Ghost towns of Nebraska: Echoes of a forgotten frontier

Every village, town and city in Nebraska had the same humble roots -- ambitious settlers and big dreams.

As the state was settled, moving from southeast to northwest, new communities sprang out of the prairie. While those that remain range from a sole resident (Monowi) to hundreds of thousands (Lincoln and Omaha), hundreds failed to take root and withered.

German settlers from New York found looking for new beginnings following the bank panic of 1857 discovered abundant cheap land along the Missouri River a few miles upriver of the town of Rulo.

Only one of Nebraska's 93 counties is named for a woman -- and its initial county seat carried her name, too.

Before Deshler became an early industrial powerhouse, there was Friedensau.

As central and western Nebraska were settled by the first permanent residents in the late 1800s, many oppressed groups -- including blacks and Jews -- found a home on the prairie where they lived and worked alongside white settlers.

The Jamaica name lives on in Lancaster County, long after the town dubbed that by its first settlers disappeared to history.

With much of Brown County's population along present-day U.S. 20, the sparsely populated areas in the southern half of this sprawling Sandhills county often had to get creative to get things done.

The long-gone town of Lee Park has generated more than its fair share of confusion.

Founded by the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad in 1889, the small station of Marsland -- named after Thomas Marsland, the Lincoln man who was the railroad's general freight agent -- was platted in northwest Nebraska.

The town of Martha is no more, but its post office has returned home after a long journey from Holt County brought it to Lincoln for a brief stay.

U.S. soldiers and a group of pioneers, primarily from Scandinavia, teamed up to build a stockade in southern Nebraska near the Republican River in 1870. The land had, until shortly beforehand, been prime hunting grounds fiercely contested by the Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes.

The name "Meridian" still means something in Jefferson County as the name of the school district based in Daykin. But the school was far from the first entity in the county with that moniker.

In an otherwise arid stretch of Nebraska's Panhandle, natural springs in a long stretch between Lodgepole Creek and the North Platte River served as an oasis. And, long before other communities in the western part of the state were even dreamed up, Mud Springs was surveyed in 1856 and constructed with its first sod buildings in 1859.

Omaha began as Nebraska's territorial capital, and Lincoln later replaced it in that role.

In many counties, towns initially declared county seats failed to hold onto that distinction. Saline County saw its first two fade into obscurity.

By way of Sweden, Illinois and the Civil War battlefield in Tennessee that cost him an arm, John Swenson settled in northwestern Buffalo County in 1874.

Every village, town and city in Nebraska had the same humble roots -- ambitious settlers and big dreams.