Walker's Ranch

The ranch's post office had its own name. The Kearney County history in Who's Who in Nebraska (1940) places the Keene post office at Walker's Ranch, one mile north and two miles east of Wilcox, and records its move into that village. Wilcox grew up in the 1880s when the Burlington and Missouri River Railroad was extended there. It is named for Henry Wilcox, born in Michigan in 1858, a homesteader admitted to the bar in 1884. About 1886 he bought the 240-acre town site and became cashier of the Bank of Wilcox.

What the plaque says

Walker's Ranch Two miles to the east is the site of Walker's Ranch, an early Kearney County landmark. The ranch was established by Charles Walker in 1872 as a station on the government mail route from Kearney City to the Republican Valley. It consisted of a house, well, and stable large enough for forty horses. In 1873, the buildings were purchased by Deputy U.S. Marshal Daniel B. Ball who homesteaded the quarter-section on which the ranch was located. An interesting episode in the early history of Walker's Ranch was Ball's capture of two men who had reportedly jumped his claim and murdered one of their companions. As settlement increased, the ranch assumed new importance with the establishment there of a post office in 1874 and a store in 1879. The first term of School District 11 commenced at Walker's Ranch in 1877. The following year, the district's first schoolhouse, a sod structure, was built on a site just east of here. To the west was a racetrack constructed by the Wilcox District Fair Association in 1893. No traces of these early landmarks remain.

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.
• Harlan County Lake — 23 mi
  Nebraska's second-largest lake, held behind an Army Corps dam on the Republican between Alma and Republican City, built after the flood of 1935 ran bluff to bluff.
• Rowe Sanctuary — 25 mi
  Audubon's sanctuary on the Platte near Gibbon, where the river's sandbars are kept bare so that sandhill cranes, more than a million in the valley each spring, can roost safely at night.

More markers nearby

• Site of Old Sacramento — 6.5 mi
• Axtell, Nebraska — 7.4 mi
• Funk, Nebraska — 7.7 mi
• First Site of Bethel Lutheran Church and Cemetery — 9.1 mi