Chappell, Nebraska

Chappell became a town because of a shipping label. When the Union Pacific pushed west across the Nebraska panhandle in eighteen eighty-four, supplies for the construction gangs were crated in Omaha and addressed to the division supervisor, a young Illinois railroader named Charles Henry Chappell. The instructions on every crate read, send this to Chappell.

Workers started calling the siding by that name, and it stuck long enough to appear on the plat when the town was formally laid out in August of eighteen eighty-four. Chappell eventually won a contested county seat election and became the seat of Deuel County, named for a Union Pacific railroad superintendent. Today it sits at the crossroads of Interstate Eighty and US Highway Three Eighty-Five, a quiet High Plains county seat of about eight hundred and fifty people, built on a name that was never meant to be one.