In 1944, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, known as the G.I. Bill of Rights. This ushered in sweeping changes to America’s colleges and universities by paying for the tuition of World War II veterans…

McCormick Hall opened in 1884. It is named for Cyrus McCormick, inventor of the mechanical reaper, who donated $5,000 to help finance construction of the building. The first building on the Hastings College campus, it was the intellectual,…

Brickmaking in Hastings began in 1878, six years after the town was established. A year later much of the downtown was destroyed by fire in September 1879. Following the fire, the city passed an ordinance requiring future commercial buildings to…

The Central Hastings Historic District began at this site in 1878 when Samuel Alexander, using his 160-acre homestead, created the first northern addition to Hastings. This National Register district physically documents the three major periods of…

In 1893 the Crystal Ice Company dammed a portion of the Little Blue River 1 1/4 miles north of Ayr, creating "Crystal Lake" for harvesting and selling ice. A huge storage and loading facility was built on the nearby Republican Valley branch…

The Kingston Cemetery is located on the hill just west of this marker. Founded in the early 1870s, the cemetery was the final resting place for nearly thirty of Kingston's early settlers. In 1887 the Kingston settlement was moved to the rail…