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History of Spencer, Nebraska

History of Spencer, Nebraska

Spencer sits in the middle of Boyd County on Highway 12, and for most of a century its name was attached to something bigger than itself: the hydroelectric dam on the Niobrara six miles to the south. This page draws on the Lynch Centennial book, “Lynch, Nebraska 1892 to 1992,” which carries a full chapter on the dam, on Perkey’s Nebraska Place Names, and — for the dam’s end — on the independent panel that investigated its failure in 2019.

Contents

An Iowa Name

Spencer is not named for a person who lived here. Perkey’s records that the town was “named for Spencer, Iowa, former home of many of the first settlers” — homesickness, more or less, written onto a map. The post office was established on 12 May 1891, which makes Spencer one of the earliest in Boyd County, ahead of the railroad by eleven years and only months after the county itself was organised in 1891.

It grew into the largest town in the county. Perkey’s gives Spencer a peak population of 728, reached in 1920 — more than Lynch at its height, and comfortably more than the county seat at Butte.

The Town on the Line

The Fremont, Elkhorn and Missouri Valley reached Spencer in 1902 on its way west across the county, and the town became a division point of sorts — several of the derailments the Lynch book records happened in the Spencer yards or just west of them. The Spencer depot closed in March 1966, in the same round of closures that took Bristow and Anoka. Six years earlier, in the flood of March 1960, the river “took out five miles of track between Spencer and Verdel.”

Spencer had its own newspaper, the Spencer Advocate. In September 1968 the Advocate printed two issues of the Lynch Herald-Enterprise on Spencer’s press so that the Lynch paper would not lapse and lose its standing as a legal newspaper — a small favour between rival towns that says something about how these places actually worked.

The Spencer Dam, 1923–1940

In December 1923 the North Nebraska Power Company announced it would use the Niobrara six miles south of Spencer to make electricity. State approval came on 29 January 1925, and work began on a 4,000-horsepower, $450,000 dam. The powerhouse was set in the middle of the stream to keep it clear of silt, and the promoters promised the reservoir would also give the county “a fishing place and recreation area for many years for people of all ages.”

The dam was completed in 1926 by the Lynch book’s account — later engineering records date it to 1927, and the two figures have never been reconciled — and its power was sold to the surrounding communities.

The Day the Dam Tipped Over

Ten years in, it failed — and the way the Lynch book tells it is worth quoting exactly, because two men were standing on it:

“In September 1936, just as Don Stewart and Fred Pierson were about to walk out on the spillway and do some fishing, the whole dam suddenly dropped down and slid on the soapstone in the river bed and tipped over. The brick powerhouse and turbines were all that remained intact.”

The dam had been founded on shale, and the shale let go. It was rebuilt in 1939 and 1940, and the rebuilt structure — the one most people alive today remember — began generating around February or March 1940. Both dams stood less than a quarter-mile above the site of the old Whiting Bridge, before U.S. Highway 281 was relocated.

The river took a steady toll of the people who worked and fished there. The book records one man drowned in each of 1931, 1934, 1947 and 1951, and a man and a child in 1991. In March 1958, as the ice went out, foreman Mike Smith slipped and was swept through an open flood gate; he caught an old bridge pier and survived.

By 1992 the book could still write: “Today, the dam still stands and provides electric power and a fishing hole, even though silting and periodic flushing are problems challenging its continued existence.” That last clause turned out to be the important one.

14 March 2019

The Spencer Dam no longer exists. It was destroyed in the early hours of 14 March 2019, during the bomb-cyclone flood that broke records across Nebraska.

The cause was not simply high water. Heavy snow had fallen on frozen ground; then Winter Storm Ulmer dropped two inches of rain onto the melting snowpack, and the Niobrara broke up its own ice cover and drove it downstream. An ice run — a moving mass of river ice — arrived at the dam faster than the gates could pass it. Operators watched the reservoir rise at least two feet over the crest at 4:38 a.m. Two large breaches opened in the 3,200-foot embankment and the dam was gone. Slabs of ice rubble were left sitting on what remained of it.

One man died. Kenny Angel lived and ran his business about a third of a mile below the dam. The operators telephoned a warning; he did not get out in time, and he was never found. His family later reached a settlement with the Nebraska Public Power District, which owned the dam.

The independent panel that investigated reached a conclusion worth stating plainly, because it is often misreported: the dam’s failure added a negligible amount to the flood downstream. The Niobrara was already carrying a historic flood; the dam did not cause it. What the panel did find was that ice runs are a genuine and under-appreciated threat to dams, and that owners and utilities need to plan for them — a finding that has been circulated to dam operators well beyond Nebraska.

The wrecked structure was not rebuilt. Federal money — around $50 million — has since been committed toward removing what is left of it and restoring the river channel. After ninety-two years, the Niobrara at Spencer runs free.

The Hospital, the Churches and the Lodges

Spencer Hospital served the whole west end of the county. It is where John A. Lynch — the man Lynch is named for — died on 25 November 1935, aged 79.

Spencer’s churches were mother churches for the towns around them. Immanuel Lutheran of Spencer founded Christ Lutheran at Lynch in 1947; the Catholic parish at Lynch began as a mission out of Spencer, and Rev. Vaclav Kroupa built Catholic churches at Spencer, Butte, Lynch and Baker. St. Mary’s of Spencer was a partner in the Niobrara Valley House of Renewal in 1985.

The lodges consolidated the same way. In April 1982 the Lynch Masonic and Eastern Star lodges merged into Spencer’s — one of the plainest markers of which way population was flowing in Boyd County by then. When the Salk polio vaccine was distributed to Boyd County residents in the 1950s, it was handed out at Spencer Hall.

Hard Times

Two moments stand out. In January 1933, at the bottom of the Depression, the Farmers Holiday Association turned out in force here: “700 were present to protest a foreclosure sale in the Spencer area.” In a town whose peak population was 728, that number is the whole county standing in one place.

And through the late 1980s and 90s, Boyd County was the proposed site of a low-level radioactive waste dump, on land west of Butte. Spencer, Lynch, Monowi and Butte were all drawn into a fight that ran for more than a decade. Nebraska was finally removed from the Central Interstate Low-Level Radioactive Waste Compact in 2004, and the dump was never built.

Further reading: the Lynch Centennial book Lynch, Nebraska 1892 to 1992 carries the dam chapter in full. See also the history of Lynch, Monowi, and Boyd County.