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History of Lynch, Nebraska

History of Lynch, Nebraska

This history draws chiefly on “Lynch, Nebraska 1892 to 1992,” the Lynch Centennial book, produced by the Lynch Centennial Book committee and sold through the Lynch postmaster. Its village-government spine is “Then and Now” by Velma McDonald, built directly from the Lynch Village Board minutes; other chapters are the work of Charles Mulhair (Indian lands), David Kalkowski (the railroad), Earl Conklin (steamboats), Eleanor Micanek (Highway 12) and Bessie Fisher (threshing), among others. Some details are supplemented from the Lynch Quasquicentennial (Q125) book of 2017, the third in the series after the Diamond Jubilee book of 1967 and the Centennial. Where the two books disagree, this page says so rather than choosing.

Contents

The Land That Was Closed

Boyd County was settled a full generation after the counties around it, and the Centennial book is blunt about why: “Compared to the rest of the state Boyd County was late in getting settled up; Holt County having been created in 1862 and Knox County clear back in 1856.” The land north of the Niobrara was Indian land, and it stayed closed for thirty years.

The chain runs like this. In 1858 the Ponca gave up title to all their land except a reservation between Ponca Creek and the Niobrara. Towns grew on the south bank — Cottonwood (Redbird), Pischelville, Dukeville, Paddock — but nothing was built north of the river. In 1868 a treaty with the Sioux defined their reservation as everything north of Nebraska and west of the Missouri, which swept the Ponca reservation into it and led, in time, to the removal of the Ponca to Oklahoma.

In 1881 the state line was straightened. The official reason was cartographic tidiness. The book does not believe it: “In reality, the Fremont, Elkhorn and Black Hills Railroad was interested in building a line up the valley of the Niobrara River and it was obvious that land on the north side, which was unpopulated, would be cheaper than land on the south side, which was settled.” Boyd County was Nebraska again — but the Sioux still held title and settlement was still prohibited.

The 1889 treaty broke up the Great Sioux Reservation into smaller ones and opened the remainder to homesteaders — with the provision that the railroad got first choice of whatever land it needed. Boyd County opened the following year. The chapter ends where that story really ends: “The Ghost Dancers, as they were called by the whites, threw the frontier into a panic. The Army was brought in and the last Battle of the Indian Wars was fought at Wounded Knee. And so the birth of the new county with its tide of settlers looking for new homes and a better life was accompanied by the death of an older way of life.”

John A. Lynch and the Night of 14 February 1890

In February 1934 the Lynch Herald-Enterprise sat down with John A. Lynch, then 78 and a year from his death, and printed his own account of the founding. It is the best primary document in the book.

Lynch had come into Nebraska on 14 April 1885 from southeastern Minnesota, by ox-team and covered wagon, and taken a 160-acre preemption in Knox County — not Boyd. He added a tree claim the next year, improved both, and sold both in 1888 meaning to move west. The bill opening the reservation passed the House in the first days of February 1890 and the Senate on 12 February. Congressman C. W. Dorsey wired Saul Draper, a Niobrara banker and a friend of Lynch’s, who told Lynch it had passed — “but that the President had not signed it” — and advised him to go at once. He went.

No government survey had yet been made, so men paced off what they judged to be 160 acres and held it under squatter’s right until the survey caught up. Lynch reached the site on 14 February 1890. In his own words:

“While here on the night of February 14, 1890, I slept in an open wagon box filled with hay. It was so cold that I had to put two blankets on each horse to keep them warm. The night of the 15th I had company from Niobrara and we camped in a tent… This night was also very cold and somewhat of a blizzard. I again blanketed my horses as well as the visitor’s team of little mules, but the livestock were very uneasy all night, caused by a close approach of a band of wolves.”

His companions were Frank Hajek, Menzi Reid and Joe Vlasnak of Niobrara. The next morning is the founding gesture of the town:

“Frank Hajek took an American flag that was about 3×4 feet and fastened it to a long pole, chopped a hole in the ground about where the Lynch Motor Company is now located, and when I got up at sunrise there were about 25 men passing on foot, going west looking for land. We did not speak, but afterwards recognized John Sedlacek as the leader of the home seekers.”

Of the flag pole he added, in the same interview: “It looked grand but very lonesome.”

He spent the rest of that February commuting to the claim — “when night came I would eat supper, blanket the horses well, crawl into the hay in the wagon box and stay there until morning” — and remembered the country before it was broken: Ponca Creek 75 to 100 feet wide and three to four feet deep all winter, and bluestem three to four feet high, so tall that when two deer crossed the flat west of town “all he could see was the big horns.” He broke 25 acres that first spring and made about 25 bushels of corn to the acre on the sod.

