Atwood: The Town That Almost Ran the County

Atwood was founded in eighteen eighty-five. They named the community after John Atwood, a Unitarian minister. The settlement grew during an unusually wet run of years in the mid-eighteen eighties, when the high plains of Logan County seemed hospitable to homesteaders and crops actually came in.

When Logan County was formally created in eighteen eighty-seven, local tradition says Atwood bid to become the county seat, laid a courthouse foundation, and lost the vote to Sterling, then reused the concrete for a school.

By the early nineteen hundreds, sugar beet farming transformed the entire region. A factory in Sterling processed beets from fields all across the county, and Atwood farmers joined in. The community has stayed small and agricultural ever since, the kind of place where losing a courthouse vote turned into a school.