Salt, Population Thirty, and the Night Ride to Lincoln

The place that would become the Nebraska state capital had, in the summer of eighteen sixty-seven, a population of thirty people and no particular reason to exist. Its name was Lancaster. Its founders had come not for the grass or the soil but for the salt.

Settlers came to the marshy flats along Salt Creek in the eighteen fifties hoping to extract salt. The salt basins there were real. Companies formed to extract the brine and boil it down into product. For a brief moment, Lancaster County seemed poised to become a manufacturing hub, sitting atop what boosters called a permanent source of wealth. The salt, however, turned out to be far thinner than advertised, and the industry faded once Kansas salt mines took over.

None of that mattered yet in eighteen sixty-seven. Nebraska had just become a state in March of that year, and the new legislature was looking for a capital away from Omaha, which most Nebraskans south of the Platte River viewed as impossibly far and politically hostile. A three-man commission, composed of Governor David Butler, Secretary of State Thomas Kennard, and State Auditor John Gillespie, was dispatched that summer to tour the candidate counties and pick a site.

They selected Lancaster.

An Omaha senator, J. N. H. Patrick, hoping to sink the removal bill, proposed naming the new capital Lincoln, reasoning that legislators who disliked the late president would vote against it. The bill passed anyway.

On December first, eighteen sixty-eight, the first state capitol in Lincoln was completed, and the government moved south from Omaha.

The village of thirty had become the seat of government for a state of more than one hundred twenty thousand people.