Researched, authored and posted August 11, 2015 by author Patricia Nell Warren
Nellie Warren in a sweet moment with a Belgian foal in the 1930s. She had her own ranch roots, which eventually grew her conviction that the Grant-Kohrs Ranch should be perserved as a national historic site. Born Nellie Bradford Flinn in 1911, she grew up on her family’s homestead in Okaton, South Dakota. Her father, Roland Flinn, divided his time between trying to ranch and a job on the Milwaukee Road, which ran through Okaton.
Eventually hard times motivated the Flinns to give up the homestead and move to Alberton, MT and then to Deer Lodge, where Roland worked full-time as a Milwaukee conductor. Nellie graduated from Powell County High School there. Instead of attending college, as she’d hoped to do, Nellie went to work as a secretary to help support the family.
A job with a law firm in town was how she met Con Warren, who came into the office on business. They married in 1934.
Finding herself surrounded by highly educated Kohrs female in-laws, Nellie started to pursue higher education on her own. Amid her work as a ranch wife and mother, she always found time to collect and read books on Western history, or write down ranch recipes collected from Augusta Kohrs. When Augusta passed on in 1945, Nellie shouldered the task of organizing and caring for the mass of Kohrs and Bielenberg records and artifacts inherited by her spouse.
Becoming a self-taught historian was a natural process, whether it was researching an extensive family genealogy for “Colonial and Revolutionary Lineages” or checking the ranch’s typewritten copy of the Conrad Kohrs autobiography back to Anna Boardman’s handwritten original. Inevitably she came to see the value of such a complete collection of historic ranching memorabilia.
In the mid-1960s, when Nellie first heard about the National Park Service’s new program of taking on family-owned historic sites and turning them into small national parks, she started urging Con Warren that they should put forward the Grant-Kohrs as a candidate. Her vision was a major force in the long process resulting in the Park Service’s 1972 purchase of the original homestead site within the ranch, and its opening to the public in 1977.
(Photo from the Grant-Kohrs Ranch NHS archives)