On March 27, 1879, George G. Meade Post 19, Grand Army of the Republic, Department of Nebraska, was founded in Sutton by twenty former Union soldiers. The G.A.R. was a national fraternal organization created to provide for the welfare of Union veterans of the Civil War, their widows and orphans, and to keep alive memories of wartime sacrifices. The G.A.R. held annual encampments and reunions, organized Memorial Day ceremonies, and was active in politics.
By 1890, 448 Union veterans lived in Clay County. In 1894 the Union Soldiers' Monument and Memorial Association of Sutton was formed to erect a monument to veterans. The association petitioned the government for surplus cannon and received two 24-pounder flank howitzers cast by Cyrus Alger and Company of Boston in 1863. The howitzers arrived from Fort Montgomery, N.Y., in 1900. In 1909, a granite base was laid that included the names of area Civil War veterans, but the monument was never finished. In 2001 a bronze statue of a Civil War soldier, commissioned and paid for by community members, completed the monument.
]]>The first permanent settler in the town of Sutton was Luther French, who arrived in 1870. He and his seven children lived near here in a dugout on the bank of School Creek. This dugout had a tunnel to the creek bank; the inside entrance could be concealed by a crude cupboard. In the event of an Indian attack, the children were instructed to take cover in the tunnel. Apparently, Indians never bothered the family. In 1871 the French homestead was laid out as a townsite and named for Sutton, Massachusetts. Soon after its founding, the town found itself engaged in conflict with the Burlington and Missouri Railroad. Sutton wished to have a depot and offered land for the construction of facilities. Because the title to the Sutton land was not clear, the railroad located its depot 4-1/2 miles from Sutton and laid out a townsite there. By 1873, the railroad had decided to relocate the depot in Sutton. This area was hard hit by the grasshopper plague of 1874. Sutton became a distribution center for federal, state and private aid. Without this aid, many settlers might not have survived the following winter.
]]>Harvard Army Air Field, located two miles northeast, was one of eleven army air forces training fields in Nebraska during World War II. The 1,759-acre base included runways, hangars, barracks, and fuel and munitions storage. Construction began in September 1942, and the airfield was activated in December. The coming of several thousand military personnel and civilian workers caused an acute housing shortage and stressed other local services. The 447th Bombardment Group (B-17s) and the 484th Bombardment Group (B-24s) were the first to train at Harvard. Later, the 505th, 501st, 45th, 376th, and 476th Bombardment Groups trained here in B-29s. The first two groups from Harvard were sent to Europe. Two of the B-29 groups went to the Pacific. Harvard was proud to help win the war and support the brave young men who risked their lives defending the United States. Lifelong friendships developed, and several servicemen returned to marry local girls and raise families in Nebraska. On May 20, 1946, Harvard Army Air Field was declared surplus and later transferred to Nebraska for use as a state airfield and for agriculture.
]]>Tracks of the Burlington and Missouri River Railroad reached Harvard on December 20, 1871. The town was surveyed in March 1872 and platted on a section of land pre-empted by Newman W. Brass, George Van Gilder, Elijah J. Stone, and Levi W. Mosher. They sold this land for $500 per quarter section to Charles F. Morse of the Eastern Land Association, a company which developed town sites along the railroad. Harvard was named by a railroad employee to follow Grafton as one of as series of towns on the line christened in alphabetical order. Harvard was incorporated as a Village on July 1, 1873. It became a Second Class City in 1879, and W. J. Turner served as the first Mayor. Because the population was less than 1500, it returned to Village status in 1880, only to become a Second Class City again in 1886. During the 1870's Harvard vied with other towns to become the county seat of Clay County. After several disputed elections, Clay Center was selected as the location of the Courthouse in 1879.
]]>The original Spring Ranche, located two miles south of here on the north side of the Little Blue River, was founded about 1863. James Bainter, the first permanent settler, operated a store and inn for travelers along the Oregon-California Trail. The ranche was burned in 1864 when Lakota Sioux and their allies attacked settlements along the Little Blue. Spring Ranche was later rebuilt.
The village of Spring Ranch dates from 1870 when a post office was established south of the river. A saw mill was in operation a year later. In 1886 the townsite moved across the river, where the St. Joseph and Grand Island Railroad was being built. The village once boasted several businesses and a population of about 100, but few traces remain today.
In 1885 Spring Ranch residents Elizabeth Taylor and her brother Thomas Jones were accused of barn burning and murder. Before they could be tried, they were lynched by a mob on March 15. Taylor and Jones, along with other early settlers, are buried in the Spring Ranch Cemetery.
