Webster County, 1871-1971

The courthouse behind this marker is the county's third home. Garber's dugout came first, then in 1878 a frame courthouse with the jail in its basement, paid for by the Burlington in exchange for forgiveness of taxes it owed. The board chose William F. Gernandt of Omaha as architect in October 1913, but a 1914 state Supreme Court ruling on county levies stopped spending until voters approved a four-mill levy that April. The cornerstone went down July 30, 1914. A 1981 survey names it the setting for the immigrant trials in Cather's One of Ours.

What the plaque says

1871 Webster County 1971 On April 10, 1871, Acting Governor William James issued a proclamation calling for the organization of Webster County, with officials to be elected nine days later. The dugout of Silas Garber, later to serve as Nebraska's governor, was the polling place and forty-five votes were cast. A portion of Garber's claim, future Red Cloud, was voted the county seat. When the first settlers of the county had arrived the previous year, the Republican Valley was the center of the West's great buffalo ranges, still traversed by Indians while on their tribal hunts. Within a very few years, however, those times were gone, and, with the arrival of the railroad in 1879, Webster County was rapidly settled by thousands of homesteaders, ending the frontier era. Webster County is part of a prosperous mixed- farming region, with numerous irrigated farms, while the rolling divide country has provided rich lands for grazing. The faith of the pioneers, that Webster County would prove to be a wealthy, agricultural home, is proven by the surrounding countryside. Webster County Commissioners Nebraska State Historical Society

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• National Willa Cather Center — steps away
  The restored Moon Block on Red Cloud's Webster Street, home of the Willa Cather Foundation, with the town she grew up in and wrote about laid out around it.
• Willa Cather Memorial Prairie — 6.0 mi
  Six hundred and twelve acres of never-plowed mixed-grass prairie south of Red Cloud, once Kitkehahki Pawnee country, named for the writer who said the grass was the country.
• Home on the Range Cabin — 27 mi
  Dr. Brewster Higley's 1872 homestead cabin on West Beaver Creek in Smith County, where he wrote the poem that became Home on the Range, kept on its ground by a farm couple who would not sell it.

More markers nearby

• Grace Episcopal Church — steps away
• Cather Childhood Home — 0.2 mi
• Red Cloud, 1871-1971 — 0.3 mi
• St. Juliana Falconieri Catholic Church — 0.7 mi