Shickley is a village in Fillmore County, in southeastern Nebraska. The country around it was first settled in the 1860s by people from Pennsylvania, Ohio and Illinois, with Swedish emigrants arriving in the 1870s. In 1885 the Burlington and Missouri River Railroad surveyed a branch line to run from Beatrice to Holdrege, and the depot was placed half way between Strang and Ong rather than at the Swedish village of Stockholm. The town was named in honor of the county judge, Benjamin Shickley, and by March 1888 it had the 200 residents it needed and was duly incorporated.
The decades that followed were hard. In the 1890s drought and a collapse in markets left farmers selling corn at 13 cents a bushel, and the long drought of the 1930s, made worse by a worldwide depression, found Shickley at its lowest ebb. The turn came in 1936, when the first deep well was drilled on the Charles Flory farm. Others quickly followed, and the town’s trade territory is now dotted with hundreds of deep wells.
The village covers about a third of a square mile. The 2020 census recorded 343 residents, close to the 341 counted in 2010 and below the 376 of 2000. Shickley marked its hundredth birthday in May 1988.
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Shickley is a village in southern Fillmore County that grew out of an earlier Swedish immigrant settlement called "Stockholm," founded in the area beginning in the 1870s. When the Burlington and Missouri River Railroad surveyed a branch line in 1885, the townsite relocated about three miles east onto land offered on favorable terms by Robert Campbell and William Kline. The village was formally incorporated in 1888 and named in honor of Benjamin Shickley, the county judge at the time. Like much of the region, Shickley was hit hard by the 1896 agricultural price crash -- a bumper 70-bushel-per-acre corn harvest that year drove prices down to just 13 cents a bushel -- and again by the Great Depression and 1930s drought. Recovery began in 1936, when the first deep irrigation well was drilled on the Charles Flory farm, launching local irrigation development that helped stabilize the area's agriculture. Shickley celebrated its centennial in 1988. With a 2020 population of 343, it has remained essentially stable in size for decades, unusual for a small Nebraska village.
Shickley's population has held remarkably steady over the past several decades, a rarity among Fillmore County's smaller communities. Its origin as a relocated Swedish settlement and its recovery through early irrigation development give it a distinct history within the county's broader railroad-town story.