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History of Bristow, Nebraska

History of Bristow, Nebraska

Bristow is a small village in eastern Boyd County that has the unusual distinction of having existed twice — once where the settlers put it, and once where the railroad wanted it. Sources for this page are Perkey’s Nebraska Place Names and the Lynch Centennial book, “Lynch, Nebraska 1892 to 1992,” which has no Bristow chapter but refers to the town throughout.

Contents

Named for a Cabinet Secretary

Perkey’s records that Bristow “commemorates Secretary of the Treasury Benjamin H. Bristow” — a genuinely notable choice. Bristow was Ulysses S. Grant’s Treasury Secretary and the man who broke the Whiskey Ring, the tax-fraud conspiracy that reached into Grant’s own White House staff. He had been dead only fifteen years when the county was settled, and the name would have carried a clear meaning: honesty in public office.

The post office was established on 24 November 1891, within months of Boyd County’s organisation and more than a decade before the railroad arrived. Perkey’s gives the peak population as 255, in 1920.

The Town That Moved

The 1891 post office matters, because it means there was a Bristow before there was a railroad — and it was not in the same place. The District 30 school history in the Lynch book is blunt about it:

“The first school was a soddie and located east of town on the McCracken place. Later a frame building was erected there. This building also housed the first Sunday school and church. The first post office and store was west of town. When the railroad came the town site was changed.”

So the original settlement had its school on one side and its store and post office on the other, and when the Fremont, Elkhorn and Missouri Valley came through in 1902 the whole thing was picked up and re-laid along the tracks. Bristow’s townsite lots were sold at public auction on 22 June 1902 — six days after Anoka, four days before Monowi. This was the pattern all across Boyd County that summer: the railroad platted three towns in eleven days.

The Depot

The depot did not last long in its first form. The Lynch book’s chronology records: “7-12-1911: Sparks from a passing train set fire to the Bristow depot, causing it to be rebuilt.” A railroad burning down its own station with its own locomotive was common enough in the coal-burning era to be almost routine.

The rebuilt depot served until March 1966, when the Chicago & North Western closed the Bristow, Anoka and Spencer stations together and consolidated the work into Lynch. The line itself was abandoned in 1978.

The Bank That Carried Lynch

Bristow’s most consequential institution served the town next door. The Nebraska State Bank of Bristow was the bank for Lynch during both of the periods when Lynch had no bank of its own — 1931 to 1934, and 1939 to 1946 — and was named the village’s official depository in 1939.

Launce Gibson managed it from 1924, and in 1946 founded the Lynch bank out of it. The institution kept both towns in its name for the rest of the century: the sponsor listed in the front of the 2017 Lynch Quasquicentennial book is the Nebraska State Bank of Bristow & Lynch, which provided the computers, scanners and safe storage that made that book possible. When the Nebraska State Insurance Agency was sold in 1987, it moved out of the bank building at Lynch back to Bristow, where it remained.

The Bristow Enterprise

Bristow had its own weekly, the Bristow Enterprise, published by Earle and Verna Landholm. In 1931–32 it merged with the Lynch Herald to form the Lynch Herald-Enterprise — the paper that carried both towns’ news for the next forty years, and whose name still records the merger.

The School

Bristow’s schools went the way of every small district in the county, in stages. In 1960 the high-school students began going to either Lynch or Spencer, leaving Bristow with a K–6 system. In June 1963 Bristow merged with Lynch. A satellite school kept the younger grades in town for a while afterwards, “until it was not feasible to hold school for so few students.”

The 1970 Twister

The Labor Day weekend storm of 1970 — the same system that did severe damage across this corner of the county — “also hit Bristow with a twister.” The Lynch book gives it that one line and no more.

Bristow keeps a place in the county’s civic life out of proportion to its size. The Bristow Lions Club ran the organising meeting that founded the Lynch Lions in January 1957; the Farmers Union Cooperative Gas and Oil of Boyd County was headquartered here; and the Lynch Rural Fire District still runs “from just west of Bristow east to western Knox County.”

Further reading: the history of Lynch, Monowi, Butte, Spencer, and Boyd County.