History of Inman, Nebraska
Long before the railroad gave it a name, the ground where Inman sits was simply a bend in the Elkhorn River where a young man from Wisconsin had the good sense to build his cabin on high ground — or thought he had. In 1871, Bill Inman and his father set out from Sauk County, Wisconsin, in a covered wagon with a friend, H. H. McEvony, to look over the newly surveyed land along the upper Elkhorn. McEvony pushed on another eight miles to a spot near what would become O'Neill, but Bill Inman liked what he saw west of the river bend and staked his claim there. His father went home to spread the word that the country was worth settling; Bill stayed behind to build.
Two years later, in July 1873, Inman's cabin became a landmark for the next wave of settlers. McEvony had returned to Wisconsin, gathered a colony of twenty-two neighbors and relations — the Proutys, the Thompsons, the Bitneys, the Sanfords — and led five wagons and a trailing herd of livestock back across the plains, hoping to reach "Bill Inman's cabin" by the Fourth of July. They arrived a week late, on July 13, and found their friend in the middle of an unplanned move: a spring flood had driven him out of his riverbank cabin, and he'd spent days dismantling it log by log and hauling it to higher ground just before the Wisconsin colonists rolled in. The travelers pitched their tents beyond the high-water mark and pressed on to found their own settlement nearby, but Inman's flooded-out cabin site, a few miles west of today's village, had already earned a place in the county's origin story — one told in the same breath as the founding of Ewing and O'Neill.
Bill Inman's name attached itself to more than a homestead. When Holt County organized in 1876, W. H. Inman was named one of its first special county clerks, serving alongside the original board of commissioners. A year later, on May 10, 1877, he applied for a post office at his own home, to be called Inman's Grove — there was, as the county history notes, "no town of Inman" yet, just thirty-five scattered families relying on a twice-weekly mail route between Norfolk and O'Neill City. For a few years mail for the area was actually picked up across the river at William Harte's ranch, a stopping point on the Omaha–to–Black Hills freight line. It wasn't until 1881, when the railroad building up the Elkhorn Valley laid its tracks and platted a townsite on the north side of the line, that the post office application dropped "Grove" from its name, moved into the new town, and Inman, the place, began to take shape. The Harte office closed that September, its patrons folded into the new Inman list. Over the next century the office would pass through the hands of twenty-three postmasters — housed at various times in a dry-goods box of pigeonholes, the back of the general store, the McGraw building, and eventually the old Inman State Bank building — a small but telling measure of how long the town had been quietly serving its neighborhood.
That neighborhood had a rough and colorful edge in its earliest years. Doc Middleton, the well-known horse thief who ranged across the Elkhorn country, was remembered in "an old Inman history" as a man who, "though he rustled horses, visited many homesteads throughout the valley and his kindness and courtesies were told by many people." Vigilante justice was a real threat in the same years: one local story, preserved by Harvey Tompkins in his memoir "Footprints on the Prairie," tells of young Leon Tompkins racing to reach Inman by ten o'clock one night, one step ahead of a band of "Vigs" convinced he was riding a stolen horse. He made it, ate supper at his mother's table while the riders inspected his team, and was let go once they satisfied themselves the horses weren't the ones they wanted — a reminder, the old-timers said, that in that era horse theft could be treated more seriously than homicide.
Faith arrived with the settlers. By 1883, the Reverend Bartley Blain, superintendent of the region's Methodist circuit, had organized the northern section of Holt County into seven charges, and Inman was named as one of them, alongside Ewing, Atkinson, Stuart and several smaller neighborhoods — evidence that the settlement, though still young, was already considered a hub worth a circuit rider's regular attention.
