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History of Monowi, Nebraska

History of Monowi, Nebraska

Monowi is known today as the smallest incorporated village in the United States, with one resident. It has a longer story than that, and most of it is told in the Lynch Centennial book, “Lynch, Nebraska 1892 to 1992,” which carries a full Monowi chapter, and in the Lynch Quasquicentennial book of 2017, which devotes eight pages to it. Those two local histories are the source for almost everything below.

For Monowi as it is now, see Elsie Eiler and the story of Monowi, the Monowi Tavern and Rudy’s Library. This page is about how the village got here.

Contents

A Town the Railroad Built

Monowi did not grow up and then get a railroad. The railroad made it. As the Lynch Centennial book puts it: “Monowi came into existence when the railroad came through. The railroad had selected the site for the town. A depot was built and the name ‘Monowi’ put on the sign board. The grade work for the tracks was done with mules and buck scrapers.”

The land came from a settler already there. Frank Vlcan Sr. arrived in Boyd County in 1892, before either Monowi or Lynch had a townsite, and “later sold 40 acres of his farm to start the townsite of Monowi and furnish right-of-way for the railroad.”

The line was the Fremont, Elkhorn and Missouri Valley, building its Bonesteel Extension north-west across Boyd County in 1902; it became part of the Chicago & North Western the following year. Monowi’s townsite lots were sold at public auction on 26 June 1902, a week after Anoka and four days after Bristow. The rails reached Lynch that September.

A date to be careful with. The Monowi chapter of the Centennial book says the town “came into existence in 1901” and that the depot was built in 1901. The railroad chapter of the same book — the better-researched one, which cites newspaper dates throughout — puts the townsite auction in June 1902, and outside sources agree the village was platted in 1902. The two cannot both be right, and the book never reconciles them.

The Name

Monowi was not the town’s first name. Perkey’s Nebraska Place Names records that the post office here was called Alford until 3 July 1902, when the name changed to Monowi. Alford is a family name from this exact ground — Mr. and Mrs. William Alford Sr. appear among the founding members of the Monowi Methodist church the following year. The renaming falls in the same month the townsite went to auction, and Perkey credits the new name to the Pioneer Town Site Company, the same company the church board bought its lots from in 1904. So the name did not rise out of the settlement: it was chosen by a townsite company at the moment the railroad arrived.

Perkey also gives Monowi a peak population of 123, in 1930 — which sits far closer to the published figure of about 150 than to the 420 the church history claims for 1906.

The usual published account says only that Monowi means “flower” in an unidentified Native American language, for the wildflowers growing at the site. The local history is more specific: “Monowi is the Indian name for the ‘Snow on the Mountain’, wild flowers that grew in abundance in the area.”

Snow-on-the-mountain is a real and striking plant of this country — a euphorbia whose upper leaves turn white-edged in late summer, so that a patch of it looks like drifted snow on the hills. The town’s Girl Scout troop later took it as their flower, which suggests the meaning was well understood locally rather than invented afterwards. The book does not identify the language, and neither does anyone else.

Main Street in Its Prime

“At one time,” the book says, “Monowi was a very up and coming town with business places lining both sides of Main Street and was quite thickly populated.” It had its own weekly newspaper, The Monowi News, published by H. L. McCoy, who came over from Creighton and “added much to the business, social and civic life of the new town.”

There were two grain elevators, a lumber yard and a hog market. Levi Brunson ran a livery stable and, by one account, built the first house in town. Draymen hauled freight up from the depot — among them Harry Woodruff with his red dray wagon. The town supported several doctors over the years, including Dr. Keep, Dr. Young and Dr. Vaughn, and a run of blacksmiths: Stendy Laska, said to be the first; Martin Slamslidlo, “better known as ‘Slummy’”; Frank Morvac; Ed Kopke; Joe Ballard; and Claude Lewis.

One detail from the blacksmith shops is too good to lose. Clayton Thomson ran a Phillips 66 station just west of Claude Lewis’s shop and employed Claude’s brother Rob: “The two brothers didn’t get along the best so it made for some very interesting times.”

There were hotels run by the Kovareks and by Mrs. Chris Jorgensen, boarding houses kept by Mrs. Della Lewis and Mrs. Gardener, butcher shops, and a long procession of general stores — Friedans, Marcellus Pravecek, E. C. Mohr, D. D. Beck, F. L. Bates, the Farmers Union, Z. T. Miller, Henry Herman, the L. H. Black store, and others. And there were saloons, many of them, the book listing fourteen keepers by name across the decades and noting that “a good many of these owners also sold gas, fixed tires, and did some mechanical work.” At one time there was a dance hall above one of the saloons, and Rob Lewis ran a pool hall and lunch counter in 1908. The last of that line is the tavern the Eilers took on.

The Depot and the Section Crew

The depot was the town. It was built in 1901 by the Monowi chapter’s reckoning, burned in 1910, and was rebuilt. Its first agent was Elmer Lewis, followed by Ed Coulter, Frank Post, Mrs. George Eiler and finally Mrs. Mike Piklapp. When Monowi lost its own post office building in 1932, the post office simply moved into the depot with its caretaker.

At its height “at least four passenger trains plus numerous freights ran through Monowi enroute from Norfolk, Nebraska to Winner, South Dakota.” Later it was two — one in the morning, one at night — and the mail rode with them. The book asks a question of its own readers: “Does anyone recall the ‘bug?’ It was a diesel with a square front having red and white stripes on it.”

