History of Gross, Nebraska
Gross is one of the smallest incorporated villages in the United States — a handful of people in the north-east corner of Boyd County, above the Niobrara. It was not always. A century and a quarter ago it had a business district big enough to lose nine buildings in a single night. Sources for this page are Perkey’s Nebraska Place Names and the Lynch Centennial book, “Lynch, Nebraska 1892 to 1992.”
Contents
- It Used to Be Called Morton
- The Fire of May 1902
- The Railroad That Didn’t Come
- Ben Gross’s Telephone Line
- Three Hundred and Twenty-Five, Then Three
It Used to Be Called Morton
Perkey’s records something most short accounts of the town leave out: the post office here was called Morton until 28 February 1895, when the name was changed to Gross. The town was named by its own postmaster, Benjamin B. Gross, one of the first settlers, who kept the general store. The settlement itself dates from about 1893.
A man renaming the town after himself sounds like vanity, and it may have been; it was also entirely ordinary practice, since the Post Office Department took the postmaster’s word for what a place should be called. What makes it stick in Gross’s case is that the family stayed long enough to be part of everything that followed.
The Fire of May 1902
This is the single event that shows what Gross once was. From the Lynch Centennial book’s chronology:
“May 1902 nine business houses and three smaller buildings and all the contents were destroyed by fire in Gross. The fire began between Korab’s saloon and the bowling alley around 11:15 PM and destroyed the greater part of the business district in 1 1/2 hours.”
Read that carefully. Gross had a bowling alley. It had at least one saloon, and nine business houses standing close enough together to burn in sequence — and losing all of them still only took “the greater part” of the district, not all of it. Perkey’s peak population figure for Gross is 325, in 1900, two years before the fire. That is a real town, and this is what it looked like on its worst night.
The Lynch book does not say whether the business district was rebuilt. Given that Gross never again approached its 1900 figure, the fire is likely to have been the hinge.
The Railroad That Didn’t Come
The other hinge came the year before, and Gross lost that one too. When the Fremont, Elkhorn and Missouri Valley surveyed its route across Boyd County in 1901, one option under consideration ran up Ponca Creek to Lynch and then “possibly following Whiskey Creek toward Gross to an area where a townsite was being laid out on S. W. Lightner’s place.”
That is a revealing sentence. Somebody was platting a speculative townsite near Gross in 1901 in the expectation that the railroad would come that way. It went west instead, through Monowi, Bristow and Anoka, and those three towns were auctioned into existence in June 1902 — the same season Gross burned. Within eighteen months the county had a rail line and Gross was not on it.
Ben Gross’s Telephone Line
If the railroad would not come, a telephone would. In September 1905 B. B. Gross petitioned the Lynch village board for a telephone permit, and it was granted subject to the ordinances. The Lynch book notes the purpose plainly: “This was for the line between Lynch and Gross, Nebraska.” Elsewhere it records that “Ben Gross added a line that ran northwest from Lynch.”
So the same man who named the town, kept its store and ran its post office also strung its first wire to the outside world.
Three Hundred and Twenty-Five, Then Three
The post office that started life as Morton was discontinued in 1960. The population has run 5 in 2000, 2 in 2010, and 3 at the 2020 census — from a peak of 325 in 1900 to a village you can count on one hand.
It has not stopped being a place, though. In November 2018 the two people then living in Gross hosted a family Thanksgiving that temporarily raised the town’s population to twenty.
Further reading: the history of Lynch, Monowi, Bristow, Butte, Spencer, and Boyd County.