The Elkhorn Valley provided a natural travel corridor into north-central and western Nebraska, with water, wood, and grass supporting overland travel and the river offering waterpower for mills. Settlers entered the area that later became Antelope County by 1868 and used a trail along the north side of the river to reach downriver trade centers. John D. Neligh, a Pennsylvania-born mill operator who had established a mill at West Point in 1867, visited the upper Elkhorn country in 1872, chose a town site with waterpower potential in central Antelope County, purchased the land, and platted the town of Neligh. He began building a substantial two-story brick flour mill in 1873, then sold the town site to William Lambert and William Gallaway in 1874; they finished the mill and put it into operation. Roads, bridges, and later railroads tied the mill to area farms and wider markets. Gallaway and Lambert conducted both custom and merchant milling, and by 1875 were buying large quantities of wheat and shipping flour to Columbus and Yankton. In 1878 a large Indian Department contract required 350-400 wagons to haul flour to Niobrara for steamboat shipment to upriver agencies in the Dakotas. The Fremont, Elkhorn & Missouri Valley Railroad, organized in 1869 and later routed westward through Antelope County, reached the mill in the summer of 1880, allowing wheat to be purchased from a wider area and flour to be shipped to continental and overseas markets. In 1886 the mill was converted from stone buhr grinding to the roller process, increasing production and expanding merchant work beyond custom milling, with new warehouses and elevators storing the added grain. After Stephen F. Gilman bought the mill in 1898, it became his main plant for producing wheat flour and cornmeal. Flour shipments rose from 700 railcars in 1908 to 875 in 1911, supported by Indian Department orders, military contracts for posts such as Fort Robinson, and cornmeal shipments to Alaska, Hawaii, and the Philippines; Neligh flour also traveled from Wyoming to Pennsylvania, south to Atlanta and Florida, and for several years to Hull, England. The mill depended on roads and bridges as well as rail service: farmers south of the river relied on a bridge built in 1875, and after high water destroyed it in 1884, mill owners opened a temporary bridge across their dam before a permanent iron bridge was built later that year and used until 1909. Reported in 1915 as one of the eight largest flour mills in Nebraska, the mill benefited from World War I orders and survived the 1920s and the Depression, but competition from larger commercial milling companies made flour production less profitable. It stopped grinding flour in the 1950s, continued producing livestock feed for regional markets, and closed before being purchased by the state as a historic site in 1969. In the twentieth century, motor vehicle travel and improved roads reshaped transportation in northeast Nebraska. Federal support for road building began with the Federal Highway Act of 1916, the east-west route through Neligh became part of the Black Hills Trail by 1922 and U.S. 275 in 1932, and Nebraska 14 reached Neligh from the south in 1922 before extending north to Niobrara by 1933. As highways improved, railroad passenger and freight traffic declined; passenger service on the Chicago & North Western ended in 1957, and the line that had first brought settlement and progress to Neligh and northeast Nebraska was abandoned in 1992.