Phelps County

Phelps Center was a county seat without a courthouse. Voters took the seat from Williamsburg in November 1879, the courthouse was moved there that winter and soon burned, and in 1882 A. T. Andreas found a village of about eighty with two weekly papers, in a county owing about $25,000 with no public buildings. Holdrege, the Burlington's new town named for general manager George W. Holdrege, won a special election in 1884, and citizens took the county records from Phelps Center and hid them for two months. Holdrege's officials took over on January 1, 1885.

What the plaque says

Phelps County The great immigrant roads to the West which followed the Platte River brought the first settlers to this area. Beginning in the late 1850's, these frontiersmen operated stage stations, road ranches, and trading posts. An August attack upon a wagon train in present northwestern Phelps County, known as the Plum Creek Massacre, was the initial incident of the Indian War of 1864. Phelps County was organized on April 23, 1873, with the northern town of Williamsburg being named the county seat. The seat of government was moved to Phelps Center in 1879 and again to Holdrege, its present location, in 1883. Early settlers, lured by government homestead lands and cheap railroad lands, were mainly of Swedish descent. Excellence in education, religion, and agriculture was their goal, as it is today. This area is credited with one of the world's largest underground water supplies. Phelps County is 348,000 acres in size of which 338,300 are farmland. In 1973, the county's centennial year, over 62 per cent of its cropland is watered by 1,041 irrigation wells and over 350 miles of ditches and laterals. Phelps County Historical Society Nebraska State Historical Society

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fort Kearny State Historical Park — 24 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

• Holdrege Silt Loam: The Nebraska State Soil — 1.7 mi
• First Site of Bethel Lutheran Church and Cemetery — 3.5 mi
• Site of Old Sacramento — 5.4 mi
• Atlanta Prisoner-of-War Camp — 6.4 mi