Aurora, Nebraska: Seven Iowans and a County Seat Bet

In March of eighteen seventy-one, seven young men from Chariton, Iowa formed a company with a plan: head west to the newly organized Hamilton County in Nebraska, stake a town, and make it the county seat. David Stone, Darius Wilcox, Robert Miller, and four others made the journey and filed their plat. Stone named the town Aurora as a tribute to his wife, who was a native of Aurora, Illinois.

On June nineteenth, eighteen seventy-one, the name was officially adopted. The county seat designation came in eighteen seventy-six when it moved from Orville City to Aurora, and the Burlington and Missouri River Railroad arrived two years after that, sealing the town's position as the commercial center of the plains county. Today Aurora is the Hamilton County seat with a population of just under five thousand, still anchored by the agricultural economy its Iowa founders bet on.