His summary of the first years is worth having whole: “The first settlers were kept busy with erecting homes for themselves in a new country and improving their land, in organizing the county, naming it, locating the county seat, organizing school districts, laying out and establishing roads. For two years we had no courts of any kind in the county so it was for every man to mind his own business and take care of himself. For 12 years the county did not have a railroad and everything had to be freighted from 35 to 40 miles with no roads to speak of and no bridges over the streams.”

J. C. Hoffman was the first man to settle alongside him and the town’s first businessman, later one of the first county commissioners. Lynch was elected Boyd County sheriff in 1892, declined a nomination for state senator in 1902, and died at the Spencer hospital on 25 November 1935, aged 79. His wife Hannah had died three months earlier; she was buried at Dixon and moved to the family plot in the Lynch Catholic cemetery in July 1937. Their daughters Mary and Anna rode the first engine into town in 1902, and Anna appears in the class of 1904, the earliest on the alumni roll.

A note on the founding date. The Q125 book dates the town’s founding to 14 February 1890, the night of the wagon box. The Centennial book uses 1890 for the claim but 1892 for the town — its own title is Lynch, Nebraska 1892 to 1992, the Diamond Jubilee of 1967 counted 75 years from 1892, and School District 36 turned 100 in 1992. Both are defensible; they are answering different questions.

Lynchburg, and How It Became Lynch

The town is named for John A. Lynch, but he did not name it, and on his own telling he found the whole business slightly absurd:

“…but my friends at Niobrara thought different and they at once acclaimed to the world that I had a town site and in a few days they drew up a petition to the Post Office Department at Washington asking to have a post office established at Lynchburg, Nebraska. About every man in Niobrara signed the petition, asking to have myself appointed postmaster. In due time the post office department established a post office and called it ‘Lynch,’ and I was appointed first postmaster; which office I held nine years and resigned to put more time in other line.”

Two things follow from that. The name was proposed by the men of Niobrara, not by Lynch or by anyone living on the site. And the book does not say why the Department shortened it — only that it did. No correspondence, no reason, no date. In 600,000 characters there is no rival etymology and no other candidate name for the townsite.

The post office itself was in Lynch’s dugout on the bank of Whiskey Creek, and mail came by stage and postal wagon. The book cannot decide when it was established: the village narrative places it in the 1890–91 story, while the post office chapter says it came “after the townsite petition was filed at Butte on March 29, 1892.” A nine-year tenure ending around 1899–1901 fits the earlier date better. Postmasters after Lynch: J. C. Irwin, M. J. McGinitie, A. C. McFarland, C. J. Brown, Ernie Miller, Louis Nelson, Fred King, Martin Benck, and LaVone Hanzlik.

The Townsite, the Village Board and Fourth Street

On 29 March 1892 the citizens met for the first time, chiefly to get land from John Lynch for an organised townsite; the petition went to the county judge at Butte the same day. The process finished on 12 January 1893, when the settlement became an incorporated village. Lynch kept Lot 4, where his house stood, and 20 acres valued at $1.50 an acre, deeded back to him.

The first village board, elected 29 March 1892: Neal Walters, chairman; J. C. Hoffman, clerk; William Haigh and Joseph Pravecek, trustees; Frank J. Mulhair, treasurer. A lot could be had for a $2.50 filing fee — $2.00 to the treasury, 50 cents to the clerk — good for thirty days, in which $50 of improvements had to be made or the fee lapsed. Patrick Hanlon was appointed the first village marshal in January 1893, and, as the book puts it, “so law and order began on this frontier.”

The first three ordinances tell you what a frontier village worried about: No. 1 regulated the sale of malt, spirituous and vinous liquors; No. 2 defined nuisances and their abatement; No. 3 prohibited livestock running on the streets. The first liquor licences went to the Sedivy brothers, Frank and Joseph, and to J. I. Shurts. Sidewalks came in May 1893 — two-inch planks, not less than eight feet wide, built by the street commissioner and charged to the lot owner.

Why Fourth Street is crooked. The town’s main street sits half a block off the section line, and the reason is personal: “When the village was surveyed and streets platted, Mr. Lynch would not allow Fourth Street to be on the section line as he did not want the road going north of town to be so close to his home.” The other streets in the record are Hoffman, Ponca, Adams, Chestnut, Sampson, Second, Third and Fifth; David Street is named for land David Kalkowski gave in the mid-1980s.

