille because she was dying of tuberculosis and Mr. Dille because he was old and had an army record.

When first organized the township was included with the township to the south and called Carlton. Later it was given separate organization and named from one of its pioneers. In 1927 a good highway was constructed through it north and south two miles west of the east range line.  For some time Edwin Canfield kept an airplane on the home farm on the northeast of Section 3, and used it for taking people up for the experience and made many longer flights, attending meetings of his and other com-munities to give the braver neighbors an airplane ride, but in 1927 the Can-fields removed to Fargo where the plane was used for long distance commercial purposes.

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