Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
October 1970 | Volume 21, Issue 6
Authors:
Historic Era:
Historic Theme:
Subject:
October 1970 | Volume 21, Issue 6
It is almost unheard of to find a town in Nebraska that has a past; it is sometimes rather difficult to find one that has a present, though all of them have, or think they have, a future. A country cares very little about its early history and traditions until it has had a great many trials and disappointments, until the first feverish impetus of its growth has been checked and it settles down into that quiet, steady course of honest labor and honest gain, which is the only honest way of living. Then it has time to look back on whatever was beautiful or brave in its history, and begins to appreciate the talent and worth that it overlooked or pushed aside in its frenzied hurry to be great. Nebraska has not reached the retrospective age as yet, and in the western part of the state, at least, there are few people who know anything about the sleepy little town on the Missouri where the beginnings of Nebraska history were made.
Brownville is built in a little horseshoe-shaped guldi. Behind and on either side of it rise the high, wooded bluffs and in front of it flows the yellow river. Across the river run the bluffs, with intervals of green meadow land, and back of the town, over the ridge of the hills, lie the rich orchards and fruit farms for which Nemaha County is noted. The site looks out over four states, across the river Missouri and Iowa, on this side Nebraska and Kansas. The town is built back into the little ravines, and the dusty roads, which the inhabitants still respectfully call “streets,” run up the wooded ravines and across the hills. It does not take one long to see that the town has been what it is not. Here and there all over those stately hills are handsome residences gone to rack and ruin, terraces plowed up in cornfields and sloping lawns grown up in wheat and sunflowers.