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by Keith Blackledge

Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you .... for in its welfare you will find your welfare. -
Jeremiah 29:7

That is good advice. We are citizens of a state and nation and of a larger world. But we do most of our living in the city we were sent to, or at least where we live right now. Most of us can do little to change the course of national or international events. But we can all do something to make the place we live better.
I have a fondness for town builders, the individuals who go out of their way to make their town better. There are some in every town, in every era. Sometimes their projects succeed, sometimes they don't. But the effect generally is one of moving forward.

Looking at our town's history, I was struck by how much is revealed in the census figures, decade by decade. Mostly we've moved ahead. Some of it was our own doing, some of it, especially the "down" periods, seemed determined mostly by economic or natural events beyond our control.

There has been much controversy in recent years about whether we should offer incentives to help our town grow. We've always done it. Spending money to attract new investment and jobs has been a part of our town's history from the beginning. I suspect it is part of the history of every town that survives.

Here as examples are a couple of stories from old North Platte newspapers. One called The Independent Era printed this item in its July 30, 1903 edition.

Our local committee that went to Lincoln Monday to present North Platte's claim for the permanent state normal school, returned Wednesday.

They found fourteen competitors for the school, some of them with "stunning" propositions in the way of bonuses to the state in return for the school. For instance, the city of Hastings offers what figures out to be equal to a cash bonus of $131,000....

Kearney, Broken Bow and Ord are thought to be our strongest competitors on account of geographical location, but our committee seems to think that North Platte is still in the list of probabilities. Our offer aggregates $20,000, including the site.

The school went to Kearney. If it had happened differently, our town would be different today and so would Kearney.

We did get something in 1903, and at the time it may have seemed a bigger prize than the state normal school. This story appeared in The Independent Era in August that year.

At a meeting of the citizens last night at the court house a finance committee of eleven members, with H. S. White as chairman, was appointed whose duty it also will be to receive bids, determine on several suitable propositions as sites for the farm, raise such subscription of cash as is deemed necessary and work with the University committee for the location of the farm.

The committee included W. W. Birge, John Bratt and W. H. McDonald, among names some might recognize today. The "state farm" opened in 1904. It is known today as the University of Nebraska West Central Research and Extension Center. Half the money for the original land purchase was donated by local citizens. Then, as now, you seldom get something without some local investment.

I've looked with some envy at what the "normal school," now the University of Nebraska at Kearney has meant to that city. But I'm also grateful to the leaders in our town who worked and raised money to bring the experiment station here. If it had gone elsewhere, we would have missed out on Glenn Viehmeyer's mums, Dale Lindgren's penstemons, Gail Wicks's softball teams and much more.

In every time there are decisions and actions that shape a town's future. And always those decisions and actions depend on leaders with vision and energy and a desire to make a difference. They also depend on leaders willing to take risks and make investments for the long term. And they cannot succeed without some measure of public support and trust. Sometimes we have those things, sometimes we don't.

There are many leaders who made a difference in our town's history. My list would include Mendel Hirschfeld, who raised the funds to make Scout's Rest Ranch a State Historical Park, and who also headed the Mid-Plains Vocational Technical School board in its difficult beginnings when a lesser man might have bailed out. A history of the 20th century in our town would recognize the leadership of Wendell Wood in finding ways to keep that school alive, and even more in building a new hospital that launched a new era in health care for our town.

Telling those stories will require a larger book. Meanwhile, the broad brush strokes of population figures tell quite a story in themselves.

There was no town here until the railroad came in 1866, and not much after the construction crews moved on in 1867. Things moved slowly at first. A town charter was drawn up in September, 1873, but we didn't really get a city government until 1875. The "Panic of 1873" brought on a national depression that lasted through 1878. Our population was listed as 363 in 1880.
Then things started happening. By 1890, North Platte had grown to 3,055 Imagine what an exciting time that must have been! If you ran a store (or a saloon); if you were a carpenter or a banker or a lawyer, there was plenty of business. If you were a town builder, anything seemed possible.
Then the town hit a wall. There was almost no growth between 1890 and 1900. The first five years of that decade were marked by severe drought. A national depression brought on by the Panic of 1893 slowed business everywhere. From a feeling of unbounded optimism about the town's future in the 1880s, there must have been serious doubts during the 1890s.

