About Aspinwall
Aspinwall was a town in the southeastern part of Nemaha County, Nebraska, on the south bend of the Missouri River. It no longer exists as a town, and sources today are not always clear about exactly where it stood.
History
Louis Neal was the first settler, in 1853. A ferry was established and a store opened in 1856. A post office was added in 1860, and the town was incorporated in 1870.
The steamboat landing
Aspinwall claimed to be the best steamboat landing on the river, because a sharp bend in the channel cut deep water right up to the shore. By 1864 its shipping exceeded that of both Brownville and Nemaha, with corn hauled up from Pawnee County for loading. John H. Morehead, later governor of Nebraska, was hired here as a young schoolteacher by the school board. An 1895 business atlas still listed Aspinwall with a post office and no railroad. The post office closed in 1903.
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Aspinwall is an unincorporated, largely vanished community in southeastern Nemaha County, Nebraska, on the Missouri River bottoms a few miles south of the village of Nemaha. First settled around 1853, it grew into a busy Missouri River steamboat landing during the 1860s — local histories describe it, by 1864, as one of the busiest grain-shipping points on this stretch of the river, for a time outshipping the older river towns of Brownville and Nemaha. A post office operated at Aspinwall from 1860 into the early 1900s. The town’s fortunes faded as river trade gave way to the railroads that bypassed it, and today essentially nothing of the original townsite remains beyond open farmland and the small Aspinwall Cemetery a couple of miles away.
Adjacent Counties
- Otoe County (north)
- Atchison County, Missouri (east)
- Holt County, Missouri (southeast)
- Richardson County (south)
- Pawnee County (southwest)
- Johnson County (west)
Nearby Towns
- Nemaha — about 5 miles north-northwest
- Brownville — about 6 miles north
- Auburn — the Nemaha County seat, about 13 miles northwest
A vanished 19th-century Missouri River steamboat landing in southeastern Nemaha County; no incorporated town remains today.