Elm Creek

Elm Creek's first business was feeding train passengers. Samuel Clay Bassett writes that Charles Davis kept the eating house, where the emigrant train stopped twenty minutes for meals, and a saloon. To curb drinking aboard, he and the trainmen refused to sell bottles until the train was about to leave, then handed over jugs of cold tea, and for a mile or more west of the station the roadside was lined with broken jugs and bottles. In November 1870 a deputy sheriff sold 460 cords of wood here at six to nine cents a cord.

What the plaque says

Elm Creek Elm Creek siding was established in August 1866 during construction of the Union Pacific Railroad. The nearby creek provided both water and timber for the railroad's locomotives. By 1872 a school-church building, a saloon-restaurant, a store, and a post office formed the nucleus of a town. The railroad brought settlers to the area, many of whom were Irish emigrants and railroad workers. They acquired homesteads and timber claims from the government or purchased land from the railroad. About 1880 the Union Pacific constructed a depot one mile to the east of the original town and the village soon followed in 1883. Elm Creek was incorporated on January 12, 1887, and boasted a population of 300. In 1906 the village survived a major fire which destroyed fourteen buildings on Front Street. Elm Creek's location in the fertile Platte Valley helped make it an agricultural center for sugar beets, alfalfa, livestock, and corn. In its centennial year of 1987 the population was 862. Elm Creek Centennial Nebraska State Historical Society

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fort Kearny State Historical Park — 20 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.

More markers nearby

• Historic Platte Valley — 4.9 mi
• The Tobin Indian Raid — 6.8 mi
• Kearney-Fort Kearny — 12 mi
• Kearney Cotton Mill — 12 mi