On level ground between Dry and Twelve Mile Creeks, two miles west and a mile north of Downs, stood the 1871 homestead of Henry Ise. In 1873 Henry married seventeen-year-old Rosa Haag of Holton, Kansas, and brought her west to live there. Twelve children were reared on the homestead during the 27 years before Henry's death in 1900. Nine years later Rosa moved with her family to Lawrence, Kansas, where she died in 1947. Their son John published his parents' story in 1936 in a book called Sod and Stubble, a classic tale of homesteading on the Great Plains that recounts the struggles and hardships the family and their neighbors endured as they transformed virgin sod into productive farms of corn and wheat. The Ise Farm also served as the location of the New Arcadia Post Office from 1874 to 1879 and the Ise School, District 37. About a mile west of the site, on the north side of Highway 24, Downs Cemetery contains members of the Ise family and other early settlers.