Celebrating MindenThe Kearney County seat has more than bright lights and a pretty county courthouse going for it. Story
by Kristen Friesen |
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EARLY ON A FRIDAY MORNING, before last night’s dark blanket is pulled back, Minden stirs. Commuters on their way to Hastings, Kearney and Holdrege string lights in the pre-dawn skies along U.S. Highways 34, 6 and 10. They are people like Amber Lewis, headed to Olsson Associates’ Hastings location, and Frank Kovacs, a professor at the University of Nebraska at Kearney.
Sleepy shop keepers arrive on the square where a jewelry store, two banks, a floral shop, restaurants, two coffee shops and other businesses huddle around the courthouse. The three-story Bedford stone courthouse with an impressive 100-foot white dome was built in 1907 to better accommodate Minden’s role as Kearney County’s seat.
What began in 1874 as Frederick Bredemeier’s unassuming tract of land, named for his hometown in Germany, is today home to nearly 3,000 souls. Lisa Karnatz, director of economic development, and Roger Jones, Minden’s mayor, are two of them. There’s noted irony in the fact that, though the two met while working together in Kearney, they now pool their efforts to keep traffic headed into Minden.
“We’re a bedroom community,” Karnatz said, “and we’re trying to jump on that idea. So we’re focusing on family oriented events, safety and community.”
Alec Geist unlocks the front doors of Minden Coffee House which he bought this past October. Though Alec and his wife, Tracy, have lived in Minden for seven years, Alec’s former corporate career had earned him a lifetime of frequent flyer miles . . . and very little chance of making it to the Whippits basketball games in time to find a spot on the crowded bleachers.
Now he’s a changed man – dressed in faded blue jeans, hanging the work of local artists on the exposed brick walls of the historic carpet-store-turned-coffee-shop and aligning his store hours with Minden’s social calendar.
Like many in Minden, Geist has a spring in his step this time of year. The days are shorter and there’s a definite bite in the air, but people around here simply melt at the sight of their courthouse come Christmas. More than 12,000 colored lights – from the top of its dome, down three stories of century-old stone and all along the square – can be seen for miles. It’s this view that explains, in part, why Minden is known as Nebraska’s Christmas City.
The annual illumination of the courthouse began in 1915 as a city-wide attempt to impress the state convention of the Grand Army of the Republic to be held in Minden’s city auditorium that spring. However, doomed by three days of freezing rain, the non-insulated lights strung from the railroad depot to the town square didn’t stand a chance. Sensing the town’s disappointment and once the ice thawed, Minden’s City Light Commissioner J. W. Haws single-handedly colored the bulbs and arranged them in Christmassy patterns on the courthouse dome. When he flipped the switch on Christmas Eve 1915, no one was thinking about the Grand Army of the Republic. A tradition in Minden was born.
More lights were added every year thereafter and, by the end of World War II, the lights numbered in the thousands. Then, in the spring of 1946, the Rev. Arthur Johnson from the Methodist Church attended a passion play at Bayard that ended with the lighting of Chimney Rock, pointing straight up to heaven.
The inspired reverend wasted no time convincing his friend, Clayt Morey, an insurance salesman known for his theatrical talents, to write something similar for Minden. Morey was willing and immediately set to work.
But writing takes time and, by November, Morey’s script was only finished up to the birth of Christ.