Macon Area Cameras
About Macon
Macon is an unincorporated community in Franklin County, in south central Nebraska. It sits at about 2,100 feet above sea level. Franklin, the county seat, is roughly seven miles south. Upland lies about eight miles north, Bloomington about eight miles south-west, and Hildreth about ten miles north-west. Macon is not an incorporated village, and no separate census population is published for it. Franklin County also contains a Macon Township.
History
A post office named Macon opened in 1873 and was discontinued in 1955. The name came from Macon, Georgia. One of the early settlers in this locality had come from Macon and named the place after his former home. That account appears in the 1925 survey Nebraska Place Names and is repeated in later reference works.
A note on sources
Documentation for Macon is thin. The post office record, the origin of the name and the community's position in Franklin County are what can be confirmed from published sources. A founding or platting date and a peak population do not appear in the references consulted.
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Macon is a small, historic unincorporated community in Macon Township, in eastern Franklin County. It was settled in the 1870s and had its own post office from 1873 until 1955, when rural mail delivery made small local post offices unnecessary across much of the country. The community is named for Macon, Georgia, the birthplace of one of its early pioneer settlers. Macon has no current ZIP code of its own -- mail delivery in the area now falls under Franklin's 68939 service area -- and no population figures are tracked for it separately today. It remains one of the smallest and least-documented places in Franklin County, a reminder of the many small rural post-office communities that dotted the Nebraska prairie during the homestead era but never grew into incorporated towns.
Macon's story is really the story of a 19th-century rural post office rather than a town in the usual sense -- it never incorporated and has no separately tracked population today. Its lasting presence on the map is a small piece of Franklin County's homestead-era settlement history.