In this month’s Essent (PDF – it’s on page 6), the newsletter of the Nebraska Municipal Power Pool, I ran across some fun little factoids that illustrate just how closely linked many Nebraska towns are with their railroad-generated past.

Corrinne Pedersen, NMPP Energy’s manager of member development, noted a few Nebraska towns named after railroad officials. Here’s the few she mentioned:

— Shelton, for Nathan Shelton, auditor in the Union Pacific land department.

— McCool Junction, for Daniel McCool, general manager of the St. Joseph & Grand Island Railroad.

— Holdrege, for G.W. Holdrege, a Burlington exec.

— Kimball, for Thomas L. Kimball, a UP general manager.

(My favorite part about these names is the fact that Shelton’s doesn’t even seem to be named after a company bigwig — apparently even middle management got their own towns.)

A quick Google search comes up with several other Nebraska towns with railroad-inspired names: Brock, Sutherland, Ainsworth, Hastings and Coleridge (suggested by a railroad exec).

As this Omaha World-Herald article and this Nebraska Game and Parks information point out, many of Nebraska’s rural towns were quite simply built on the backs of railroad, having grown out of stations created every seven to 15 miles. This summary of Nemaha County history gives a fairly typical picture of how it worked: County bonds to help build railroads, towns built around depots, towns moved to accompany new tracks, and so on.

In some cases, as in Fairfield in this history, the railroads would actually name the towns themselves in alphabetical order by starting letter as they went down the line.

Just a fascinating reminder of how closely tied Nebraska history has been to that of its railroads.