The Railroad Town: Scottsbluff Founded 1900

The city of Scottsbluff owes its existence to a land company and a railroad, which is true of a great many western cities and tells you something about how the American West was built. In eighteen ninety-nine, the Lincoln Land Company, a subsidiary of the Burlington Railroad, purchased land from the McClenahan family on the north bank of the North Platte River and laid out a town site. The following year, the Burlington extended its tracks into the new settlement.

The timing mattered. Gering had been established in eighteen eighty-seven on the south bank, twelve years earlier, and was already the county seat of Scotts Bluff County. But Scottsbluff had something Gering lacked: a railroad. The Burlington used an old boxcar as its first station, a temporary solution that suited a town that was anything but temporary. Businesses began moving north from Gering almost immediately. The commercial center of the Panhandle was shifting.

The next decade brought the decisive change. In nineteen ten, the Great Western Sugar Company opened a beet sugar factory in Scottsbluff, one of the largest in the region. The factory had an initial capacity of more than a thousand tons of beets per day. Suddenly the city had not just a railroad but an anchor industry, a reason for farmers to grow beets and for workers to move to town. Scottsbluff grew quickly into the region's commercial hub.

By the mid-twentieth century, Scottsbluff was the largest city in the Nebraska Panhandle, a designation it still holds. The population today is just over fifteen thousand, modest by national standards but substantial for a semi-arid corner of the High Plains that received its first permanent settler within living memory of the Oregon Trail. The trail landmarks and the railroad depot are about five miles apart, and between them lies the full arc of this valley's transformation.