Dix, Nebraska: Dixon Minus One Syllable

Dix is a tiny village in Kimball County in the Nebraska panhandle, and it owes its name to a clerical shortcut. In eighteen eighty-six, Henry Vogler arrived and built a store on land purchased from Margaret Robertson, who had come from Dixon, Illinois. The original plan was to call the new settlement Dixon, but the post office refused: Nebraska already had a Dixon.

So they simply dropped the last syllable. The village became Dix. A Union Pacific siding had been here since the early railroad days, and Dix grew into a small farm and ranch service stop on the High Plains.

Today it is a village of fewer than two hundred people, but its origin story remains one of the more honest in western Nebraska: named by subtraction.