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…

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…

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…

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.…

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…

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…

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 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…

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…

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…

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.…

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…