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.

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.

3334 State Highway 27 (20 Miles North of Ellsworth)
Ellsworth, NE 69340

Sunday School at 10:00 am on Sunday
Church Service at 11:00 am on Sunday
Bible Study and Prayer Meeting at 7:00 pm on Wednesday

Ellsworth NE 69340
308-282-2753
 
Hunt and fish on our family owned cattle ranch covering nearly 20,000 acres in the heart of the Nebraska Sandhills. Sandhills High Country was established in 2000 to share and promote some of the best hunting and fishing in the Sandhills of Western Nebraska.

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Highway 27
Ellsworth NE 69340
308-762-2666

Do not miss the Old Spade Ranch Store in Ellsworth-Wade Morgan’s Cowpoke Haven. Hunting and Fishing Supplies, Guns, Knives, Spices, Books,Tack, and Saddles. We are proud to offer American made products. Antiques cover the walls. Well worth the stop.

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Ellsworth NE 69340
308-360-0618
www.midwesttanks.com

Tanks, scrapers, feeders, and more

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