A railroad section crew worked out of Monowi, with a shed for the motor car and a house that was always called the section house. Its foremen ran from Grant Dick through to Pete Chvala, who started on the section in 1923 and retired in 1971 — forty-eight years, and it was Chvala who was stranded on the Niobrara River bridge in the flood of March 1960 and lifted off by helicopter.

A bus from Norfolk to Bonesteel stopped in Monowi from 1938, running up in the evening and back the next morning; that route stopped in 1956. The C&NW closed the Monowi and Verdel depots in 1959 or 1960, and Delbert Nielsen bought the Monowi depot and moved it to his farm, where it became a cattle shed. The line itself was abandoned in 1978.

The Fires

Fire did more to end Monowi than depopulation did, at least at first. The worst came at one in the morning in February 1913, and it took most of the business district at a stroke: the hotel, the hardware store, the post office, the Woodman hall, D. D. Beck’s general merchandise store and residence, and three barns — which, the book notes, accounted for all but one or two buildings on that side of the street. The 1910 depot fire had come three years before it. Summing up the town’s decline, the book puts fire first: “Over the years several fires destroyed numerous business places.”

The Methodist Church

The Methodist church was founded in 1903 with five members, and at first “services were held in the waiting room of the depot” — which says everything about what the railroad meant to this town. Rev. Walker C. Kelley served 1902–03; Rev. Arhendt was appointed in 1906, “at that time the population of Monowi was about 420 persons.” In 1904 the church board bought lots from the Pioneer Town Site Company for $90.00, built a barn on them first, then a parsonage, and finally a church in 1907.

The Monowi Ladies Aid kept its fiftieth anniversary on 20 October 1960, which puts its founding around 1910. Of one of its long-serving members the book says simply: “Mrs. Lena Johnson was the Sunday School superintendent for many years and also taught the young adult class. She gently but firmly led many children on the straight and narrow path.”

Services were discontinued in 1964 and the memberships transferred to the Lynch Methodist church in 1967. The chapter’s last line about the building is the best sentence in it: “The Church still stands, a sweet but sad reminder of the place many received their Christian start in life.”

The School

Monowi’s school was a two-storey frame building, and by the late 1940s it had been condemned. The children were moved into a smaller building beside it — “the little room school house,” as the kids called it — and told to stay away from the old one. They did not. What follows is one of those passages that only a local history book preserves:

“The children were instructed to stay away from the big school house as it was condemned, but it was such a fascinating place. It had a fire escape on the north side. The teacher couldn’t see the fire escape from inside the school. Kids stayed in during recesses and after school for breaking windows out of the old building by throwing rocks. It seems we stayed 1/2 hour for each pane we broke. Some of the boys were pretty good shots and they logged up quite a few hours. Some of the rest couldn’t hit anything, but still stayed in because they were trying.”

The big school was sold in 1949 and torn down. Grade school carried on in the little room until 1961–62, when Velma McDonald taught the last twelve pupils at Monowi and the children began riding the bus to Lynch. McDonald — who also wrote the village-government history in the Centennial book from the Lynch board minutes — is thus both the last teacher in Monowi and the chief historian of the county’s biggest town.

Baseball, and the Iwonom Girl Scouts

The Monowi baseball club of 1910 was serious. “They played to win games and they did just that! They played other teams from Pierce, NE, to Bonesteel, SD. They also played the Greenwood Indians. The Indians would cross the river in row boats and Ora Brunson would bring them to town in three double seated buggies. In 1910, they boarded the train and went to Foster, NE, to play in a tournament. Monowi won all three games.” The team was still going in the 1940s, when the pitcher was John Chvala — “surely many will remember John’s famous speedball.”

The Girl Scout troop of the 1930s and 40s, led by Mrs. Frank Post, named itself “Iwonom” — Monowi spelled backwards — and took the snow-on-the-mountain as its flower. They made stuffed toys for a children’s home, went on nature hikes, and once camped for a week at the Studley Ranch south of town, where the farm girls helped the Johnsons milk the cows and then everyone gathered close around a battery radio for the Major Bowes talk show.

How a Town Becomes One Person

The book is unsentimental about the causes: “Over the years several fires destroyed numerous business places. Faster modes of travel and lack of jobs have helped deplete the population.” Cars let people shop in bigger towns; the passenger trains stopped; the school closed in 1962; the church closed in 1964; the depot went to a farm to hold cattle.

The population figures are worth setting out because they disagree. The Methodist church history puts Monowi at about 420 people in 1906. Published sources give the peak as around 150 in the 1930s. Both cannot be right, and the 1906 figure may well count the surrounding country rather than the village. What is certain is the end of the curve: 2 residents in 2000, Rudy and Elsie Eiler; 1 in 2010, after Rudy’s death in 2004; and 1 in 2020, the census having briefly printed 2 before confirming it as a privacy-protection artefact.

When the Centennial book went to press in 1992 there were three families left — the Eilers, the Brockmanns and Mrs. Agnes Leamons — and one business, the tavern. The chapter ends: “For those who grew up there, it still holds many happy memories of a childhood spent in a much slower and relaxed place of life.”

One more thing on this ground. The book records a house on the Matejcek farm, along the Niobrara south of Monowi, built by Ponca people in 1890 — a reminder that the land the railroad platted in 1902 had been lived on long before the town had a name.

Further reading: the Lynch Centennial book Lynch, Nebraska 1892 to 1992 and the Lynch Quasquicentennial book of 2017, whose Monowi chapter runs to eight pages. See also the history of Lynch and Boyd County.