Dobytown

Moses Henry Sydenham, born in London in 1835, came to the United States in 1856 and settled at Fort Kearny as a freighter. He first published the Kearney Herald in 1862 and later The Central Star. When the fort closed in 1871 he opened a store and post office in Kearney City. A late-1860s movement had proposed a more central national capital, and Sydenham used The Central Star to promote the empty military reservation as its site. He died at Kearney on February 3, 1907. The Dobytown site entered the National Register in December 1974.

What the plaque says

Dobytown Following the 1848 establishment of Fort Kearny two miles east of here and the later expansion of overland commerce and emigration, the small commercial center of Kearney City was established here in 1859. The town's more common name, Dobytown, was derived from the resemblance of its twelve to fifteen earthen buildings to adobe structures. Dobytown itself developed in response to the thousands of soldiers, freighters and travelers whose "needs" could not be met within the fort. Gambling, liquor and disreputable men and women were its principal attractions. One of the town's most famous visitors, General William Tecumseh Sherman described the horrible whiskey he was served here as "tanglefoot." However, in addition to its notorious functions, Dobytown also served as the major outfitting point west of the Missouri River, the center of frontier transportation from 1860 to 1866, a Pony Express station and the first county seat of Kearney County. The completion of the Union Pacific Railroad in 1869 reduced the flow of travel by the fort until finally in 1871 it was abandoned, sounding the death knell of Dobytown, a pioneer frontier town. Kearney County Historical Society Nebraska State Historical Society

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fort Kearny State Historical Park — 2.0 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 — 8.6 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

• Fort Kearny — 2.1 mi
• The Great Platte River Road — 2.2 mi
• Historic Kearney — 3.8 mi
• The Great Plains — 4.5 mi