Roads to Success

An old road trace lined with cottonwood trees once carried freight by wagon, and access to roads and rail service was a major reason Daniel Freeman homesteaded four miles from Beatrice. Freight roads helped homesteaders move harvests to towns with rail depots, where trains carried goods cheaply and quickly across the Great Plains. Freight that took four days by road could be delivered by rail in four hours, so easy access to roads and rails could determine a homesteader’s success or failure. In fifty years, railroads reshaped society in ways compared here to the Internet today. Railroads also sought more customers in the West, and lavish advertisements promoted places such as Nicodemus, Kansas, as if a golden future awaited there, even though the town existed only on paper and no railroad ever arrived. People who bought land there then had to rely on what they could produce for themselves. Today Nicodemus, with a population of 27, remains isolated, with Hays, Kansas, more than an hour away by car. The Freeman family also lived to see the automobile replace the wagon, and Highway 4 was moved to its present location in 1956.

Beatrice, Nebraska · United States