Spade Ranch

The ranch's own store still stands in Ellsworth. W. T. Merrit built it for the Spade about 1898 as business office, supply store and post office. It was sold in 1927, and Lawrence and Hazel Graham ran it from 1928, living upstairs and adding gasoline pumps; Hazel and her son Roy kept it open until 1967. In 1971 Veldon Morgan and his son Wade added two warehouse wings for a western tack and saddle plant with more than 100 employees, which ran until 2000. The Spade Ranch Store joined the National Register on August 30, 2010.

What the plaque says

Spade Ranch Twenty miles northeast of here is Spade Ranch headquarters, a National Register of Historic Places site. In Ellsworth are the business offices (built c. 1890) and home (built 1902) of cattleman Bartlett Richards (1862-1911), a Vermont native. Richards, brothers DeForest and Jarvis, Will Comstock, Charles Jameson, and others began assembling the Spade about 1888. By 1900 its range comprised some 500,000 acres, principally in the most rugged Sandhill areas of Sheridan and Cherry counties. Much of the land was in public domain subject to homesteading. Farmers who tried to cultivate Sandhill homesteads usually failed, and in the 1890s the Spade illegally fenced the almost uninhabited land, drilled wells, introduced Hereford cattle, constructed trails, and built tele- phone lines to ranches and towns. Spade acreage shrank after 1905, when Richards pleaded guilty to fencing government land. After unsuccessful federal court appeals from a 1906 land-conspiracy conviction, Richards was imprisoned for one year at Hastings, where he died, aged 49. Today the core of the Spade is owned by the Bixbys, associates of Richards since 1908. That the ranges remain cattle country today attests to the vision of early Sandhill ranchers. Sandhills Chapter, Daughters of the American Revolution Nebraska State Historical Society

Where it stands

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