Many Nebraska communities lay claim to superlatives such as having the biggest porch swing or baking the world’s largest kolache. Still few can match Kearney’s actual titles of “The Electric City of the Midwest†or “Minneapolis of the West,†let alone being the home of a huge cotton mill and having the second electric street railway system west of the Mississippi River.
At that rate one might even easily understand Kearney’s attempt to woo the capital of Nebraska from Lincoln or accept how Moses Sydenham, once postmaster at Fort Kearny, could realistically propose moving the U.S. capital to Buffalo County, even producing local land and showing how to completely finance moving Washington D.C. to the center of the United States. All of these concepts and ideas do however apply to Kearney.
As early as 1873, following a grasshopper invasion and extended drought, a proposal was made to dig a canal from the Platte River to Kearney for farm irrigation. In 1876, 87 area farmers and businessmen petitioned the Buffalo County commissioners to survey the idea, but when the cost of $58,000 was presented, the canal concept was tabled.
People are also reading…
The Kearney Board of Trade was established in 1881, the canal concept was again broached and later that year another survey ordered. The following March the Kearney Canal & Water Supply Company was incorporated and sold $100,000 worth of stock. $30,000 in bonds were sold and that June construction of the 16-mile canal from the Platte River near Elm Creek was begun.
George W. Frank, originally from Warsaw, New York, moved to Kearney from Corning, Iowa, in the early 1880s. Here, his Frank Improvement Company immediately stepped into the canal project which was mostly completed by 1884 and then totally taken over by Frank and finished in 1885.
Kearney already had a horse-drawn street railway, primarily along Central Avenue, but under Frank, a lake, spillway, and electric generator were constructed. By simply installing electric motors on the horse-drawn cars, Kearney was able to state they had the first electric streetcar system in Nebraska and even the first west of the Mississippi River outside of St. Louis.
Omaha followed with electric streetcars in 1887. The first power plant building was finished in 1886, and a huge cotton mill was announced which would also develop a lake to run turbines and utilize electricity generated by Frank’s new electric company.
By 1890 the electric streetcar lines connected the Kearney suburbs of Kenwood, East Lawn and West Kearney with Central Avenue in Kearney. The power plant also provided electricity for eight arc lights for the city’s use. A new two and a half story, brick powerhouse with a three-story tower, and 3,000 horsepower turbine was completed on the Kearney Lake spillway.
In 1891 a sixth turbine was added, and the Omaha Bee reported the following January that Kearney “enjoys the cheapest and most perfect illumination of any city on the continent … an electric motor street railway that would do credit to any city four times her population (and) an inexhaustible supply of water.â€
The $400,000 cotton mill west of Kearney opened in 1891 with around $300,000 worth of machinery and over 15,000 spindles which, with 450 employees, made it Nebraska’s “biggest manufacturer.â€
The depression of the 1890s at first seemed to bypass Kearney and in 1894 the canal was redredged to a depth of nine feet, which increased the production of electricity and even encouraged economic growth.
By 1901, however, the recession reached Buffalo County, and the great cotton mill which, it turned out, had never had a profitable year, was closed. Also in 1901 the power plant was virtually destroyed when the structure was undercut by a water leak, causing generation to cease for several months.
The canal and power company was then declared bankrupt, with its assets purchased by the Northwestern Heat & Electric Company. The power plant was completely rebuilt in 1922, and after World War II the city of Kearney sought to regain ownership, at one point attempting to condemn it. This plan failed in court leaving electricity production with the Nebraska Public Power District as owner/operator.
In the 1980s the University of Nebraska at Kearney attempted to rebuild and renovate the power plant adjacent to their campus, but the plan was scrapped, and the plant razed in 2008. All above-ground evidence of the cotton mill, which briefly existed as an amusement park, is gone while Kearney Lake is now surrounded by housing development and Kearney Country Club though George Frank’s 1886, $42,000 mansion is extant on the University of Nebraska at Kearney’s West Campus and is occasionally open to the public as a museum.
Historian Jim McKee, who still writes with a fountain pen, invites comments or questions. Write to him in care of the Journal Star or at jim@leebooksellers.com.