The town kept growing outward. The West and North Additions opened in June 1900; Mary’s, Annie’s and West Additions were annexed in August 1901; McGinitie’s Addition followed in July 1902 because “more land for homes was needed as the area was prospering with the coming of the railroad”; Burkholder’s West Addition came in 1907. B. L. Chambers and his son Boon did the surveying in 1902 for a total of $11.52.

A few firsts, from the book’s own “Did You Know That” list. The Joseph Sedivy family was the first Czech family in the neighbourhood, arriving in May 1890. John Korab homesteaded three miles south in spring 1891 and was the first hardware dealer. Neal Walters opened the first hotel in 1891, and it later burned. Edwin D. Korab was the first boy born in Lynch, on 8 June 1893, “at which time there were only three houses in town” — though the same list elsewhere calls Bernice Chambers the first child born in the community, and never reconciles the two.

The Railroad, 1902–1978

“Railroad Days at Lynch,” by David Kalkowski, is the most carefully researched chapter in the book, and it starts with the railroads that never arrived. Butte businessman Az Perry spent years promoting lines under a succession of names — the Nebraska and Northern, the Atkinson and Northern, the Dakota Nebraska and Southern, the Atkinson and Niobrara River Railway. A whole town, Perry, was platted on the north bank of the Niobrara and by 1900 had “a large number of people and buildings.” Grading was done twice as far as the Niobrara’s south bank. It came to nothing by 1902. The book notes that resistance came partly from locals “unsure of the impact its presence would have on communities not getting a railroad” — a fear that turned out to be exactly right, since the line that did come is what killed Dorsey.

By 1900 John Lynch had money from the village board and a committee of seven businessmen, and was talking to the Fremont, Elkhorn and Missouri Valley. Survey crews walked the ground with him in 1901. In December 1901 the FE&MV called a town meeting and announced the Bonesteel Extension would be built through Lynch, Spencer and Anoka during the summer of 1902.

It happened fast. Crews blasted through chalk bluffs near Niobrara and threw a 900-foot bridge over the Niobrara near its mouth. On 16, 22 and 26 June 1902 the townsites of Anoka, Bristow and Monowi were sold at public auction. On 4 September 1902 the rails reached Lynch: “The frontier appearance of Lynch was dramatically changed now that an eight foot high grade was part of the south part of Lynch’s landscape.” The rest of that month brought side tracks, a water tower over a 29-foot stone-walled well, a coal chute, and a 22 by 100 foot depot with two waiting rooms and a brick platform.

The first passenger train arrived Monday, 8 September 1902, met by the Ladies’ Band, with Jim Rothwell the first passenger to step down. Mary and Anna Lynch had ridden the first engine into the city limits four days earlier. The town celebrated on 10 and 11 September with speeches, two baseball games against Butte, a balloon ascension each day, and dancing day and night at the bowery. John Lynch was President of the Day.

Then came the boom. Lynch was now the gateway to Dakota, and the yards were so busy that “four men working continuously could not relieve the congestion.” When the Rosebud Extension reached Dallas, South Dakota in 1908, and again in the third great land rush of 1911, the C&NW — which had absorbed the FE&MV in 1903 — ran five passenger trains a day plus extras, carrying land seekers who crossed the Missouri at Greenwood and boarded at Lynch. The Presbyterian and Methodist ladies formed sandwich brigades. William Jennings Bryan spoke to about a thousand people at Lynch on 29 May 1908. On ordinary Sunday evenings people simply walked down to the station to meet the train and visit.

The decline took sixty years. The coal chute went in 1916 when the engines converted to oil — and with it, the book notes, went the townspeople’s supply of free winter fuel from the scrap chunks. One of the two passenger trains was cut in 1918. Monowi lost its agent in 1931. Diesels arrived in 1950. The last passenger train ran 14–15 September 1951, over the village board’s written protest. The water tower came down in 1953. In March 1966 the Anoka, Spencer and Bristow depots closed and were served from Lynch; the Lynch depot itself closed and was sold in September 1970.

The last years read like a deathwatch: “Train service decreased from two per week to one every two months. Wrecks, embargoes, and speeds less than 5 MPH were common. Weeds in the summer caused two engines to get stuck pulling less than 20 cars and front end loaders were used to clear large snow banks in the winter.” The C&NW applied to abandon the 172.4-mile Winner line in April 1974; the ICC’s final order came on 19 May 1978. By then Creighton and Winner were the only depots left, and Monowi and Bonesteel the only section men.

