Choice

From 1942, an Art Deco style gas station in North Platte, Nebraska (a town we passed through last fall).  According to the caption at Shorpy, the ten pumps offered a choice of Distillate, Mobilgas, Diesel Fuel, Kerosene, Hi-Lite, Ethyl and Metro.  You can see more detail here.  Shorpy is a remarkable photo archive of America from the late 19th century through mid-century 20th, which I like browsing through every few weeks.

Sandford Hall

Just returned from Tampa where we visited my 97 year old father-in-law.  While there we got on to the subject of how much he used to love dancing.

As a teenager, growing up in depression-era Alliance, Nebraska, his mother insisted he learn how to dance.  His instructor was the daughter of the local banker.  On Saturday afternoons he would go to their house and for 25 cents she would give him a lesson.

He told us how in the late 1930s he and his buddies would drive two hours to a dance hall on Saturday night and then two hours home after midnight.  Mentioning that he'd heard all the Big Bands play he lamented that the dance hall was probably long gone.

Turns out that after asking him some details on location, we were able, thanks to the miracle of the internet, to find the dance hall and learned to our surprise it is still standing! 

Sandford Hall in Mitchell, Nebraska is located at the Scotts Bluff County Fairgrounds and been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1997.

Sandford Hall was built in 1934, replacing the Mitchell Dance Hall Pavilion which burned down in January of that year.  1934 was a very tough year in the Nebraska Panhandle; not only was the Depression in full swing but it was the first year of the Dust Bowl sweeping across the Great Plains.   The Panhandle was big, lonely country.  Take Connecticut, Rhode Island and Massachusetts, west of Worcester, and then remove 4.9 million of the 5 million inhabitants in the area and you've got the Panhandle, with its biggest towns in 1940 being Scottsbluff (12,000) and Alliance (6,000).  In 2019 the Panhandle's population is down to about 85,000.

Thankfully, JL Sandford, one of the owners of the First National Bank in Mitchell, was able to arrange a line of credit to finance the new building (and have it named after him!).  The dance floor in the new building was made of hardwood and measured 120'x50'.

And just as my father in law remembered, many of the famous big bands played there, hosted by the American Legion, including Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, Gene Krupa, Harry James, Artie Shaw, and Lawrence Welk.  In those days the bands toured nationally by bus.  There was no interstate highway system so traveling took much longer and Mitchell and Scotts Bluff was a natural overnight stop between Denver and Omaha.  Mitchell's population was only 2,000 but the bands often drew more than 1,000 people to their shows as folks like my father in law and his friends would drive hours to get there.

Today, the recently renovated hall is still used for events ranging from dog shows to weddings.

Sheridan County Finally

(from PDN Photo of the Day)

The December 8, 2013 edition of the New York Times Magazine carried a story entitled "America At Its Plainest" with the subheading:

"The very middle of the country is gorgeous from the air - and a very hard place on the ground.  So what makes people stay?"

It tells the story of the land and people of Sheridan County in Nebraska's Western Panhandle.  Sheridan County is just north of the town of Alliance in Box Butte County, which THC and family has visited several times and greatly enjoyed and reported on in the Carhenge post. Sheridan County runs north all the way to the South Dakota state line and the Pine Ridge Sioux Reservation.

The family of THC's father-in-law settled in Sheridan County in the late 19th century, lured by the promise of the Homestead Act; if you farmed a 160 acre section for 5 years you were granted the property.  It was a tough life as the land was not nearly as productive as the lands of Iowa, Illinois and Indiana from where they came and the weather, particularly the winters, was brutal, but they stuck it out, even through the Dust Bowl of the 1930s.  The county seat of Rushville, featured in the story, was where my father-in-law was born in the only hospital in the area.

Sheridan County is half of the size of Connecticut and its current population is only 5,469 or about 2 people per square mile.  The population peaked at 10,793 in 1930 just before it was hit by the Depression and the Dust Bowl.

A couple of quotes from the locals:

"I've heard people say 'Gee, there's nothing out here'.  What does that mean?  There's no Walmart.  No McDonald's?  That means there's nothing?"

"I think there are a lot of creative people out here.  Our kids would play with spark plugs, sticks in the ground.  I think you have to have a certain amount of boredom to create.  One of our sons paints; another son does welding.  People here create things from what is around them.  The openness and the distance between people inspires possibility."

You can read the article online here (with a different title) and see a remarkable photo essay here.
(From PDN Photo of the Day)

Carhenge

Fantastic news - According to the AP and AZFamily.com the town of Alliance, Nebraska is expected to accept Carhenge as a gift and will maintain the monument ensuring its preservation for future generations!

Say, what??


Our family visited Carhenge three times over the years and it was a wonderful opportunity to share with our children the mystic vibes emanating from a bunch of old cars standing guard upon the prairie.

Carhenge is located just outside of Alliance to which you might reasonably ask - where in the world is Alliance?  Well, it is next to Nowhere.  More precisely it's in the middle of the Nebraska panhandle about an hour north of Scottsbluff and the Oregon Trail, not too far from the Wyoming border and about a five hour drive from the Denver Airport(assuming the timing belt on your rental car doesn't give out halfway there as happened to THC).

Alliance is a town of about 9,000 folks and it's the county seat of Box Butte County with a large Burlington Northern rail yard as the economic engine for the area.   It's a clean, friendly town with a surprising amount of trees for a community on the high prairie.
(Theatre where we saw X-Files movie the 1st night it was released - oh, what we went through to get there on time)

According to local legend the origins of Carhenge lay with a local family of wizards (well, actually farmers), the Reinders, who came up with the idea of a replica of Stonehenge built with cars during a long and boisterous family gathering one evening.                                                                 (Comparison of Carhenge and Stonehenge from Wikipedia).
What gained my admiration was not that they came up with the idea but that when they awoke (presumably) sober the next morning they actually decided to go ahead and build the thing!

When it was built in the 1980s, not all the townspeople were thrilled with the new monument but by the time we first visited in 1992 it had become grudgingly accepted and as its popularity and global renown continued to grow (it now draws 75-80,000 visitors a year) so did local acceptance.

So what were we doing in Alliance in the first place?  Mrs THC's grandmother lived on the outskirts on a ranch or in the town for most of her life (and it was a long life, lasting from 1899 to 2001) and her dad grew up there.  It was a treat for our family to visit her and for our children to hear first-hand about the way life on the prairie had changed over the course of a century (she said the telephone was the most significant change because it ended the loneliness of being on the ranch).   And on her 100th birthday the town of Alliance held a parade in her honor!

So, if you're driving I-80 cross-country take a little detour and visit Alliance and Carhenge and if you're driving up from Denver you can break up the trek by stopping about halfway there at the mothership store of Cabelas in Sidney, Nebraska - take a tour through the photo gallery to whet your appettite.