The town's hardest test came a few years later, in the great blizzard of January 12, 1888 — the storm remembered across the plains as the "Schoolchildren's Blizzard" for how many teachers and pupils it caught outdoors when a mild afternoon turned murderous within minutes. Holt County's own account of that day is the story of Etta Shattuck, a schoolteacher who sent her pupils safely home when she grew uneasy about the weather, then lost her own bearings in the whiteout while trying to reach shelter herself. She burrowed into a haystack for warmth but couldn't get her legs far enough into the hay to protect them, and when she was found, days later, her legs were frozen through. Surgeons in Seward amputated both, and she died a few weeks afterward. Hers was one of only a handful of Holt County deaths in a blizzard that killed teachers and children by the dozens across the Nebraska prairie, and the county history counts her among "three young women school teachers" from the state who lost their lives in it.
By the turn of the century Inman had grown into the trading hub for a wide stretch of country to its south. Its position on what was by then the Chicago and Northwestern line made it the natural supply point for the isolated farms of the South Fork valley and for the little town of Chambers, which had no rail connection of its own. A rough trail — remembered by longtime residents as "troublesome" — wound through the sandhills between the two towns, crossing five bridges and any number of boggy meadows. Farmers hauling baled hay to Inman's storage yards left before dawn, four horses hitched abreast, and hoped to be "in town and unloaded by noon." Inman's three livery barns, its hotel run by the Conard family, and its blacksmith and harness shops (Charlie Fowler, Ambrose Babcock, Stubby Clark, John P. Mansenar, and others are all remembered by name) did steady business off that hay trade, and Archibald "Arch" Tompkins — born, fittingly, on the Fourth of July — became known for hauling in hay by the ton after his own livery barn burned, then decorating his buggy with small American flags every Independence Day and thanking the whole town at the close of each celebration, as if the party were being thrown in his honor.
Inman supported its own newspapers almost from the start, an unusual feat for so small a place: the Inman Review began publishing in 1883 (before relocating to O'Neill in 1890), followed by the Inman Index in 1884, the Inman News in 1892 under publishers D. L. Pond and a Mr. Leidy, and the Inman Leader in 1914. The town's school produced its first graduating class in 1894, was remodeled into a four-room building in 1907, absorbed two consolidating rural districts in 1918, burned to the ground on New Year's Day, 1935, and was rebuilt on the same site — with longtime custodian Arthur Renner remembered fondly by generations of students who passed through it. On the ball field, Inman fielded a baseball team good enough to carry on a fierce rivalry with O'Neill, and in 1911 Professor Brinkmeyer organized the town's first basketball team, which played its games outdoors against Page, O'Neill, Ewing and Clearwater and came away with the Holt County championship — a game reportedly watched, that year, by Nebraska's own governor, Chester Aldrich. The town's young people also organized themselves, in 1895, into a self-styled "Association of Hooligans," renting the Opera House for an athletic club complete with trapeze rings and a wrestling mat; membership required "taking a licking" from the school principal, and the group eventually reformed itself, more or less, into a square-dance band and amateur theatrical troupe.
Fire was the recurring threat every frontier town lived with. In April 1908 a spreading prairie fire, whipped up from a burning straw stack north of O'Neill, raced southeast toward Inman and Page with such speed that the depot agent wired Norfolk for an emergency train in case the town needed to be evacuated; the fire was finally stopped by the Elkhorn River and the railroad right-of-way before it reached the buildings, though a neighboring farmer was badly burned trying to outrun it with a plow team. Inman sent its share of young men off to both World Wars, and the county's roll of the dead includes Sgt. John M. Gallagher and T/Sgt. Laddie "Ladd" Carey, both of Inman, killed in action — names still remembered on the county's war memorial rolls.
Inman never grew into a city; it settled instead into the role it has held for well over a century, as a small rail-line village serving the farms and ranches of the Elkhorn valley. Its saddle club, organized in 1971, still gathers monthly for trail rides and parades, much as its baseball and basketball teams once did. Today's village, home to fewer than a hundred residents, sits astride U.S. Highways 20 and 275 about eight miles from O'Neill, with a volunteer fire department, a community church, and a small-town pub carrying on the sociable tradition of the old Opera House and livery-barn gatherings. The bend in the river where Bill Inman moved his flooded cabin log by log in 1873 is long since grown over, but the town that eventually took his name still marks the spot where the Elkhorn Valley's settlers first found a reliable place to call home.