Whiskey Creek and the Floods

Lynch sits at the junction of Whiskey Creek and Ponca Creek, ten miles from the eastern edge of Boyd County, with Sunshine Bottom and the Missouri ten miles north and the Niobrara five miles south. The creek that gave the town its dugout post office also repeatedly wrecked it.

May 1932 was the worst. Three separate chapters record it. The village minutes: “The Whiskey Creek bridge washed out in the big flood in May. This same flood claimed the lives of Mr. and Mrs. Joe Clinch. Much damage was done to the homes, streets, and other property.” A bridge half a mile west on Ponca Creek washed out and lodged against the railroad bridge; the town was given it, recovered it and rebuilt it, the labour costing $31. The agriculture chapter dates the storm to 25 May and adds that Lynch had lost its last bank — the Farmers State Bank — that January, so the town met the flood with no bank at all. The railroad chapter says simply: “The flood of 1932 kept 225 men busy.” The footbridge across Whiskey Creek at Fourth Street, built for $75 on 6 June 1916, went in that flood and was never replaced.

Two cautions about the Clinch deaths. The book gives the names and nothing else — no first names beyond “Joe,” no location beyond “Whiskey Creek flood waters in Lynch,” and no account of how the bodies were found. The often-repeated detail about a house washed off its foundation is not in this book. And the alumni roll lists a Joe Clinch in the class of 1934, two years after the flood, alongside several other Clinches — so there were at least two men of that name in the community, and the book never sorts them out.

March 1960 brought the other great flood, caused by a heavy snowpack meeting temperatures of 60 degrees day and night. Street repairs alone ran over $2,500. On the railroad it took out five miles of track between Spencer and Verdel, needing ten weeks, 5,000 new ties and 321 carloads of gravel — and it is the flood in which foreman Peter Chvala was stranded on the Niobrara River bridge and lifted off by helicopter.

On the 1916 flood. It is widely cited, but the Centennial book records no flood in 1916. The only 1916 date in a flood context is the building of the Whiskey Creek footbridge on 6 June. It is possible that “June 6, 1916 to May 1932” — the bridge’s life — has been read somewhere as two flood dates.

Main Street and Business Life

The book counts the town’s businesses at intervals, which makes an unusually clear economic graph. 1894: 21 business places. 1897: the population “up to 200 people.” 1913: near 800 people, five churches, seven real estate agents — the high-water mark. 1967: 46 businesses at the Diamond Jubilee. 1991–92: 41 at the Centennial. The Q125 book counted 54 in 2017.

The mill, the dam and the bath house were the town’s lost industrial anchor, and the chapter about them contains the only named land transaction with Ponca individuals anywhere in the book: Vac Tomek and Alois Wina, pioneer businessmen from Verdigre, “purchased the land upon which the mill, mill race, dam, and artesian wells would be located from Sacred Sun and her husband, William Bear.”

The first dam was sod and brush — furrows four inches deep and a foot wide, hauled by team and laid in courses with brush between, twelve feet wide at the base and six at the top. The mill was finished in 1895 and its flour sold as “Queen of the Blue.” When Ponca Creek proved too weak to turn it, Tomek and Wina drilled for water in the autumn of 1896, striking four strata and, at 712 feet, a four-foot vein of good coal. That water came up at about 80 degrees — warm enough to heat the bath house built north of the well.

In 1899, wanting electric light as well, they drilled again and hit the real artesian flow at 759 feet. They called it the Gusher: at its best 3,000 gallons a minute, thrown twenty feet into the air. The mill could now run eighteen hours a day instead of six. And below the dam there was a sight nobody who saw it forgot — “a sea of foam which at times reached 100 yards down Ponca Creek, was up to twenty feet deep, and reached to the top banisters of the bridge.”

It ended quickly. S. E. Looker took over mill, light plant and bath house in 1910; all three closed in 1911. Tomek bought them back in 1913 and put in a gas engine. In October 1915 a fire started in the basement near the engine room and destroyed the mill and the bath house. Neither was rebuilt.

Hotels came and went: Neal Walters’s of 1891, the first, which burned; the Oxford; the Schrier; the Serk; Derickson’s; the Walden rooming house that became the town’s first hospital. The best documented is the Kloche Hotel, built in 1907, two and a half storeys of brick over a full basement, and razed in 1990 when it had gone too far to save. The saloon corner has been licensed continuously since 1897, running through John Sedlacek’s building to the Double K Bar of today.

