Page Nebraska 68766

Historical Background

Page traces its roots not to a townsite but to a schoolhouse. In the early 1880s, families bearing the names Hunt, Wood, French, Page, Hunter, Gray, and Wager staked claims in a stretch of prairie a few miles east of Inman, and by the fall of 1883 they had banded together to organize a school district. Neighbors pooled thirty-four dollars to raise a fourteen-by-sixteen-foot schoolhouse of sod-banked boards on an acre leased from R.B. Hunter for ninety-nine years — payment: one dollar. Selinda Page, wife of blacksmith W.W. Page, taught the first classes there, her infant daughter in tow, while neighbors burned hay twisted into ropes to keep the room warm. The settlement and its school took the name Pleasant Valley, and the little building quickly became more than a classroom — it hosted Sunday services, a literary society, and Fourth of July celebrations, with mail and supplies hauled in from the railroad depot at Inman.

Everything changed when the Pacific Shortline Railroad began pushing west from Sioux City toward O'Neill around 1890. Anticipating the line, the Pages opened a post office in their home that April, naming it Page in Selinda's honor as postmistress, and the community set about platting a proper town where four neighboring homesteads — belonging to the Pages, Robert Gray, and R.B. and George Hunter — happened to corner. Growth came fast: a two-story schoolhouse replaced the old soddy, the Pages built a combination store and post office, an Illinois couple named Coon added a hardware store and lumberyard before frontier life sent them packing east, and by the time the town was formally platted in 1892 Page counted roughly a hundred residents, a bank, a church, and its own newspaper, The Eye.

The young town's history carries its share of hardship and drama alongside its growth. In July 1892, two young Woods sisters drowned in the Elkhorn River while picnicking with their family, becoming the first burials in the town's new cemetery — a plot that today holds the graves of twenty-five Civil War veterans among its pioneer families. A tornado ripped through in 1893, flattening a mill and a homesteader's house, and in 1910 a would-be bank robber's dynamite blast came up empty-handed only because the new safe hadn't yet been delivered and the cashier had stashed the money under a floorboard instead.

What has kept Page's story feeling like one continuous thread rather than a series of accidents is the steadiness of a few families. The Hunter and Gray general store, founded in 1892, stayed in Gray hands for fifty years, and three generations of the Walker family — Jesse, his brother John, and John's nephew Cordes — served successively as Page's postmaster, with Cordes later carrying the rural mail route for decades more. That sense of a small, tightly knit Pleasant Valley community simply relocating itself, business by business and family by family, into a proper town on the new rail line is what still defines Page's quiet, close-knit character today.

Read the full chapter history of Page and Pleasant Valley in Chapter 34 of “Before Today: A History of Holt County, Nebraska.”