Opportunity, Nebraska

Opportunity, Nebraska is a small unincorporated community in northeastern Holt County, set among farm and ranch country between O'Neill and the Niobrara River in the Sandhills Region. Founded in 1911 around a cheese creamery that gave the town its hopeful name, Opportunity today is a quiet crossroads of open grazing land and farmsteads, positioned near the historic ghost town of Mineola and the neighboring rural communities of Star, Dorsey, and Redbird.

Location

• County: Holt County
• Region: Sandhills Region
• Highways: Local county roads
• Nearby Towns:
  O'Neill (12 miles southwest),
  Page (14 miles south-southeast),
  Lynch (16 miles north)

Adjacent Towns

• O'Neill - 12 miles southwest
• Page - 14 miles south-southeast
• Lynch - 16 miles north

Adjacent Counties

• Holt County (surrounding)
• Knox County (northeast)
• Boyd County (north)

Points of Interest Near Opportunity

Outdoor & Recreation

• Open grazing land and farmland marking the former Opportunity and Mineola townsites
• Rural prairie and ranch country surrounding the Niobrara River valley in northeastern Holt County
• Country roads connecting Opportunity to the neighboring rural communities of Star, Dorsey, and Redbird

Cultural & Historical

• Mineola Cemetery, surrounded on three sides by cornfields, the last trace of the 1887 boomtown that preceded Opportunity
• The site of Cox & Frost's creamery, the cheese factory that gave Opportunity its name and its brief prosperity in the 1910s and 1920s
• The former Opportunity townsite, once home to a general store, school, post office, and one of the area's first gasoline pumps

Historical Background

Long before Opportunity had a name, there was Mineola, a frontier boomtown platted in 1887 after trader Charles Lamont and his partner Richards began running Texas longhorns on the surrounding grassland. For a few bright years Mineola had a Methodist church, a general store, a blacksmith shop, a lumberyard, a hotel, and even its own newspaper, the Mineola Sun, along with talk of a railroad that never came. The devastating blizzard of 1888 finished off the founders' cattle business, and a typhoid epidemic in the 1890s took a further toll on the small community; when the last store went up in flames one night, it marked the effective end of the town.

Opportunity rose in 1911 to fill the gap Mineola's decline had left, founded a few miles away by a cheesemaker named Cox, who partnered with a man named Frost to build a creamery and store. Cox gave the settlement its hopeful name because he believed turning local milk into cheese offered area farmers a genuine chance to prosper from their dairy herds. For a time it worked: the creamery hummed, a school and post office followed, and by the 1920s the store even had a gasoline pump out front for the farmers who were beginning to trade their wagons for automobiles.

The good years didn't last. Postwar land speculation and overreach broke Cox financially, and the cheese factory closed for good, done in as much by a new generation's reluctance to keep milking cows twice a day as by the long hauls that let milk sour before it reached the vat. The store held on a while longer, serving the neighborhood until the drought and depression of the 1930s finally emptied the community out for good, and the Mineola post office, already folded into Opportunity's in 1913, disappeared from the map entirely.

Today nothing marks either townsite but a name in old records and a scattering of farmsteads. The ground where Opportunity's creamery once stood is grazing land, and the Mineola cemetery, surrounded on three sides by cornfields, is the one lasting reminder that a hopeful little town once stood on this stretch of northeastern Holt County prairie.

Read the full chapter history of Opportunity in Chapter 38 of “Before Today: A History of Holt County, Nebraska.”

Education

Local Schools

• West Holt Public Schools (K-12) serve Opportunity and the surrounding rural area of northern Holt County.

Health Resources

Clinics & Local Care

• Local medical clinics and care providers in the region

Hospitals

• Avera St. Anthony's Hospital (O'Neill) — 12 miles southwest

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Wandermore in Nebraska

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