Central CityOld Lone Tree has evolved into a full-fledged city. Story and photographs by Christopher Amundson |
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BEFORE CENTRAL CITY WAS the “Center of It All,” as the billboard behind the Aurora Co-Op elevator on Highway 30 now boasts, it was just old Lone Tree.
The settlement was named for a giant cottonwood that was a landmark for westbound pioneers plodding up the Platte River Valley. With the tree in view for 20 miles, they hastened their oxen pace, rounded their wagons at dusk and camped under the canopy of its branches at night. Before them, the first pioneers, Native Americans, held council under its wide expanse and buried their dead in the crotch of its trunk, according to folklore.
Railroad land speculators hoped the early years of their water-station settlement would be prosperous, but they had little faith that Easterners would move to a place with only one tree. They rolled out a map, saw they were in the center of the United States and devised a new name for their town with hopes that it would grow into a city. Pitting progressives against romantics, they held a contentious name-change vote in 1875 – the progressives won.
That issue dissolved into an ethnic melting pot of farmers, shop keepers and railroad workers all pulling together – German, Czech, Irish, English and others.
Soon, the Quakers arrived and built a foundation in Central City. Taking the hint of progress, they established a fine college on the west edge of town. The Quaker’s college closed in 1953 with declining enrollment; but community members fought back, as you’ll often find them doing in Central City. The campus reopened as a non-denominational Christian high school. Nebraska Christian Schools, locally called “NC,” has a thriving international student population and an excellent Christmas concert every December conducted by a man with ties to the New York Philharmonic.
No doubt, the Quakers left their mark. Central City is an ecumenical city today with 13 churches and two bars. At the Lincoln Manor Steak House, you can get a beer six nights a week with your hash browns and steak, but not on Sunday.
the most unusually-shaped county in Nebraska, Merrick County looks like a napkin folded in half at a diagonal. It forms a triangle with the hypotenuse on the Platte River Valley. Central City is at the middle of the triangle’s long side.
Central City and Merrick County have always had an independent streak, preferring to do for itself when possible. Locals like to tell the story that during the Great Depression of the 1930s and ’40s, the federal government through the Works Projects Administration, wished to build an auditorium for Central City. A nice gesture, some may have said, but the community refused the handout. Once the war and the depression were over, Central City promptly built its auditorium and paid for it by itself.
The people of Merrick County learned that if they were to be successful, they had to work together. Fifty years ago, they formed the Merrick Foundation, a community fund to pool money and ideas and to re-distribute them for the good of the county. Most worthwhile projects in Merrick County and Central City (from public building, to college scholarships, to funds for the needy, to parks and nature trails) have the touch of the Merrick Foundation.
Notable foundation donors are praised on a wall near what the locals call the “crazy triangle,” a patch of downtown lawn where Highway 30 and Highway 14 meet at a dogleg intersection by the busy Union Pacific Railroad track. The triangle is decorated beautifully with American flags during national holidays and a marquee announcing community events like hamburger feeds at the Eagles Club and fish fries at St. Michael’s Catholic Parish.
In an Eagle Scout project, 17-year-old Galen Schaffer added veteran’s memorial plaques to the flagpole holes. Otherwise, Central City’s triangle is a challenging confusion of a stop light, pedestrian crosswalk, railroad crossing guard and four-way highway traffic.
The triangle is perhaps the one disparity in the city’s pragmatic and progressive nature. For even the roads follow a simple, logical alpha and numeric naming pattern – A, B, C, etc., and 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc. Avenues run north and south, more or less, and streets run east and west, more or less.
It is possible, for example, to live at the corner of D Street and D Avenue in Central City. When the chamber of commerce moved up the block a few years ago, its address changed from 17th Street to 17th Avenue, which still has locals pausing before answering the question, “Where’s your chamber office?”
As goes the farm, so goes the city. It’s a truism heard and felt across rural America, and especially so in Merrick County and Central City. Rick Kunz wasn’t a farmer, but he grew up making ice cream cones for farmers and farm kids. He moved away to Greece when he became an adult and worked in the Middle East selling construction equipment for a living. He promised to return to Central City when his parents were ready to retire from their Dairy Queen on West Highway 30.
