About Hendley
Hendley is a village in Furnas County, Nebraska, on Nebraska Highway 89. The 2020 census counted 20 residents on about 0.21 square miles, at an elevation near 2,234 feet. The post office is still in operation, though not in a building of its own. It shares space with the small convenience store at the south-east corner of Grant Avenue and Third Street.
History
A settlement called Lynden existed west of the present village from the early 1870s, with I. W. Meyers as its postmaster. When the Burlington and Missouri railroad built its Pueblo branch through in 1887, the company renamed the station Hendley after a conductor who asked for the honour, over local objection. The post office was established in 1888. For a time the town supported eight stores, a livery barn, a grain and stock market, a hotel, two banks and a drug store. Hendley incorporated in 1906.
The Kool-Aid connection
Edwin Perkins, who went on to invent Kool-Aid, grew up in Hendley. He worked in his father's store at eleven, became the village postmaster at thirteen, and ran a mail order business out of the back of the post office. He started a local paper, the Hendley Delphic, in February 1909. He later moved his company to Hastings, then to Chicago.
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Hendley began in the 1870s as the settlement of "Lyndon" before the railroad renamed it Hendley in 1887. It is Furnas County's smallest incorporated town by a wide margin, with a post office that per local sources still operates out of a small convenience store.
Furnas County's smallest incorporated town, formerly known as Lyndon.