The Banks

Lynch went through four banks in fifty years, and lost two of them inside seven months.

The Bank of Lynch, the first, was robbed in 1928 and went into liquidation in July 1931, closed by the state “due to low deposits and bad loans.” The Farmers State Bank outlasted it by six months. Its end is the strangest passage in the book, and the book simply leaves it hanging:

“On the morning of June 22, 1931 news spread through the community that robbers had knocked out Mr. Melsha at 7:45 A.M. and stole $2,000 in currency. Shortly after reporting to work the next morning, June 23rd, Cashier Rosicky heard two gunshots at the back of the bank and found Mr. Melsha lying on the floor. On July 3, 1931, information became available that led to a search of the bank’s vault and recovery of the money. The exact date of this bank’s failure was not found.”

The book never says Melsha died — though the same chapter notes he served “until his death in 1931” — never calls the robbery staged, and never explains how the money came to be in the bank’s own vault. The Farmers State Bank closed its doors in January 1932, four months before the flood.

A third attempt, the Lynch Co-op Credit Association, opened in August 1935; in 1938 its manager was charged with embezzlement and forgery, and liquidation took effect on 3 March 1941. From 1931 to 1934 and again from 1939 to 1946, Lynch had no bank at all, and the village deposited its money with the county treasurer or with the Nebraska State Bank of Bristow. That bank — managed by Launce Warner Gibson, who had closed it for reorganisation on 9 March 1932 and reopened it that June with $15,000 of capital stock — opened a Lynch office on 24 November 1946. It is the ancestor of the Nebraska State Bank of Bristow & Lynch, which sponsored the Q125 book seventy years later.

Churches

The denominational picture kept changing. In 1913 there were five congregations — Catholic, Free Methodist, Presbyterian, Methodist Episcopal, and German Lutherans without a building. By 1925 there were three. In 1946–47 there were four: Wesleyan Methodist, Catholic, Seventh-day Adventist, Church of God. In 1991 there were again four: Assumption B.V.M., United Methodist, Wesleyan and Christ Lutheran, with the Seventh-day Adventists alongside. Neither the Free Methodists nor the Church of God ever gets a chapter; each is named once and never explained.

Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary began as a mission — “a branch mission from Creighton, then Verdigre and lastly Spencer.” Many of the settlers who came in after the land opening were Czech Catholics. The first church was built in 1899–1900 with lumber hauled from Running Water, South Dakota, by Rev. Vaclav Kroupa, who built the Catholic churches at Spencer, Butte and Baker as well. It stood just east of what became the depot site — so when the railroad arrived in 1902, the whole church was moved on horse-drawn rollers to a spot near the schoolhouse. A rectory followed in 1918, and with it the announcement that services would now be held every Sunday and that an instruction class in Bohemian would be offered. The present brick church and rectory were dedicated in 1960, on ground donated by the Benedictine Sisters, and the old church was taken down. The building fund had been started in the 1940s under the name “God’s Acre.”

A caution on the priest list. The book prints an unbroken succession from 1892 to 1991, but it contains genuine problems of its own making: Rev. Vincent Opava’s dates (1898–1900) overlap Kroupa’s (1899–1908), two names appear twice and out of order, one is mangled past recovery, and no priest is listed for 1889–92 or 1922–23. The book also dates the Homestead Act to 1890 in this chapter — it is 1862; 1890 was the land opening, and the agriculture chapter gets it right.

The Presbyterians ran from 1897 to 1945 and formally dissolved in 1955. The Methodists were listed in conference minutes from 1890 to 1896 simply as the “Reservation Mission — to be supplied,” which is as good a description of the early religious situation as anything. Their lots at Third and Adams were deeded by the village board in June 1893 for $2.00 each, and the church still stands there.

Schools

The village board gave District 36 four lots and $1,000 in March 1893. The first school was a frame building — though here the book contradicts itself, the village minutes saying it went up on the donated lots and the schools chapter saying that site “was not used” and the building went up on Hoffman and Second instead.

The first brick school came in 1901–02 at the west end of Hoffman Street: two storeys, eight rooms, each heated by its own stove. “Water was carried from a spring northwest of the school house. A water bucket and common dipper was used. Toilet facilities were ‘out back.’” The grades were added one at a time — tenth in 1906, eleventh in 1908, twelfth in 1915 — and on 18 December 1908 the state superintendent notified the board that Lynch was an accredited high school, “an honor to be ranked with the best in the state.”

