History of Anoka, Nebraska
Anoka is a village of about ten people in eastern Boyd County. It was made in a single afternoon in the summer of 1902, by a railroad that has since been torn up. Sources for this page are Perkey’s Nebraska Place Names and the Lynch Centennial book, “Lynch, Nebraska 1892 to 1992,” supplemented where they are silent.
Contents
- 16 June 1902
- The Name, and Both Sides of It
- The Railroad, Real and Imagined
- Ten People
- What Is Not Known
16 June 1902
Anoka has an exact birthday, which is more than most towns can say. The Lynch Centennial book records the railroad’s programme for that summer in one sentence: “on June 16, 22, and 26 respectively the towns of Anoka, Bristow, and Monowi were opened by sale of lots at public auction on the townsites.”
Anoka went first. Three towns were auctioned into existence in eleven days as the Fremont, Elkhorn and Missouri Valley pushed its Bonesteel Extension across Boyd County; the rails reached Lynch that September. The post office was established on 19 September 1902, three months after the lot sale — the ordinary sequence for a railroad town, where the mail followed the track rather than the other way round.
The Name, and Both Sides of It
Two accounts of the name are in circulation, and they do not actually conflict.
Perkey’s says “Anoka is a Dakota Indian word meaning ‘on both sides.’” Other sources say the village was named after Anoka, Minnesota. Both are right: the Minnesota city takes its own name from that same Dakota word, describing a settlement lying on both sides of the Rum River at its mouth. So the Nebraska village most likely carries the name at one remove — a Dakota word, arriving here by way of a Minnesota town, in the luggage of settlers or in the naming list of a railroad that had already used it once.
Perkey’s gives Anoka a peak population of 145, in 1910 — reached eight years after the town was created, and never approached again.
The Railroad, Real and Imagined
Anoka existed because of the Chicago & North Western, and for a moment it was to be the junction of a second line. In 1914 a company was floated to build the Niobrara Electric Light and Power Railroad — a standard-gauge road running from the C&NW at Anoka to Butte, and then south-east toward the Niobrara River.
It was never built. Boyd County produced several of these paper railroads — Az Perry of Butte had promoted others before 1902, and a whole townsite called Perry was platted on the strength of them — and none of them laid a rail.
What Anoka actually had, it lost in one round of closures. In March 1966 the C&NW shut the depots at Anoka, Bristow and Spencer and consolidated the agency work into Lynch. The post office was discontinued in 1967, the year after. The line itself was abandoned under an order of 19 May 1978.
Ten People
The census has recorded 10 residents in 2000, 6 in 2010 and 10 again in 2020. Anoka is among the smallest incorporated villages in Nebraska — a state that also contains Monowi and Gross, both in this same county, and both smaller still. Three of the least-populated incorporated places in the United States sit within about twenty miles of each other in Boyd County, and all three were made by the same railroad in the same decade.
What Is Not Known
The published histories give Anoka the auction date, the railroad scheme and the depot closure, and almost nothing else. There is no business list, no school history, no church history and no founding narrative for Anoka in either of the county’s big local-history books. That is a gap in the record, not a sign that nothing happened here — a town that reached 145 people had a school and a store and a Sunday service like every other.
If you hold photographs, records or recollections of Anoka, they would fill a real hole.
Further reading: the history of Lynch, Monowi, Bristow, Gross, Butte, Spencer, Naper, and Boyd County.