Monowi, Nebraska

Beginnings

Monowi lies about a mile inside the eastern Boyd County line, not far from the town of Niobrara. Homesteaders were already farming the area after the land opened in 1890; local history remembers a man named Emil Schindler as the earliest settler. Until the railroad came, families here hauled their grain and supplies by wagon, and there was no town until 1902. That year the Fremont, Elkhorn and Missouri Valley Railroad was extended west from Niobrara, and the Pioneer Townsite Company laid out a town beside the new station. A post office opened the same year.

The name is said to be a Native word meaning "flower," given because of the wildflowers that covered the original site. Which language it came from is not known for certain.

A Busy Little Railroad Town

Monowi filled in quickly. One family built the first house and a livery barn, and soon there were a store, a restaurant, a hotel, a bank, a doctor who also ran the drugstore, and a lawyer's office by 1904. Czech families were among the early settlers, and the village even had its own weekly paper, the Monowi News, around 1908 to 1910.

Fire was a constant danger to wooden towns. One fire took the bank and a general store, and in 1912 a larger blaze destroyed the hotel, a store, the hardware, the post office and the Woodmen hall. The town rebuilt and reached its peak in the 1930s, when the 1930 census counted 123 people.

The Long Decline

After the 1930s Monowi shrank, as so many small Plains towns did. Farms grew larger and needed fewer hands, cars and better roads made it easy to shop in bigger towns, and young people left for jobs elsewhere. The census counted 99 people in 1940, 40 in 1960 and 18 in 1980. The post office closed, and in 1978 the Chicago and North Western stopped running trains on the line.

By the 2000 census only two residents remained: Rudy and Elsie Eiler, who had bought the local tavern in 1971 and reopened it in 1975. Even as the houses emptied, the village kept going. A $10,000 grant paid for improvements to its appearance and water system, a small concrete business operated nearby, and the tavern's steaks drew farm families from miles around.

The Town of One

Rudy Eiler died in 2004, and since then Elsie Eiler has been Monowi's only resident. Because Monowi is still an incorporated village, she serves as its mayor, clerk and treasurer, and each year she files the paperwork that keeps the village's few streetlights funded. She also keeps the Monowi Tavern open for neighbors, farmers and a steady stream of curious travelers.

In 2004 she opened Rudy's Library in a small building near the tavern, in her husband's memory. It holds thousands of books, many from his own collection. Monowi has been featured by newspapers and television around the world, but at heart it remains what it always was: a gathering place for the farm families around it.

Country Cemeteries Nearby

Two small rural cemeteries lie south of Monowi. Alford Cemetery, named for William Alford, is about a mile west and two miles south of town, then a quarter mile east. Riha Cemetery, named for one of the early Czech families, is about three miles south and a mile east. Many of the area's homesteading families, ours included, are buried in these quiet country plots.