NE-2: The Sandhills Journey, Grand Island to Alliance
About 277 miles on NE-2 from Grand Island to Alliance: the Stuhr Museum, Butcher's homesteader photographs at Broken Bow, the Middle Loup, the planted forest at Halsey, the Spade's town and the potash ruins at Antioch.
The Route at a Glance
Nebraska Highway 2 crosses the Sandhills beside the railroad the Burlington laid west in the 1880s, now BNSF's. How the dunes hold their water is told at The Sandhills; this is the road through them.
It starts at Grand Island at the Stuhr Museum, where an 1890s railroad town has been put back together, and runs northwest to Broken Bow, where the Custer County Museum keeps nearly 4,000 of Solomon D. Butcher's photographs of homesteaders. Past Anselmo the grass closes in. The Dismal and Middle Loup rivers meet east of Dunning, and the Middle Loup keeps the road company past Halsey and the Nebraska National Forest, Thedford and Mullen.
Beyond Hyannis, Ellsworth was the Spade's town. Bartlett Richards and his partners began assembling the ranch about 1888, and by 1900 it ran on about 500,000 acres, much of it public land they had fenced illegally. Richards pleaded guilty in 1905, was convicted of land conspiracy in 1906 and died serving his year at Hastings, aged 49.
Near Antioch, concrete ruins stand off the road. When the First World War cut off German potash, the price rose from $8 or $10 a ton to more than $150, and plants here pumped brine from the alkaline lakes. Antioch grew to about 2,000 people; the last plant closed in 1921. The drive ends at Alliance, founded by the Burlington in 1888, at Carhenge.
The route runs about 277 miles, five and a half hours without stops, and west of Broken Bow the towns are small and far apart.
The Drive, Stop by Stop
3 stops along the route, in driving order from Grand Island, Nebraska to Alliance, Nebraska.
- 1
- 2
- 3
That's the drive. Take your time, pull over often, and let NE-2: The Sandhills Journey, Grand Island to Alliance do what it does best.
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