The Ox-Bow Trail

The ford made the town. Joseph Stambaugh, Saunders County's first settler, landed at Salt Creek Ford on September 6, 1856, and the crossing drew the county's first community, called Saline Ford. Dennis Dean built a mill in 1864, Archibald Wiggins opened the first store in the spring of 1868, and James H. Snell asked the Legislature to merge Saline Ford with Flora City. The new name came from a Mr. Argyle, an admirer of Henry Clay, who had fished up Salt Creek and named the place for Clay's home. Ashland organized on March 4, 1870.

What the plaque says

The Ox-Bow Trail This marker sits astride the Ox-Bow Trail, also known as the Old Fort Kearny or Nebraska City Road. Beginning in the 1840's, this route carried thousands of emigrants and millions of pounds of freight destined for the settlements, mining camps, or military posts of the West. Many travelers were Mormons bound for the Great Salt Lake Valley. The trail, looping north to the Platte from such Missouri River towns as Plattsmouth and Nebraska City, resembled an Ox-Bow, after which it was named. Just west of here was an important ford across Salt Creek, where limestone ledges form a natural low-water bridge. Travel over the trail declined in the mid-1860's with the development of more direct routes from the Missouri to the Central Platte Valley. The water supply for the City of Lincoln comes from wells in the Platte Valley near here. In 1932 this pumping station was built, and a 36-inch water main laid to Lincoln. A treatment plant and an additional 48-inch main were added in the 1950's. Saunders County Historical Society Ashland Chamber of Commerce Nebraska State Historical Society

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Strategic Air Command & Aerospace Museum — 2.5 mi
  Two hangar-sized halls beside I-80 near Ashland holding the bombers and reconnaissance planes of the command that ran America's nuclear force from Offutt, south of Omaha, from 1948 to 1992.
• Nebraska State Capitol — 24 mi
  Bertram Goodhue's 400-foot tower on the prairie, built in four phases from 1922 to 1932 and paid off on completion, home of the only one-house legislature in the country.
• Joslyn Art Museum — 26 mi
  Omaha's free art museum, a 1931 Art Deco memorial with two modern pavilions, and the keeper of Karl Bodmer's watercolors from the upper Missouri in 1833 and 1834.
• The Durham Museum (Omaha Union Station) — 27 mi
  Omaha's 1931 Union Station, Gilbert Stanley Underwood's Art Deco depot for the Union Pacific, closed to trains in 1971 and kept as a city museum with its waiting room intact.

More markers nearby

• Prehistoric Burial Site — 2.3 mi
• The Armour and Company Icehouse — 5.8 mi
• Gretna Fish Hatchery — 5.8 mi
• New Pennsylvania Cemetery — 11 mi