The Haymarket, From Hay Wagons to History
Near Lincoln, Nebraska
The name comes from a market square that dates to Lincoln's earliest years, when the city set aside open ground for a market, bounded by O and P streets and Ninth and Tenth. It was an open-air ground where farmers brought hay and produce, where immigrants camped before moving on, and where livestock changed hands in the muddy middle distance between the new capitol and the Burlington and Missouri River Railroad's tracks.
In eighteen seventy, the Burlington became the first railroad to reach Lincoln. More lines followed over the next thirty years. That convergence of rail lines transformed the western edge of downtown into something more permanent: a wholesale and manufacturing district anchored by the warehouses and depots that fed every general store on the plains. The jobbing trade, as it was called, had three essential building types. Hotels for the traveling salesmen who covered their territories by rail and needed a bed and a bath for the night. Warehouses for the merchandise they sold. And train yards for moving everything in and out.
Between eighteen eighty and nineteen twenty, the Haymarket took the form it still partially wears. The buildings that survive are brick and heavy-timbered, built to last and to hold weight: grain, hardware, dry goods, farm implements. The traveling salesmen's hotels had bars and dining rooms on the ground floor. The upper floors held samples and contracts and men sleeping off long train rides.
When the interstate highway system matured and trucking replaced rail as the primary way to move goods across the plains, the district went quiet. Warehouses that had hummed for decades sat empty. Property values dropped. People who paid attention to old buildings began to pay attention to these.
The Lincoln City Council designated the area the Haymarket Landmark District in nineteen eighty-two. The National Park Service certified it as a National Register Historic District in two thousand fourteen. Today it is a neighborhood of restaurants, galleries, a farmers market, and the arena that replaced the parking lots. The warehouse bones are still there, carrying weight the way they were built to do.
