Spencer, Nebraska

Beginnings

Spencer was born in the same months as Boyd County itself. In April 1891, soon after the Legislature created the county, two men from O'Neill came to look over the site, and the town was surveyed in May. A post office opened in June, and the original plat, dated September 5, 1891, was filed in neighboring Knox County.

There are two stories about the name. Local tradition says it honors an Army captain, while other sources point to George E. Spencer, a United States senator. Before the name was settled, the founders checked that no other Nebraska post office already used it.

Homestead Days

The first Fourth of July in 1891 brought a lively celebration, and a large group of Native visitors from a nearby reservation, led by chiefs remembered as Yellow Horse and War Bonnet, joined in. So many came that the meat ran out by noon, and neighbors from Butte sent more.

Spencer became one of the two largest Czech settlements in the county, and families of many other backgrounds took up claims around it. A schoolhouse went up in the fall of 1892 and was soon replaced by a three-room building. Life was hard in the early 1890s: everything came by a long wagon trip from O'Neill, and in the drought of 1894 Spencer settlers sent a man to Minnesota, where Czech communities answered with a carload of grain. In May 1915 a cloudburst flooded Ponca Creek and drowned several members of one local family, one of many floods that year.

Railroad Town and Crossroads

The railroad arrived in 1902 and ended the long haul from O'Neill. Spencer filled out with stores, banks and homes. The first automobile drove in from O'Neill in 1908, electric lights came in 1911, and in 1915 the town received $8,000 from the Carnegie library fund for a library building. By 1920 Spencer had 728 people; in the 1920s it paved its main streets and built a sewer system, and in 1929 the first talking pictures came to town.

In 1927 the Spencer Dam was completed on the Niobrara River about five miles southeast of town, and the town began buying its electricity from the hydro plant instead of running its own. Highways 12 and 281 meet near Spencer, and a marker on Highway 281 north of town recalls that Lewis and Clark camped in the area in September 1804.

Storms, Schools and Today

Spencer stands above the flood plain and has escaped many disasters, but residents still speak of the blizzard of 1949 as "the big one." In March 2019 the Spencer Dam itself failed during a sudden thaw and flood. The rush of water washed out part of Highway 281 and a home and saloon below the dam, a man living there was lost, and the water line serving much of Boyd County was cut.

Spencer's school has grown as country schools closed. A new building was added in 1966 after rural districts consolidated, and today the village is part of Boyd County Public Schools. The 2020 census counted 408 people, making Spencer the largest community in the county. Its Union Cemetery and St. Mary's Cemetery, and the Lutheran cemeteries a few miles north, hold many of the area's pioneer families.