BANKING AND FINANCE -- FRATERNAL ORGANIZATIONS -- INDUSTRIES

The story of the banks in Sioux county tells the story of its material progress only in part, because many of Sioux county people do their banking in adjoining counties : Lusk and Torrington, Wyoming ; Ardmore, South Dakota; Crawford, Hemingford, Marsland, Alliance, Henry, Morrill, Mitchell, Scottsbluff, and Minatare, all the latter named in Nebraska, each have some of the finances of Sioux county people to look after and handle. This leaves the banks at Harrison only a portion of the county business. Scotts Bluff county banks probably do as much Sioux county business as the banks of the county itself.

Nevertheless the resume of banking affairs from the time when two per cent a month was not unreasonable interest to the present day of the federal reserve and bank guarantee laws, is interesting reading.

C. E. Verity and S. H. Jones established the first bank in Harrison and Sioux county. This was in eighteen eighty-seven, the year following the organization of the county. Verity had been the deputy special county clerk at the organization of the county, and Jones was the first justice of peace in the county to qualify. The bank was called the Bank of Harrison.

The next bank organized was called the Commercial State Bank. B. E. Brewster was president ; C. F. Coffee the vice president, and Chas. C. Jameson, cashier. The names of these three men have been written in large letters upon the northwestern part of Nebraska. March seventeenth, nineteen hundred four, this bank had a capital of ten thousand, and ten thousand surplus, with thirty-one thousand, one hundred seventysix dollars and ninety-one cents of undivided