The Lee and Gottliebe Fritz House, located at 132 North Oak in Gordon, Nebraska, is a historic house that was built in 1909. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) in 2003. The listing included a garage, older than the house itself, as another contributing building.
In its NRHP nomination, it was deemed significant as “a distinctive example of a significant type of construction in Gordon, Nebraska, namely … a Dutch Colonial Revival residence.” It was noted that Dutch Colonial Revival is “extremely rare…in this part of Nebraska.” In fact it is apparently the only example in Sheridan County. And also it was also deemed significant for association with Lee Fritz, “a leading Sheridan County citizen”.

Organized in 1885, Sheridan County named Rushville as its county seat in 1888. The county initially rented office space. In February 1904 the county board received a petition calling for a special tax to build a courthouse. Sheridan County officials built as costly and elaborate a courthouse as they could afford; it was completed in 1904.

The one-story, false-front building listed on the National Register of Historic Places, was constructed by Dave Gourley in 1914. The opera house has a raked floor and retains the original opera chairs. A wooden floor found in the basement was purportedly used for dances and roller skating. The opera house was later used for motion pictures and was known as the Plains Theater.

During World War II the Japanese built some nine thousand hydrogen-filled, paper balloons to carry small bombs to North America, hoping to set fires and inflict casualties. The first was launched November 3, 1944. The balloons rose to about 30,000 feet, where winds aloft transported them across the Pacific Ocean. On February 22, 1945, Kenneth Hamilton, living on a nearby ranch, observed a balloon floating eastward. It looked like “an orange ball with the sun shining on it. . . . As we were watching, it turned into a cloud of smoke and went to the ground.” The balloons carried timing devices to release the bombs and then destroy the envelope. Alliance Army Air Field officials recovered a valve and pieces of shroud lines where the balloon came down. Parts of five balloon bombs were recovered in Nebraska from a total of 285 balloon bomb incidents reported across North America. Although the balloon bombs proved ineffective as military weapons, they caused six fatalities and a few minor fires in the United States. Only after the war was their story revealed.

This is the country of Mari Sandoz–historian, novelist, teacher–who brought its history and its people to life in her many books, articles and stories. She was born in Sheridan County, Nebraska. Although she lived much of her life in the East, she is buried here in her own West. Mari Sandoz was first famed for Old Jules (1935), the story of her father and other settlers who came to the upper Niobrara region in the late nineteenth century. Her greatest achievement is the series of six related books on life as it developed with Indian and white men in the trans-Missouri country: The Beaver Men, Crazy Horse, Cheyenne Autumn, The Buffalo Hunters, The Cattlemen and Old Jules. In these and a dozen other volumes she presented the drama of man on the Great Plains more completely, accurately and vividly than anyone before her had done. Mari Sandoz was internationally known as a chronicler of the West and as an expert on Indian history. Her own aim was to understand all of life by understanding this one part of it: how man shaped the Plains country.

Not many settlers were in the area before 1884. Judge Tucker, U.S. Commissioner at Valentine, convinced the Rev. John Scamahorn of Sullivan, Indiana, that northwest Nebraska was “a paradise for agriculture development” while in attendance at the Louisville Exposition in 1882. The next year, Scamahorn and a few friends came out to look it over. He returned home and organized a colony. In the winter of 1884, he and 104 sturdy folks journeyed to rail’s end at Valentine, then on west by means of ox drawn wagons. They set up their tents beside the “Lone Willow”, the only tree of any size in the area, near the present site of Gordon. A nine-trunked old willow tree still stands as a landmark to their campsite. The good reverend conducted church services and using a shoe box for stamps, set up the “postal service”.

The city of Rushville began as a settlement called Rush Valley, two miles north of its present location, in 1884. Buffalo grass pastures west of the Sandhills provided good grazing, but were too short for hay. The natural meadows along Rush Creek induced settlement in the area. Two stores a mile apart were established in the valley, with the postoffice in the south store. When the Fremont, Elkhorn, and Missouri Valley Railroad churned westward across Sheridan County in 1885, the tracks missed the established community. Rush Valley merchants were among the first to purchase lots from the railroad-controlled Pioneer Townsite Company, build, and move their goods to the new town of Rushville located on the railroad. The village of Rushville was incorporated on October 9, 1885. The first trustees were Bruhn, Mosler, McEachron, Enderly, and Meservey. We are indebted to area individuals and groups for many benefits we enjoy. It is to these former citizens who had the vision to see beyond their now into the future that this park and its wall of history are dedicated.

About ten miles north of Hay Springs are the sites of Spotted Tail Agency and Camp Sheridan. Named for Brule Sioux Chief Spotted Tail, the agency was built in 1874 to supply treaty payments, including food, clothing, weapons, and utensils, under the terms of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty. The army established Camp Sheridan nearby to protect the agency. A similar arrangement prevailed for the Ogalala Sioux at Red Cloud Agency and Camp Robinson forty miles west. Spotted Tail Agency was generally quiet and peaceful throughout the Indian War of 1876-77. Crazy Horse surrendered there on September 4, 1877, after fleeing Red Cloud Agency. He was stabbed to death the next evening while being imprisoned at Camp Robinson, but his parents returned his body to Camp Sheridan for burial. On October 29, 1877, Spotted Tail’s Brules were moved to present South Dakota. In 1878 they occupied the Rosebud Agency, where they live today. Camp Sheridan, with a peak garrison of seven companies of soldiers, was abandoned on May 1, 1881.

Spade Ranch

Spade Ranch headquarters is a National Register of Historic Places site. In Ellsworth are the business offices (built c. 1890) and home (built 1902) of cattleman Bartlett Richards (1862-1911), a Vermont native. Richards, brothers DeForest and Jarvis, Will Comstock, Charles Jameson, and others began assembling the Spade about 1888. By 1900 its range comprised some 500,000 acres, principally in the most rugged Sandhill areas of Sheridan and Cherry counties. Much of the land was in public domain subject to homesteading. Farmers who tried to cultivate Sandhill homesteads usually failed, and in the 1890s the Spade illegally fenced the almost uninhabited land, drilled wells, introduced Hereford cattle, constructed trails, and built telephone lines to ranches and towns. Spade acreage shrank after 1905, when Richards pleaded guilty to fencing government land. After unsuccessful federal court appeals from a 1906 land-conspiracy conviction, Richards was imprisoned for one year at Hastings, where he died, aged 49. Today the core of the Spade is owned by the Bixbys, associates of Richards since 1908. That the ranges remain cattle country today attests to the vision of early Sandhill ranchers.

Antioch NE

For a few years, the Antioch vicinity was one of the most important potash-producing regions in the nation. Antioch grew from a small village to a town of about 2,000. When the First World War broke out, the United States was cut off from European sources of Potash, which was a component of fertilizer used in the cotton belt. Two University of Nebraska graduates in chemistry developed a method for separating potash from the alkaline lakes of the Nebraska Sand Hills. Large-scale production began in 1916. The potash-producing brine was pumped from the lakes to reduction plants near the railroads. By the spring of 1918, five plants were in operation in this vicinity. Nebraska potash was used in the manufacture of fertilizer, epsom salts, soda, and other products. With the end of the war, importation of foreign potash resumed. Because French and German potash could be produced more cheaply than the Nebraska product, the Nebraska potash boom collapsed. The last Antioch plant closed in 1921. Today, the ruins of reduction plants and pumping stations bear mute testimony to the activity which once made Antioch a major potash production center.

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