History of Naper, Nebraska
Naper sits in the far west of Boyd County, close to the South Dakota line. It is a small village with an active historical society of its own — which is fortunate, because the county’s two published local histories say very little about it. This page sets out what is firmly established, and is honest about where the record runs out. Sources: Perkey’s Nebraska Place Names and the Lynch Centennial book, “Lynch, Nebraska 1892 to 1992.”
Contents
- The Man Who Gave Away Forty Acres
- The Early Village
- The Bus and the Telephone
- Naper Today
- What Is Not Known
The Man Who Gave Away Forty Acres
Perkey’s is specific and generous about the town’s namesake: Naper was “named for Ralph Naper, who gave forty acres of his homestead for a town site.”
That deserves a moment. Across Boyd County the usual pattern was a railroad or a townsite company choosing a spot, platting it and selling the lots at auction — that is how Monowi, Bristow and Anoka all came into being in June 1902. Naper came about the other way round: a homesteader gave up two-thirds of a quarter-section so that a town could exist there. The village returned the compliment by taking his name.
The post office was established on 5 March 1894, and the village dates from about 1892 — which makes Naper roughly a decade older than the railroad towns to its east.
The Early Village
Perkey’s gives Naper a peak population of 300, reached in 1910. For context, that put it ahead of Gross at that date and well ahead of Anoka, and made it one of the larger places in the county in its generation.
The Bus and the Telephone
The Lynch Centennial book mentions Naper only twice, and both mentions are about connection to the wider world.
The first is the bus. A passenger service ran from Norfolk up into this country, and “starting in 1938, it ran to Naper, Nebraska in the evening and returned to Norfolk the next morning.” Naper was the end of the line — the bus turned round here. Later the route was extended on into Bonesteel, South Dakota, and in 1956 the service was discontinued altogether.
The second is the telephone. When the Boyd County Telephone Corporation was incorporated in 1955, two of its incorporators were Reo Ludemann and John Davis of Naper. The following year the new company acquired the Farm and Home Telephone Co. at Naper — so the village had been running its own independent exchange until then.
Naper Today
The population has run 105 in 2000, 84 in 2010 and 89 in 2020 — one of the few places in Boyd County to post a gain between censuses. The school is part of Boyd County Public Schools, formed in June 2017; before that it was West Boyd Schools, created by the merger of July 2007.
Since 2003 the Naper Historical Society has published a quarterly, The Naper Paper, circulated to residents, former residents and friends of the town. For a village of under a hundred people to sustain a quarterly journal for more than twenty years is remarkable, and it is much the best available route to Naper’s detailed history.
What Is Not Known
It is worth stating plainly what this page cannot tell you, so that nobody mistakes silence for absence. The county’s two big published histories — the Lynch Centennial and Quasquicentennial books — contain no founding narrative for Naper, no business list, no school history and no church history. Their focus is the east end of the county, and Naper is at the west end.
None of that means the record does not exist. It means it is held locally — in The Naper Paper, in the Naper Historical Society’s files, and in the memories of the people who read them. If you have material on Naper’s history, this page is a good place for it to end up.
Further reading: the history of Lynch, Butte, Spencer, and Boyd County.