Blue Mills and Glenwood Park

Glenwood Park's ice belonged to a trade that ran across Nebraska. History Nebraska describes it at Armour's Memphis icehouse: harvest began when the ice was eight inches thick, and the blocks were scored, sawed with horse-drawn saws and poled along an open channel to elevators, then packed in sawdust. A warm December in 1881 set off what the Omaha Daily Bee called a panic among the ice dealers, brewers, butchers and packers. Lincoln's Valley Ice Company began making ice in 1901, but harvested ice stayed cheaper for the railroads and remained common into the 1950s.

What the plaque says

Blue Mills and Glenwood Park In 1881 Sylvester Bearss constructed Blue Mills just east of here on Wood River, so-named for a blue clay outcropping. A 30.5-inch Leffel turbine rated at 30 horsepower ran the mill with water impounded by an earth and brush dam. Fifty barrels of flour could be produced every 24 hours. When the mill was rebuilt after burning in 1892, a concrete dam and steam engine were installed. From about 1908 to 1920 Sylvester's son Guy Bearss owned the mill, which featured "Star Patent" and "Snow Flake" brand flour. Bearss sold the mill to Warren Ewell a few months before it was again destroyed by fire on October 31, 1920. Ewell was convicted of arson; the mill was not rebuilt. Until about 1910 the mill pond and environs was a popular recreation area operated by Charles Nelson and known as Glenwood Park. Ice harvested from the pond was stored in a huge ice house nearby for summertime use in Kearney. In 1944 the land where the mill once stood was acquired by the Lawrence and Violet Richter family. Blue Mill, LLC Nebraska State Historical Society, 2015

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fort Kearny State Historical Park — 8.6 mi
  The 1848 army post on the Platte, built on a strip of Pawnee land bought for $2,000 in goods, where emigrant wagons passed by the thousand and only the cottonwoods outlasted the fort.
• Rowe Sanctuary — 12 mi
  Audubon's sanctuary on the Platte near Gibbon, where the river's sandbars are kept bare so that sandhill cranes, more than a million in the valley each spring, can roost safely at night.

More markers nearby

• University of Nebraska at Kearney — 3.7 mi
• Historic Kearney — 4.7 mi
• Kearney Cotton Mill — 4.8 mi
• The Great Plains — 6.1 mi