The second brick school, built 1920–22 and still in use at the Centennial, cost $47,373 to a Sioux City firm, not counting heating, plumbing and lighting; the bond passed with only eighteen votes against. While it went up, classes met in rented buildings around town, including the old Rhode Meat Market. It had a basketball court in the basement and an assembly room with a stage, where class plays were rehearsed before being performed downtown at the I.O.O.F. hall — and where “some of the play cast names were written high in the walls back stage.”

A Smith-Hughes shop building went up in 1939 with W.P.A. labour. A gymnasium and auditorium followed in 1960–61, seating a thousand for basketball and 1,500 for a concert; the bond passed 220 to 50. A shop, kitchen and library addition came in 1973 on a $69,000 bond, and three elementary classrooms were built over the old gymnasium. In 1974 Dr. and Mrs. William Becker gave the running track in memory of their son Bill.

Enrolment tracks the town. 1913: 243 students, eleven grades, seven teachers. 1934: 114 in the high school, the largest in the county. 1968: twenty teachers, thirteen support staff, 52 courses. Madlen Peklo’s two grades held 42 children in 1937–38 and ten in 1956 — one teacher’s career as a demographic record.

From Mineral Springs to the Niobrara Valley Hospital

Healthcare is the largest single subject in the Centennial book, and the town has a claim it repeats at every opportunity: “Lynch is proud of the fact that it is the smallest town in the state of Nebraska to have an acute care hospital.”

Dr. Guy Bentley Ira is the central figure. He came to Lynch in the autumn of 1898 from Newburn, Illinois — to hunt, attended a woman who fell gravely ill, and decided to stay. By the time his effects arrived from Illinois he was already “snowed under” with work. There was no drug store, so medicine had to be fetched from Niobrara. He owned the first automobile in town, “a two cylinder Holman with a rope drive and a top speed of 20 MPH”; he served in the First World War with his father covering his practice; and he retired in January 1949 having delivered over 2,000 babies, dying in 1961 at 87. Of the 1890s he remembered that “Saturdays brought horse races and two or three fights to town.”

The hospital began as a spa. In early 1919, on the strength of the artesian wells south of town — whose water “was equal to the water at Hot Springs, S. D.” — Fr. F. B. Tomanek and a group of businessmen set out to build a sanitarium. $7,000 was subscribed in two days. The testimonial that sold it was Nelson Easthouse of Bristow, brought in on a stretcher after specialists had sent him home to die, who “after a few months left here unaided by crutches.”

While the building went up, the cooperative bought the Walden rooming house as an interim hospital, and Sacred Heart Hospital opened and was dedicated on Sunday, 30 November 1919, in the care of the Sisters of St. Benedict. The first patient came from Monowi; by Thursday there were five. An X-ray machine arrived in April 1920.

It failed within four years. In early 1924 Fr. John O’Flynn persuaded the Missionary Benedictine Sisters of Raeville to reopen it, and that May the Sisters bought it outright. Five young German sisters — Sr. M. Fortunata, Sr. M. Rosamunda, Sr. M. Ubalda, Sr. M. Cornelia and Sr. M. Hermengilda — ran it, and the book is clear about what that meant: “These women did nursing, cooking, raised vegetables and fruit, tended cows and chickens and did much manual labor to make ends meet.” In the 1930s “few people could afford to pay for medical care… some paid both hospital and doctor’s bills with farm produce.” In 1948 the Sisters recorded 123 live births.

For six years Lynch had two hospitals at once. From 1923 to 1929 Dr. R. E. Kriz bought the Kloche Hotel and ran the Lynch General Hospital there with Dr. Ira, giving a town of well under a thousand people two banks, two hospitals and five doctors. Dr. and Mrs. Kriz later built and donated the town swimming pool, wanting, as the book puts it, “to give something back to the community and children for all the years they worked and lived here.”

The fight of 1968–71 is the best civic story in the book. In January 1968 the state told Sister Herma that Sacred Heart failed the fire code and would close. Remodelling was not feasible, “so the community became involved.” A Tri-County hospital district was formed across all of Boyd and parts of Holt and Knox to allow tax funding — and promptly challenged in court by landowners inside it. In January 1970 the licence was refused outright and the Sisters were given thirty days to appeal.

On 14 January 1970 Governor Norbert Tiemann brokered a compromise between state officials and about twenty Boyd County residents. The state held the 25-bed building unsafe; the local side agreed it was, but argued “that the area surrounding Lynch would lose its medical personnel if the hospital were to close and would suffer a serious economic loss.” A conditional licence was granted.