]]>Edgar lies in the Little Blue River Valley just north of the old Oregon and California trails. The townsite was pre-empted in March 1872 by Henry Gipe with funds provided by the Nebraska Land and Townsite Company. The first postoffice was established in June of that year in a log cabin on the A. J. Ritterbush farm. One month later the St. Joseph and Denver City Railroad completed tracks into the area and laid out the town of Eden, which later became Edgar. The town was surveyed in May 1873. Edgar was incorporated on March 15, 1875. The droughts and grasshopper plagues of the middle 1870s slowed the development of the community temporarily, but by 1880 the population had grown to nearly 600. The 1886 coming of the Nebraska and Colorado Railroad, part of the Burlington system, assisted the community's rise as a manufacturing center. At its height Edgar had a creamery, a brick and tile company, a cannery, and several mills. The farm depression of the 1890s, however, signaled an end of growth for the town. Edgar today is a quiet community and remains a part of the great American agricultural heartland. Although its role as a service center for the area has declined, the people of Edgar carry the proud traditions and the rugged spirit of their pioneer ancestors.
]]>The town of Clay Center was laid out in the summer of 1879. An election on November 4, 1879, confirmed Clay Center as the location for the Clay County seat, following months of heated competition with rivals Sutton and Harvard. W. D. Young erected the first building on the site, a frame structure, which was used as the temporary courthouse. In February, 1887, Clay Center became an incorporated village. Industrial development began in 1903 when M. M. Johnson built a factory to manufacture "Old Trusty" poultry incubators and brooders that were sold nationwide. The factory provided employment for hundreds of local citizens. The Johnson Company established radio station KMMJ in 1925 to promote its products, and the station made Clay Center a well-known and respected name in farm homes throughout the Midwest. Clay Center experienced dramatic change in 1942 when a Naval Ammunition Depot was built just west of town to produce bombs and shells during World War II. This property was later transferred to the U. S. Meat Animal Research Center.
]]>The congregation organized in May 1881, building a church that fall on Oak Street east of the Harvard Courier building. The first service was in March 1882, with consecration by Bishop Robert Clarkson, Missionary District of the Platte. Five persons were confirmed. The church was moved to the southeast corner of Beech Street and Harvard Avenue in 1895. Methodist, Congregational, and Christian Churches once also stood at that intersection. Stained glass windows were given by the P.H. Updike family. St. John's is Harvard's oldest church edifice.
]]>Twenty-two German families from the Russian villages of Worms and Rohrbach arrived in Sutton in September 1873, the first of many German Russians to settle in Nebraska. The immigrants were descendents of ethnic Germans who began colonizing the Volga River and Black Sea regions of Russia beginning in the 1760s at the invitation of Catherine the Great. She promised the Germans land, freedom of religion, exemption from military service, and political autonomy. When Czar Alexander II revoked these privileges in 1871 many Germans living in Russia began emigrating to the United States. The Burlington Railroad built an immigrant house near the Sutton depot to shelter the new arrivals until they could build homes and acquire land, much of which they purchased from the railroad. Throughout the 1870s Sutton remained a destination for German Russians coming to Nebraska. Those who settled here were excellent farmers with a strong work ethic and firmly held religious beliefs. Although German Russian colonies sprang up in other Nebraska communities and throughout the Great Plains, Sutton remains a center of German Russian history and culture.
]]>Harvard's first library in 1885 was a traveling one established in Church's Drugstore, and moved to other buildings until Mayor George H. Thomas appointed a committee in 1914 to contact the Carnegie Foundation. Citizens pledged $3,175.25 and Carnegie gave $6,000 after approving blueprints and the site. Constructed in 1915, the library was formally opened in February 1916. As of December 2010 the library was one of only 26 of Nebraska's 69 Carnegie libraries remaining as a library.
]]>As eight B-17F "Flying Fortresses" returned to Harvard AAF after training exercises on August 28, 1943, three collided. One crash-landed and two were demolished. Fourteen airmen died, including co-pilot Carl Hansen, whose parachute failed. Lieutenants David Rowland, Hayden Hughes, and Sgt. Earl Lynes of Hansen's crew survived. Also killed were Lieutenants John Gimperling, Peter Hirt, Lavere Clegg, Robert Twitchell, and Roy Nunn, Jr.; Sergeants Edward Kulisek, Wilbert Miller, Charles Biondolillo, Harold Lovejoy, Charles Ottinger, Francis Bush, and Richard Burchell; and Cpl. Samuel Landry.
]]>The jail was inadvertently sold to Robert Pinckney, 16, in a delinquent tax sale in 1943. When the city refused to buy back the jail, sparking a legal battle that earned national publicity, Pinckney put the jail up for auction at a West Coast war bond drive. Charlie McCarthy, ventriloquist Edgar Bergen's puppet, "bought" the jail for $10,000 in war bonds and deeded it back to Harvard. Estimated to be over 130 years old, the jail was refurbished in 2008-10.
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