In the new century, the town took off again. It grew by 31 percent between 1900 and 1910, to 4,793. Then it more than doubled in size between 1910 and 1920, when it hit 10,466. That's more than 5,000 new residents in10 years. Some folks who thought the town was about to die in the 1890s probably worried about it getting too large in the early 1900s.

Lots of things were happening and we can still see traces of some of them. A newspaper story in 1908 celebrated the efforts of Congressman Moses P. Kinkaid who had "engineered through congress" funds of $110,000 for a federal building in North Platte. It was our post office until 1964, then became our junior college in 1965, and the area community college headquarters until 2000. A plan to give it still another life as city offices and community rooms is on the table, but under attack, for decision in the first decade of the 21st century.

The Keith Theater opened in 1908, the Carnegie Library in 1912, the Post Office and Federal Building in 1913. The newspaper described a "massive brick building, two stories in height," completed on Front Street in 1918 for a fire station and city offices. (In more recent years, it was abandoned by the city, condemned and scheduled for demolition before it was renovated for apartments and offices by Larry Steele.)

There must have been a feeling that the future was unlimited. In one year, 1917, voters approved separate bond issues to finish the new Franklin Junior High, build that first City Fire Station, and build a new South River bridge.

The Chamber of Commerce organized private funding to buy land and build an airport in 1921.
Growth continued during the 1920s, so that North Platte was just over 12,000 population in the 1930 census, a 15 percent increase. There had been three decades of strong growth. Surely those were good years to be living here, good years to be building a business or working to build a community.

As the "Roaring Twenties" drew to a close, we were building a new high school and a new hospital. Joe Hirschfeld had started the successful effort to raise funds for the hospital. Then the depression hit and the building stood an empty shell because people couldn't pay their pledges.

Hirschfeld and others didn't give up. Keith Neville was chairman of the group that found a religious order to finish and run St. Mary Hospital, so that it could finally open in 1934. Most people think of Neville as the young man who went to Lincoln as the "Boy Governor" during World War I. But he came home after that one term as governor and played an important role in many town-building enterprises during the 1920s. He was a major figure later in the fight for the power and irrigation development so important to the economy of the entire region today.

Even in the depression years, our town was putting infrastructure in place that would fuel growth in decades to come. In 1935, a dinner at the Pawnee Hotel marked the opening of the last link to be paved on Highway 30, the Lincoln Highway. It was the nation's first hard-surfaced road running from coast to coast and the beginning of North Platte's thriving auto tourism industry. The Jeffers Viaduct carrying that rapidly increasing traffic over the railroad opened in 1937.

But we grew by only 238 in the 30s, and the depression bred a cautious attitude in many civic leaders and institutions that sometimes hampered development later.

Growth began again in the 1940s. Wartime rail traffic was a factor. Native son Bill Jeffers had become president of the Union Pacific in 1937, when we celebrated his rise from call boy to president with a dinner seating 850 at Jeffers Pavilion.

A young woman named Rae Wilson volunteered to organize a canteen to provide a welcome to military personnel from trains stopping at North Platte, and asked Jeffers for permission to use part of the Union Pacific Depot. Our town gained a place in World War II history that would last well into the next century. Volunteers from North Platte and 124 surrounding communities served six million service men and women between 1941 and 1946. The Canteen was remembered in hundreds of letters, magazine articles, television programs and in 2002 in a book by Bob Greene called "Once Upon A Town: The Miracle of the North Platte Canteen." That generated a new round of attention, including a Nebraska Educational Television documentary. "The Canteen Spirit," in 2004.

By the time Jeffers retired in 1946 the plans were forming for construction of the railroad's first hump yard here in 1948. Our population grew by 3,004, more than 24 percent between 1940 and 1950.

The city election of 1951 was one of the major turning points in our history. Publicity about high school boys frequenting the houses of prostitution helped generate support for a group determined to elect a city administration that would end open prostitution and gambling for which the town had long been infamous.