Then comes the sentence the town has been quoting ever since: “And so without a certificate of need, the community resorted to a little Yankee ingenuity and began a fund drive to build a $350,000 hospital. Door to door canvassing, bowling roll offs, suppers and a donation of $22,000 by the Benedictine Sisters brought the total of $148,000 by February 15, 1970.” A development corporation raised roughly $160,000 in donations and secured a Small Business loan on the strength of it. Construction started in September 1970. Sacred Heart closed and the 39-room Niobrara Valley Hospital opened on 15 September 1971, with the Sisters staying on to administer and help staff it.

Two dates in this chapter cannot both be right. Dr. Kriz’s death is given as both 1947 and 1957 — 1957 is correct. And the new clinic’s open house is dated 4 September 1971 while being described as “the same day” as the hospital dedication of the 15th. The book also reports the hospital’s size variously as 24, 25, 30 and 39 beds or rooms at different dates; some of that is real change over time and some is not.

Water, Light and Telephone

The village put its first bond to a vote on municipal electric light in 1918: 82 ballots cast, 62 for, 10 against, 10 not voting — a useful check on the claim that the town held near 800 people five years earlier. A transmission bond followed in 1923. The C&NW contracted for village water in September 1915, and from that November water was sold through meters at 15 cents per 1,000 gallons, with overflow from the west reservoir at five cents.

The telephone story is the most tangled and the most revealing, because it ends with a small town owning its own network. Early lines were consolidated by the Pickering family in 1912 and sold to the Binkerds, who extended service to Monowi and Redbird. Ordinance 84, in the mid-1920s, granted a twenty-year franchise to the Lynch Telephone Company, privately owned by Elizabeth Sinkbeil. By the 1950s the network covered most of the Lynch trade area “but the old magneto system was out-dated and dial service was needed.”

So on 21 July 1955 the Boyd County Telephone Corporation was incorporated by men from four towns — Grafton Franklin and Albert Peed of Verdel, Thomas J. Courtney Jr. and Aldon Zink of Lynch, Reo Ludemann and John Davis of Naper, Frank Carsten of Redbird. Financed through the REA, it built automatic dial equipment for 680 subscribers with its main office at Lynch, then bought up its neighbours one after another: the Home Telephone Co. of Lynch, the Verdel Community Telephone Co. and the Farm and Home Telephone Co. at Naper, all in 1956, then Applecreek at Redbird, Dorsey, Springview in Keya Paha County, the Mills and Burton systems, and finally Johnstown, west of Ainsworth. It survives as Three River Telco.

Street oiling began in 1956–57, and “dust free streets became a reality in June 1959” when part of the town was armour coated for the first time — thereafter an annual summer event. The town took over the maintenance of the TV booster in 1959–60, the tower having been built by George Hajek as a community club project; cable arrived when Vision Electronics was granted a franchise on 8 June 1988.

Lodges, Bands and Clubs

For a town of a few hundred people, Lynch carried an extraordinary amount of organised social life. Modern Woodmen Camp 3030 was chartered on 4 June 1895, with John Lynch as consul and J. C. Hoffman as banker — the earliest dated organisation in town after the village board itself. The Czech fraternal lodge ZCBJ Lipany #56 followed on 12 February 1899 and built a hall at the south end of Fourth Street; it was still meeting at the Centennial, with Fishers, Hajeks, Micaneks and Placeks among its members descended from charter members, and it hosted the Nebraska state convention in 1990.

The I.O.O.F. Hall was dedicated in April 1912 with an opera house on the ground floor and the lodge above. Its Grand Opening Ball on 7 June 1912 had music from a five-piece band, supper at midnight, and tickets at a dollar — ladies free. The building served as the town’s theatre, dance hall and meeting room for sixty years and was torn down in 1977. The Rebekahs chartered in 1906, the Royal Neighbors in 1906, the Masons in 1922 and the Eastern Star in 1921; the Masons and the Eastern Star both merged with Spencer in April 1982, which is its own kind of population statistic.

Bands were everywhere. A brass band formed in January 1898. Mrs. Pearsall’s band played the first passenger train into town in 1902. Dr. George Ira’s band of 24 musicians, in dark blue serge with red braid, took third place at Ak-Sar-Ben in October 1914. After them came the Binkerd Band, the Lynch Concert Band of 1921, the Lynch Jazz Baby’s Saxophone Orchestra, Pee Wee’s Blues Chasers in 1923, Ray and His Razzy Hi-Five, the Hard Time Orchestra, Mel’s Mighty Muldoons, the Ponca Valley Ramblers and the Sunshine Bottom Band.

