ROCK BLUFFS -- Once called the liveliest Missouri River town this side of St. Joseph and a rival to Omaha, Rock Bluffs stumbled over about every obstacle possible to growth, dooming it obscurity.
Today, a one-room schoolhouse that was converted into a museum and the Rock Bluffs Cemetery are all that remain of the town, whose residents feuded with Indians, suffered epidemics of malaria, typhoid and ague, were traumatized by two unsolved murders, helped Nebraska become a state and lost a bid to become the county seat.
A published in The Lincoln Star in 1973 declared: “Everything underscored the message: Rock Bluffs was an ill-fated town from the start.”
Platted in 1856, the town overlooked the Missouri River at the mouth of Rock Creek. It was nestled between King Hill to the south and Queen Hill to the north. Landmarks for river travelers, the hills allegedly got their names from a fable about American Indian lovers who married despite an ongoing feud between their tribes and united the two nations.
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Steamboat travel fueled the town, which had a population of 450 by 1863. Back then, a shave and perfume cost $1.10; passage downriver to St. Joseph was $7.
Settlers ferried across the Missouri and rolled their wagons up Rock Bluffs' main street, where they stopped at mercantile and dry goods stores before continuing west.
By the 1870s, the town had a brick post office, drug store, blacksmith, two steam sawmills, flour mill, brick yard, shoe shop, baseball team -- Rock Bluffs 144, Weeping Water 33 -- and two churches.
Yet its fate was sealed when the Chicago and North Western Railroad bypassed Rock Bluffs, building its Missouri River Railroad bridge at Plattsmouth.
The Louisville Weekly Courier reported that the town's population had fallen to fewer than 50 by 1900.
Then on Aug. 25, 1910, scandal broke when 74-year-old Annette Shera, who owned a store in Plattsmouth, was found shot in the back of the head and robbed. Her murder went unsolved. Twenty-one years later, county surveyor Fred Patterson began telling people he knew who committed the crime.
But before he could finger the culprit, Patterson was shot in the back of the head and died. A grand jury was convened but did not find enough evidence for a conviction, according to a history written by Jim Elworth called "
When Faye Christenham was a little girl, Rock Bluffs consisted of little more than the school, a few houses and a grocery store with a gas pump. Now 78, she lives in Murray, but she was born and raised in Rock Bluffs.
The school closed in 1969 because the community couldn’t find anyone willing to teach there, said Christenham, whose dad was on the school board at the time.
“Who wants to teach nine grades in a one-room schoolhouse without bathrooms?” she asked. “We had toilets outdoors, the boys to the east and girls to the west.”
Sometimes, Christenham said, she thinks the town actually was cursed, as one local legend goes, for how settlers treated Native Americans.
The land belonged to the Otoe before the U.S. government opened the territory to settlement with the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act. The government forcibly resettled the native people. Many starved or died from the harsh conditions, disease and poisoned provisions.
After a showdown in 1869, when white vigilantes captured three Otoe tribe members and 15 ponies, an Indian chief was said to have cursed Rock Bluffs with perpetual suffering.