Windlass Hill Pioneer Homestead

To the emigrants who came down it, this slope had plainer names: the steep hill, or the perpendicular hill. It was the main way into Ash Hollow, a canyon some 250 feet deep that History Nebraska calls the largest along the Platte. The wagons had no brakes, and crews let them down on ropes, yet History Nebraska finds no record of anyone dying on the descent. The scars they cut are still visible on the hillside. Robert Stuart, returning east from Astoria, is thought to have been the first white man to see the hollow, decades before the wagons.

What the plaque says

Windlass Hill Pioneer Homestead The stones surrounding this marker are the remains of the homestead dwelling of Reverend Dennis B. Clary, a pioneer Methodist Minister, who received final patent for his homestead May 22, 1899. Mr. Clary was born September 1st, 1822, in Maryland and immigrated to Nebraska in 1885. Using a horse drawn cart fashioned from available materials, he hauled stone to this site for a two room house. For years this was a land mark in Ash Hollow and marked the location of Windlass Hill. It was a popular stopping place for settlers traveling from the North Platte Valley area to the railroad at Big Springs, some twenty miles to the south. The wagon road used at that time is still visible nearby. The Oregon Trail passed here, and the area surrounding the house was used by early travelers to repair damages caused by the hazardous trip down Windlass Hill. This site was used July 29-30, 1967, as the stage setting for the "Ash Hollow Centennial Pageant" when a nearby sod house was reconstructed. Funds from this successful historical event provided this Marker. Ash Hollow Centennial Association Nebraska State Historical Society

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Ash Hollow State Historical Park — 2.1 mi
  The emigrants' spring below Windlass Hill, six miles from the Blue Water Creek camp where Harney's soldiers killed eighty-six Lakota in 1855, and where their belongings came home in 2025.
• Julesburg — 21 mi
  The town that moved four times: a trading post, a stage stop burned in 1865, the wickedest end-of-track town on the Union Pacific, and finally Denver Junction renamed.
• Lake McConaughy and Kingsley Dam — 24 mi
  Nebraska's largest reservoir, 22 miles of North Platte water and white sand beaches behind a 1941 hydraulic-fill dam, built so farms far downstream could water their crops.
• Pilgrim Holiness Church (Baled Hay Church) — 30 mi
  A church raised in 1928 from bales of hand-tied rye straw in treeless Arthur, the oldest known straw-bale church in North America and a survivor of a Sandhills building habit.

More markers nearby

• Ash Hollow — 2.5 mi
• Ash Hollow Geology — 2.6 mi
• The Battle of Blue Water — 6.9 mi
• Phelps Hotel — 14 mi