Chautauqua came for five days in July 1912 and again in July 1917, the latter on the theme of “Patriotism, Americanism and Happiness.” The suffragists were among the town’s three clubs in 1913, and in March 1917 the Presbyterian women took the cause to the opera house: “Songs and stump speeches were lively. If women are given the vote soon, Lynch can furnish plenty of able candidates for most any office.”

The Lynch Community Hall was accepted by the board on 6 March 1978 — built on land given by American Legion Post #228, “financed and built with donations of land, money, and labor. No government funds or tax money was used in its construction.” Its closing line in the book is the town in one sentence: “Now we can say with pride as we look at the new building, ‘We did it. It is good. Our Community is in good hands.’”

“Hang Out in Lynch”: the 1972 Award

On 27 October 1972 Lynch took first place in Class II (population 301–800) at the Nebraska Community Improvement Program awards in Lincoln, along with an honourable mention for downtown improvement and a $450 prize. It had competed against a record 185 communities.

What it had done in a single year is worth listing, because it is a portrait of a small town deciding not to decline quietly. Encouraged by LeRoy and Kathy Purviance, the town adopted a Colonial theme with uniform Williamsburg-style store front signs — designed by Kathy Purviance and cut, routed, painted and varnished by the high school industrial arts class, more than forty of them. The Farm and Ranch Committee put up matching signs pointing to farms and ranches in the area. Flower pots went on the light poles, planted with red petunias; schoolchildren bought shrubs with their own money and planted them by the school auditorium. The invitation to the state was simply “Hang Out in Lynch.”

The inventory the town presented was: “a new, modern, completely staffed 30-bed hospital; a weekly newspaper; an industry; a public swimming pool; a senior citizen home; a spruced-up main street complete with refurbished store fronts and uniform signs.” Governor J. J. Exon, speaking at the banquet, called the winners the new “PEP” in Nebraska’s Good Life — “People Encouraging People and Progress Energizing People” — and said of towns like Lynch: “Few communities have done so much with so few to make their town a better place to live.” The victory celebration was held in the school gym on 14 November 1972.

There is an irony in the list, and it is worth naming. The newspaper was already gone. The Herald-Enterprise had published its last issue in July 1971; the Tri-County Times ran only from April 1972 to July 1974. By the time the certificate was framed, one of the six things it celebrated no longer existed. Two years later, in 1974, the state added a certificate of achievement naming Lynch an All-Nebraska Community for its airport, health services, solid waste practices, law enforcement, waste water systems and water supply.

How Many People Lived Here

The Centennial book contains no census table. There is no population chapter and no decade-by-decade series — only figures scattered through other chapters, most of them impressionistic. Taken together they still tell the story clearly enough.

  • June 1893 — “only three houses in town” at the birth of Edwin D. Korab
  • 1894 — 21 business places
  • 1897 — “the town population was up to 200 people”
  • May 1908 — about 1,000 people heard William Jennings Bryan speak
  • 1913 — “the town population was near 800”; 243 students in eleven grades with seven teachers; five churches; seven real estate agents; the Odd Fellows lodge alone had 116 members. The book’s peak.
  • 1918 — 82 votes cast in the electric light bond election
  • 1934 — 114 high school students, the largest enrolment in the county
  • 1967 — 46 businesses; 345 at the Diamond Jubilee alumni banquet
  • 1972 — “its 400 citizens”; entered in the 301–800 population class
  • 1976 — 482 at the alumni banquet, the largest ever held
  • 1990 — 287 at the census, “down about 90 from 1980”
  • 1991–92 — 41 businesses at the Centennial
  • 2017 — 54 businesses at the Quasquicentennial

The shape is the familiar one for a railroad town in this country: a fast climb to a peak around 1913, a long plateau through the wars, and a steady contraction after the passenger trains stopped in 1951 and the line was abandoned in 1978. What is less familiar is how hard the town worked against it — building a hospital by door-to-door canvassing without a certificate of need, putting up a community hall on donated labour with no public money, and owning its own telephone company.

Further reading: the Lynch Centennial book, Lynch, Nebraska 1892 to 1992, and the Lynch Quasquicentennial book of 2017, both produced locally; and the Diamond Jubilee book of 1967 that preceded them. For the surrounding country see Boyd County and the neighbouring towns of Monowi, Bristow, Spencer, Naper, Butte, Gross, Anoka and Verdel.