Cozad, Nebraska: The Town a Gambler Built, and Fled

John Jackson Cozad was a riverboat gambler and land speculator who spotted the hundredth meridian marker along the Union Pacific Railroad in eighteen seventy-two and decided to build a town on it. He organized an excursion from Ohio, bought the land, and in eighteen seventy-three founded Cozad, Nebraska, naming it after himself. The experiment in town-building went well enough until eighteen eighty-two, when Cozad shot a rancher named Alfred Pearson during a land dispute.

Pearson died. Cozad was cleared of wrongdoing but feared retribution and fled with his family, abandoning not just the town but the family name. One of his sons, Robert Henry Cozad, reinvented himself as Robert Henri and became one of the most influential American painters of the early twentieth century, founder of the Ashcan School.

The town his father named and then abandoned still stands on the hundredth meridian, population just under four thousand.