Harrop

The dam the Harrops wanted was built after all, fifty-six years after the court ended their district. The Bureau of Reclamation finished Calamus Dam, an earthfill embankment 95 feet high and 7,295 feet long across the Calamus River five and a half miles northwest of Burwell, in 1985, and accepted the work in May 1986. Its Mirdan Canal carries water about fifty miles, and the North Loup Division delivers surface water to some 53,000 acres. In 1990 the dam was renamed for Virginia Dodd Smith, Nebraska's long-serving congresswoman.

What the plaque says

Harrop In 1908 John Harrop, originally from Roca, Nebraska, filed a homestead claim just west of the Calamus River about thirteen miles north of Taylor in Loup County. Harrop acquired 640 acres under the Kinkaid Act of 1904, which had been passed to encourage settlement in the Nebraska Sand Hills. By 1912 Harrop operated a mercantile store and the Harrop post office at his home. In the mid-1920s Harrop and his son Roy, an Omaha attorney, were leaders in organizing the Calamus Irrigation District. This public corporation planned to build a dam on the Calamus River to provide irrigation and promote the growing of crops such as sugar beets. In 1927 Roy Harrop platted and dedicated a townsite named Harrop about one mile south of here, and a few buildings were constructed. Meanwhile opposition to the irrigation project led to a series of court battles and in 1929 the Nebraska Supreme Court dissolved the irrigation district. John Harrop died in 1932, along with his dream for the town and the irrigation project. Today nothing remains of the Harrop townsite. Loup County Historical Society Nebraska State Historical Society

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fort Hartsuff State Historical Park — 30 mi
  A small infantry post of 1874 in the North Loup valley, built of local lime concrete on the raiding road between Lakota and Pawnee country, and kept nearly whole by eighty years of farming.

More markers nearby

• Valleyview — 11 mi
• The Calamus Valley — 18 mi
• The North Loup Project — 18 mi
• Railroad Turntable, 1887-1983 — 23 mi